Gay Rights Pioneer Honored With His Own Asteroid
(Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu, The Washington Post ) This is wonderful! Gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, an astronomer, was fired for being gay. Now he is a part of the heavens! Via The Wall Street Journal: Kameny, who earned a doctorate in astronomy at Harvard University, was an astronomer with the U.S. Army Map Service in the 1950s but was fired from his job for being gay. He contested the firing all the way to the Supreme Court and later organized the first gay rights protests outside the White House, the Pentagon and in Philadelphia in the 1960s. obituary, he consulted with others in the astronomy world. They decided to submit a citation to the Paris-based International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., seeking to designate Minor Planet 40463 as Frankkameny. It’s located in the asteroid belt, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The Kameny asteroid is visible through a telescope and was first discovered in 1999 using lon...