Frank Kameny in World War II and in 2005, Always a Soldier
My friend Jonathan Rauch has an elegant and touching tribute to a man to whom all Americans owe a debt, “A Pariah’s Triumph — And America’s.” It’s about Dr. Frank Kameny, a tireless struggler for the equal rights of gay people.
One of the most striking of Jonathan’s insights about the astronomer with the Ph.D. from Harvard University who was fired by the U.S. Army Mapping Service in 1957 for homosexuality:
A delectable, if backhanded, tribute to Kameny’s accomplishments comes from Peter LaBarbera, an anti-gay activist. Protesting the Library of Congress’s acquisition of Kameny’s papers, LaBarbera wrote of Kameny, “He is brilliant but wasted his considerable intellect and talents on homosexual activism, which is a shame.” Well, yes. Kameny might have had a brilliant scientific career — if the government hadn’t fired him for being homosexual. That was a shame.
(I debated Dr. Kameny once, quite a few years ago, on the issue of whether the law should forbid private discrimination against gay people; we agreed on forbidding the government to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.)