LEONARD PERSONALLY DESIGNED his internationally known tombstone, incorporating the same kind of reflective black granite that was used in the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, inset with his famous quote and pink triangles referencing the emblem used to mark gays in Nazi concentration camps.
NOTE IT DOES NOT bear his name—his last name inscribed at the foot of a granite grave border was to be the only indication that the grave was his. He wanted the stone itself to serve as a memorial to all gay veterans. He got the idea after being moved by the oft-visited graves of Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein [who share the same stone] and Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and realizing that in America, filled with countless places memorializing its straight-identified forebears, there are few such places where gays can remember and honor their own. In that spirit, he later began a project to build a DC memorial to Harvey Milk but passed away before enough money could be raised.
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| WHILE LEONARD WAS eligible to be buried in the same place most veterans identify with, Arlington National Cemetery, he chose Washington DC's Congressional Cemetery instead, which he discovered on one of his frequent walks near his then home. Though smaller, it is half-a-century older than Arlington, and he loved its variety of individual stones versus Arlington's tens of thousands of identical markers. He also was amazed to learn that Peter Doyle, Walt Whitman's great love, is buried there, and couldn't resist the last laugh of being buried in the same row with the loathsome and apparently self-loathing FBI legend J. Edgar Hoover and Hoover's partner Clyde Tolson.
IN A TOUCHING TRIBUTE no one anticipated, a growing number of other out gays, including veterans, have since chosen to be buried in the same once obscure graveyard. And at his graveside every Veterans Day, Capt. Mike Rankin USN (RET) conducts a memorial service for all gay veterans who have passed—just as Leonard dreamed.
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