The late Frank Kameny (Blade photo by Michael Key)

The American Astronomical Society Jan. 10 recognized the late gay rights leader Frank Kameny with a certificate of appreciation commemorating his “lifetime efforts” to advance the cause of gay rights.

Kameny held a doctorate degree in astronomy from Harvard University and worked for the federal government as an astronomer in Washington in the late 1950s before authorities fired him for being gay, prompting him to become a life-long advocate for LGBT equality.

In a ceremony at its semiannual meeting in Austin, Texas, AAS President Debra Elmegreen presented the certificate on Kameny’s behalf to Charles Francis, a D.C. gay rights advocate who co-founded the Kameny Papers Project.

The project arranged for the Library of Congress in Washington to obtain thousands of documents that Kameny generated in more than 50 years of advocacy work on behalf of LGBT equality.

“The American Astronomical Society, in light of its commitment to diversity and equality, hereby honors the memory of the astronomer Dr. Franklin Edward Kameny for his exemplary lifelong commitment to promoting equal rights for homosexual men and women,” the certificate says.

“Dr. Kameny’s activism removed discriminatory barriers that had cut short many careers,” it says. “Dr. Kameny tirelessly advocated against policies that banned gays from working for the federal government, holding security clearances, or serving openly in the military.”

As quixotic as it may sound, I believe that government can do much good — from protecting our civil rights to providing a much-needed social safety net to vulnerable people. Yet, few politicians move me in the way that certain rock stars, comedians, poets or civil rights leaders move me. Most politicos, including those who have honorably served our country, seem muted, aloof, a bit slow on the uptake without their handlers — humorless. Except for Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the longest serving openly gay member of Congress, who announced on Nov. 28 that he is retiring from Congress in 2012. Frank, who was first elected to Congress in 1980, has the passion of Harvey Milk, the integrity of Martin Luther King, Jr., the wit of Jon Stewart and the legislative smarts of Ted Kennedy.

I’ve never met Frank, but like many people, I’ll miss Frank’s presence on Capitol Hill.  His legislative acumen on issues ranging from civil rights to finance will be sorely missed.

In his 30 years in Congress, Frank has worked tirelessly on civil rights — from supporting reparations for Japanese-Americans who were unjustly interred during World War II to working for affordable housing for elderly and disabled people to championing LGBT rights.

Many of us, including, I suspect, a number of the folks in Congress, are clueless about how our financial system works. Frank is known (even by his opponents) as being a financial maven. A former chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank co-wrote with former Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Dodd-Frank bill that overhauled our financial regulations.

“He’s the smartest guy in the room,” Steve Bartlett, head of the Financial Services Roundtable told The New York Times. “In a debate, you want to be on the same side as Barney, and if you’re not on the same side, you should re-evaluate being in the debate at all.”

Frank is many things besides being gay – a graduate of Harvard Law School, a legislator, and a bit of a (lovable) curmudgeon. You gotta love a guy who says that he’ll enjoy it when he quits Congress and “I don’t even have to pretend to try to be nice to people I don’t like.”

But Frank’s openness about his sexuality has particular meaning for LGBT people.  Before he became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out in 1987, I hadn’t heard of any federally elected official who was openly gay without shame.  Frank demonstrated that being LGBT need not impede your career.  “Some thought that discussing his sexual orientation might hinder his ability to push legislation or advance to the position of committee chair,” the Blade’s Lou Chibbaro Jr. wrote in an e-mail. “He showed his constituents in Massachusetts and the national media that being openly gay wouldn’t hold him back from being a key player in the U.S. House of Representatives and chair of one of the most important House committees.”

I have no illusion that Frank is cuddly. He’s been known to make reporters tremble. As a journalist, I’d feel the need to be well-armed before interviewing him. Yet as Frank asked an interviewer, “Do you think reporters worry about whether people cry after what they write about them?”

Frank, unlike many politicians, is respected by many reporters. As a LGBT scribe, he wins my heart for not ducking questions from the mainstream or gay press. “As an elected official, Barney Frank has always been accessible for interviews with the Blade and with me as a reporter for the Blade,” Chibbaro wrote. “In addition to being accessible … he also has a sense of humor and a frank ‘tell it like it is’ manner of letting you know what he thinks about the important issues.”

Thank you, Mr. Frank!  Enjoy your post-congressional life. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do next.

