GAY PIONEER SNUBBED for MEDAL OF HONOR

Frank Kameny, along with Harvey Milk  is “one of the most significant figures’ in the American LGBT civil rights movement history.   In 1957, Kameny was dismissed from his position as an astronomer in the Army Map Service in Washington, D.C. because of his homosexuality, leading him to begin “a Herculean struggle with the American establishment” that would “spearhead a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s”.  Kameny later went on to co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, became the first openly gay candidate for the United States Congress in 1973, and stayed actively involved and at the forefront of the LGBT civil rights movement until his death last year on October 11, 2011 at age 86.