Frank Kameny’s gay rights activism predated the Stonewall riots by more than a decade. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

Expressions of condolences from LGBT activists and their straight supporters poured in from across the country this week following the death in Washington on Tuesday of Franklin E. Kameny, one of the nation’s most prominent gay rights leaders.

Friends said Kameny, 86, appears to have died in his sleep while in bed at his house in Northwest Washington. A representative of the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office, who spoke to friends and well-wishers who stood outside the house Tuesday night, said the cause of death couldn’t be immediately determined.

Kameny’s passing came a little more than a month before the planned celebration on Nov. 15 of the 50th anniversary of his founding of the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.

LGBT rights advocates Charles Francis and Bob Witeck, who were longtime friends of Kameny’s and established the project to preserve Kameny’s papers over a 50-year period, said they would be announcing soon plans for a memorial service to honor the gay rights leader’s life.

Witeck said Nov. 15 is being considered as a possible date for a Kameny memorial gathering.

Timothy Clark, Kameny’s tenant and friend, said he found Kameny unconscious and unresponsive in his bed shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday. Clark said he became concerned when he arrived home a few minutes earlier and noticed Kameny hadn’t retrieved his newspapers, which are delivered outside the house in the morning.

He said he called 911 and rescue workers determined that Kameny had passed away earlier, most likely in his sleep. Clark said he had spoken with Kameny shortly before midnight on the previous day and Kameny didn’t appear to be ill or in distress.

Kameny is credited with being one of the leading strategists for the early gay rights movement – beginning nearly a decade before the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village and continuing forward.

The Stonewall riots, triggered by a police raid of the Stonewall gay bar, are considered by most activist leaders as the starting point of the modern LGBT rights movement. But movement leaders credit Kameny and his collaborators in the Mattachine Society of Washington with laying the groundwork that enabled the post-Stonewall LGBT organizing to flourish.

“Frank was a revolutionary who lived to see the world change, and I’m comforted by that,” said Francis. “He was the first gay American to root the argument for gay civil equality in the words of Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.”

Gay historian David K. Johnson, who wrote about Kameny in two books on the gay rights movement, said Kameny broke from the early American “homophile” movement’s tactics of accommodation with the prevailing views that homosexuality was a disorder.

“Kameny’s style and tactics differed markedly from those of earlier homosexual leaders,” Johnson wrote in a 2002 article posted on the website of D.C.’s Rainbow History Project. “By unabashedly proclaiming that homosexuality was neither sick nor immoral, Kameny helped move gays and lesbians out of the shadows of 1950s apologetic, self-help groups and into the sunlight of the civil rights movement, setting the tone for a movement that continues today.”

It was during his years as head of the Mattachine Society of Washington that Kameny in July 1968 coined the phrase, “Gay is Good,” which activists say became a forerunner to the gay pride celebrations that followed the 1969 Stonewall riots.

Born and raised in New York City, Kameny served in combat as an Army soldier in World War II in Europe. After the war, Kameny received his doctorate degree in astronomy from Harvard University.

He came to Washington in 1956 to take a position teaching astronomy at Georgetown University. The following year, government recruiters persuaded him to take a job as a civilian astronomer with the U.S. Army Map Service in Washington.

NASA career derailed

Kameny told the Blade in a 2002 interview that the nation’s race against the Soviet Union for superiority in space had just begun in full force and he set his sights, among other things, on a possible role in the U.S. space program.

A short time later, Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Kameny said he would have seriously considered applying to become an astronaut. But that was not to come about.

Just five months into his job at the Army Map Service, U.S. government security investigators uncovered information leading them to believe Kameny was gay. They opened an investigation into his alleged “threat” to national security. Within a few weeks he was dismissed from his job, with his name placed on a list of people labeled as government security risks.

Kameny challenged the dismissal before the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which set personnel policies for federal employees. The commission upheld the firing, prompting Kameny to take the matter to court. After losing in the lower courts, he appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first known gay person to file a gay-related case before the high court.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling against Kameny and declined to hear the case. But Kameny’s decision to appeal the case through the court system motivated him to become a lifelong advocate on behalf of LGBT equality.

Gay historian Johnson wrote in his 2002 article that Kameny’s lawyer withdrew from the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Kameny, forcing Kameny to write his own appeal to the Supreme Court.

Johnson called Kameny’s 60-page legal brief filed before the high court a groundbreaking challenge to the federal government’s policy barring homosexuals from working for the government in any capacity. Johnson said it served as Kameny’s and the gay movement’s strategy document for advancing legal rights for gays in the years going forward.

Kameny’s Supreme Court brief, or petition, also offered the world its first glimpse of what became his trademark use of blunt, sometimes inflammatory language combined with reasoned arguments to challenge anti-gay policies.

“The government’s regulations, policies, practices and procedures, as applied in the instant case to petitioner specifically, and as applied to homosexuals generally, are a stench in the nostrils of decent people, an offense against morality, an abandonment of reason, an affront to human dignity, an improper restraint upon proper freedom and liberty, a disgrace to any civilized society, and a violation of all that this nation stands for,” he wrote in his Supreme Court petition.

“These policies, practices, procedures, and regulations have gone too long unquestioned and too long unexamined by the courts,” he wrote.

Gov’t apologizes to Kameny

Although Kameny lost his own case, he spent the next decade working with attorneys and other gay and lesbian federal workers to chip away at the then U.S. Civil Service Commission’s ban on gay federal employees through new court challenges. By 1975, after losing several cases to gay employees who won reinstatement to their jobs over a period of years, the Civil Service Commission dropped its ban on gay employees.

The change, which came under the administration of President Gerald Ford, was based on court rulings saying the government could not discriminate against homosexual federal employees if no evidence exists to show a harmful “nexus” between someone’s sexual orientation and their ability to perform their job.

Kameny, who called the development a major victory for gay rights, turned next to ongoing efforts to end two other anti-gay policies of the government – the ban on gays from receiving government security clearances and the ban on gays in the military.

In 2009, the Obama administration through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management – the successor agency to the Civil Service Commission – issued Kameny a formal apology for his 1957 firing. The apology was extended by OPM Director John Berry, an openly gay man.

In an area of work for which Kameny is less known, he established a paralegal practice in the 1970s that continued through the 1980s and early 90s to represent gays encountering problems obtaining or retaining security clearances as well as gays facing discharge from the military because of their sexual orientation.

Activists following his paralegal work, including those who he helped keep their security clearances, called Kameny a tenacious counsel who sometimes worked with lawyers and other times served as an administrative representative before adjudicatory hearings, including discharge hearings in all branches of the military.

“When the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) was on the verge of firing me simply for discovering I was gay, I enlisted Frank Kameny’s help in resisting,” said Jamie Shoemaker, a linguist and NSA career employee.

“His gutsy, unapologetic efforts to save my career and that of many others with security clearances led to a ground-breaking change in the attitude of our country’s intelligence agencies toward gays,” Shoemaker said.

Kameny said he was pleased when his security clearance practice became mostly unnecessary in the 1990s when President Bill Clinton issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in the issuance of government security clearances.

Soliciting sodomy

In his work with military service members ensnared in what activists called witch hunts, where military investigators pressured vulnerable gays to identify other gays under false promises of lenient treatment, Kameny coined another phrase aimed at helping those under investigation – “Say nothing, sign nothing, get counsel.”

Charles Francis and others who knew Kameny said his paralegal work met an important need in the years before groups such as Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network emerged to take on this type of legal work.

LGBT movement colleagues also credit Kameny with playing a lead role in the effort to persuade the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders. As a scientist by profession, Kameny wrote and spoke often beginning in the 1960s about what he called the faulty or “junk” science that the psychiatric profession used to support its claim that homosexuality was a mental disorder.

Kameny and others supporting him within the profession argued that nearly all of the “gays are sick” theories were based on studies of patients in therapy. There were little or no studies made of the overwhelming majority of gays who never sought therapy and functioned well in society despite widespread anti-gay prejudice, Kameny and others argued.

When broader studies were conducted of gays and lesbians in the population at large, findings showed there were no differences in the numbers found to have mental health problems between samples of gays and straights, Kameny often pointed out.

In yet another area of work, Kameny is credited with playing an early and effective role in pushing for repeal of state sodomy laws, which made it illegal for consenting adults to engage in oral or anal sex in the privacy of the home. In keeping with his characteristic defiant rhetoric, Kameny sought to dramatize what he called the “lunacy” of laws prohibiting private, consenting sex.

On a number of occasions he publicly solicited public officials, including D.C.’s police chief in the 1960s, to engage in sodomy with him. In 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s sodomy law in the case Bowers vs. Hardwick, Kameny said he wrote letters soliciting sodomy to each of the Supreme Court justices that voted to uphold the law.

“I defied them to prosecute me,” he told the Blade. “They never did.”

Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said Kameny “led an extraordinary life marked by heroic activism that set a path for the modern LGBT civil rights movement.”

“From the early days fighting institutionalized discrimination in the federal workforce, Dr. Kameny taught us all that ‘Gay is Good,’” Solmonese said. “As we say goodbye to this trailblazer on National Coming Out Day, we remember the remarkable power we all have to change the world by living our lives like Frank – openly, honestly and authentically.”

Chuck Wolfe, CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, said Kameny’s death marked the “loss of a hero and a founding father of the fight to end discrimination against LGBT people.”

“Dr. Kameny stood up for this community when doing so was considered unthinkable and even shocking, and he continued to do so throughout his life,” Wolfe said. “He spoke with a clear voice and firm conviction about the humanity and dignity of people who were gay, long before it was safe for him to do so. All of us who today endeavor to complete the work he began a half century ago are indebted to Dr. Kameny and his remarkable bravery and commitment.”

Local activists who knew Kameny said they are deeply saddened over his passing but pleased to have shared time with him at several LGBT events in Washington during the past three weeks.

On Sept. 30, D.C.’s LGBT Community Center honored Kameny along with three other activists with its community service award at a ceremony at the downtown Hotel Sofitel. Kameny delivered what his activist friends called his standard and beloved fiery speech asserting his 50-year struggle to change society to bring about full and unabridged rights for LGBT people. It was to be his last speaking engagement.

His passing inside his house on Tuesday came several years after the city designated the house at 5020 Cathedral Ave., N.W., as a historic landmark because of the work Kameny and his activist colleagues performed there since the 1960s on behalf of LGBT rights. In 2010, the D.C. City Council voted unanimously to name a two-block section of 17th Street near Dupont Circle as Frank Kameny Way in honor of Kameny’s lifelong work on behalf of equality for the LGBT community and the community at large.”

Kameny’s death also came five years after Francis and Witeck helped arrange for the Library of Congress to acquire more than 50,000 documents from the Kameny Papers Project, which pulled together nearly 50 years of papers and documents that Kameny compiled through his work on behalf of LGBT people.

“Frank Kameny was the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement,” Yale Law Professor William Eskridge told the Associated Press earlier this year.

Everyone packed into U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker’s courtroom in San Francisco on Jan. 11 knew they were watching history.

On one side of the court sat lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies, partisan foes in Bush v. Gore. Now the straight pair pledged to prove that same-sex couples deserved the fundamental right to marry. For them, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution is at stake.

On the other side sat Republican attorney Charles Cooper and a handful of supporting lawyers. It was what some might consider a strange sight. After the passage of Proposition 8 in California, the loss of same-sex marriage in Maine, New York and New Jersey and the gloating by ProtectMarriage affiliates such as the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay forces looked weak. In fact, throughout the trial, they portrayed themselves as David fighting Goliath.

Retired philosophy professor Linda Hirshman, reporting for The Daily Beast web site, pronounced the matchup a modern day Scopes trial.

“In the confrontation between an irrefutable religious standard and a worldly empirical survey, the challenge to California’s prohibition on gay marriage reveals a fissure that runs throughout American history: Are we modern or are we medieval?” Hirshman wrote. “Do Americans live together in a social contract for our material well-being, or are we following ancient traditions of how to live, because tradition is a better teacher than reason? This issue does not surface often in the United States, but it did most powerfully almost 90 years ago in Scopes vs. the State of Tennessee, the ‘monkey trial.’ And it did so again this week.”

The Scopes trial pitted the teaching of secular science and intellectual freedom against traditional Bible-based Christian fundamentalism. It’s a clash as old as St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae” and as fresh as the 2005 debate over whether creationism should be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the Kansas public school system.

For Prop 8 supporters, the trial is now posited as if freedom of religion itself is at stake. In a Jan. 26 column, “Putting Religion on Trial?”, NOM president Maggie Gallagher wrote that Olson and Boies are trying to invalidate the religious beliefs of millions of voters who hold that homosexuality is a sin and marriage is a sacrament between one man and one woman.

“The stakes are high. And the argument they will be asking the Supreme Court to endorse is this: Only bigotry, hatred and unreason explains why anyone cares about the idea that to make a marriage you need a husband and a wife — religious views of marriage are just anti-gay bigotry,” Gallagher wrote.

Anti-bigotry is one of the central elements to proving the case that lesbians and gays have historically been subjected to discrimination and deserve equal protection and due process under the U.S. Constitution. Walker, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if the plaintiffs proved that gays are a “discrete” minority, possess an “immutable” characteristic and are powerless to protect themselves in the political process.

“We said on the first day of [the] trial we would prove three things,” Boies said at a news conference after the evidentiary trial testimony ended Jan. 26. “Marriage is a fundamental right; that depriving gays and lesbians the right to marry hurts them and hurts their children; and there was no reason, no societal benefit, in not allowing them to get married.”

Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, said the arguments were compelling.

“Our side powerfully showed that California’s selective stripping away of the fundamental freedom to marry from a vulnerable minority lacked any legitimate reason, and harms families while helping no one,” he said. “Fourteen years and tens of millions of dollars after our Hawaii case, the anti-gay opponents had literally nothing new to put forward to defend the discriminatory denial of marriage.”

Olson and Boies entered reams of documents into evidence and put 17 witnesses on the stand. The plaintiffs spoke movingly about their loved ones and a slew of expert witnesses contributed a wealth of knowledge to the evidentiary record.

In some cases, the testimony was almost ironic. For instance, in his opening statement, Cooper said “the purpose of the institution of marriage, the central purpose, is to promote procreation and to channel narrowly procreative sexual activity between men and women into stable enduring unions. … [Marriage] is a pro-child societal institution.”

But Harvard University professor Nancy Cott noted that, “There has never been a requirement that a couple produce children in order to have a valid marriage. … And known sterility or barrenness in a woman has never been a reason not to allow a marriage. In fact, it’s a surprise to many people to learn that George Washington, who is often called the father of our country, was sterile.”

ProtectMarriage only called two of their five witnesses to the stand. So Olson and Boies introduced the depositions of the dropped witnesses into evidence, which appeared to bolster the plaintiffs’ case.

New Yorker contributor Margaret Talbot wrote that Boies’ cross-examination technique “was a little like watching your cat play with his food before he eats it.”

Indeed, Boies seemed to make mincemeat of official Prop 8 proponent Hak-Shing William Tam, who was called as a hostile witness. Tam stood by claims that gays were 12 times more likely to molest children, “based on the different literature that I have read.”

ProtectMarriage called California’s Claremont McKenna College political science professor Kenneth Miller, whose credibility as an expert on gay political power was mightily challenged by Boies on cross examination. Boies also read from a book Miller co-authored that ballot initiatives or “direct democracy can actually be less democratic than representative democracy.”

ProtectMarriage’s second witness, David Blankenhorn, was so combative, the judge reprimanded his demeanor. Boies had Blankenhorn, author of “The Future of Marriage,” go down a list of “possible positive consequences” of same-sex marriage and mark the statements with which he personally agreed.

Among the many positive statement with which Blankenhorn agreed were, “gay marriage would extend a wide range of the natural and practical benefits of marriage to many lesbian and gay couples and their children,” and “same-sex marriage would likely contribute to more stability and to longer-lasting relationships for committed same-sex couples.”

Chad Griffin, chair of the board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, said he was thrilled that the trial put “those who attempt to provide justification for discrimination” under oath for the first time.

“I think they found in a court of law, it’s quite different from on a political campaign where you can say anything and get away with it,” Griffin said. “In a court of law, you’re under oath and you actually have to tell the truth — and you have to answer to those truths under oath. And I think that proved difficult for the defendant-interveners in this case.”

Veteran gay rights leader Frank Kameny, who is credited with founding the gay activist movement in Washington 41 years ago, returned to Cambridge, Mass., last month to receive an award from the Harvard University Gay & Lesbian Caucus. Kameny, 77, received a master’s degree from Harvard in 1949 and his Ph.D. there in 1956 — both in the field of astronomy.

With Harvard University President Lawrence Summers looking on, about 200 Harvard gay students and gay alumni gave Kameny a standing ovation on June 6 as an official with the Gay & Lesbian Caucus introduced Kameny at a ceremony on the Harvard campus.

The award presented to Kameny at the ceremony honors him for “his longstanding advocacy and activism and his incredible personal commitment and contribution to the lives of all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.”

In an interview this week, Kameny said his return to Harvard brought back memories of his pre-gay activist days — including his studies at Harvard, his early ambitions to become an astronomer and become involved in the U.S. space program, and his service in the military during World War II.

Kameny rarely talks about his pre-activist days in his public appearances on behalf of gay rights. His friends and colleagues in the gay rights movement say those early years played a key role in shaping what observers say has been Kameny’s groundbreaking work on behalf of gays in D.C. and throughout the nation.

Long-time activists know Kameny for his role as founder in 1961 of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., the first gay rights group in the nation’s capital. Shortly after its founding, Kameny broke new ground by leading the first ever gay rights protests in front of the White House, Pentagon and State Department.

Those who know Kameny say few people are aware of his use of the scientific principles and knowledge he acquired in the study of physics and astronomy to debunk the psychiatric theories of the 1950s and 1960s, which held that homosexuality was an illness and that gays suffered from a psychiatric disorder.

In his 1981 book, “Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis,” researcher Ronald Bayer credits Kameny with almost single-handedly persuading the early homophile movement to change its position of accepting the prevailing psychiatric theories that gays were disordered to the posture that these theories were scientifically unsound and must be refuted.

Kameny said his love for science began in his teenage years in New York City’s borough of Queens. He graduated from Richmond Hill High School in 1941, at the age of 16, after skipping two grades, in part, because of his exceptional aptitude for science and math. In September 1941, Kameny began his undergraduate studies in physics at New York’s Queens College.

He said he had expected to immerse himself “in the sheer joy” of courses in math and physics, along with other college related activities. But all of that changed abruptly three months later when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. “Nothing was the same after that,” Kameny said.

Two years later, in May 1943, Kameny enlisted in the Army, signing his enlistment papers three days before his 18th birthday. In September of that year, he was called into active duty, where he remained until March 1946. Although he had two years of college under his belt, Kameny said his Army superiors assigned him to a mortar crew with the 58th Armored Infantry, which was part of the Army’s 8th Armored Division in Europe.

Before he knew it, Kameny said, he was engaged in front-line combat in France, Holland and Germany. Some of his most harrowing moments, he said, came during the Battle of the Bulge, where the German army made a ferocious effort to break through the lines of allied forces. Stationed in trenches during freezing whether, Kameny recounts how he and his fellow soldiers endured German artillery fire while trying to catch some sleep in the dead of night.

“I came within a hair’s breadth of losing my life several times,” Kameny said. “If you hear the whistle of a shell and then the explosion, you’re OK,” he said. “But if the whistle stops suddenly, before the explosion, you’re in gave danger of being hit.”

Years later, Kameny would wear the combat medal he earned in the Battle of the Bulge as he led the D.C. Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance in presenting its annual Memorial Day wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.

Space ambitions jettisoned

At the conclusion of the war, Kameny returned to Queens College after being discharged from the Army in 1946. He completed his undergraduate work less than two years later and began his studies at Harvard. While there, he taught astronomy at Yale University and later traveled to Arizona and Northern Island, where he conducted research in astronomy at internationally acclaimed observatories. After receiving his PhD. at Harvard in 1956, he began teaching astronomy at Georgetown University.

In 1957, he left Georgetown after being recruited by the government to take a job as an astronomer with the Army Map Service in Washington. The nation’s race against the Russians for superiority in space had just begun in full force. Kameny had set his sights, among other things, on a possible role in the U.S. space program. A short time later, Congress created the National Aeronautics & Space Administration. Kameny has said he would have seriously considered applying to become an astronaut. But that was not to come about.

Just five months into his job at the Army Map Service, U.S. government security officials discovered Kameny was gay and opened an investigation into Kameny’s alleged “threat” to national security. Within a few weeks, he was dismissed from his job, with his name placed on a list of people labeled as government security risks.

Kameny fought his dismissal in court, taking it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he became the first to challenge a firing by the federal government on grounds of sexual orientation. The high court let stand a lower court ruling against Kameny, effectively ending his career as a civil servant and an astronomer.

What Kameny did next, as the saying goes, is part of history — at least the history of the U.S. gay civil rights movement. His longtime friend and fellow activist, Craig Howell, has said that had it not been for the government’s discovery of his sexual orientation, Kameny would likely have become one of the world’s eminent astronomers.

“The government’s loss became our gain,” said Howell.