More Stars Than There Are In Heaven
No two planets, stars, or galaxies are alike. Neither are the people who study them. Nobody knew that better than astronomer Frank Kameny.
After obtaining his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1956, Kameny landed a job as an astronomer with the United States Army Map Service. There, he measured occultations of stars when the Moon passed in front of them, which was the most precise way to map distances between locations on Earth in the days before satellites.
Kameny hoped to eventually join the fledgling space program and maybe even become an astronaut someday. “I might have gone to the Moon,” he once said.
But he was fired within a few months for being gay. It was a dark period known as the Lavender Scare when homosexuals were deemed “security risks” and purged from government jobs. Kameny never worked in astronomy again.
Calling his dismissal an “affront to human dignity,” he took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it.
Undeterred, Kameny dedicated the rest of his life to fighting for equality. In 1973, for example, he helped convince the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder. And in 1975, after years of pressure, the federal government finally ended its ban on gays and lesbians in civil servant positions.
Kameny himself received a formal apology from the U.S. government in 2009, more than 50 years after his dismissal. Today, his papers are housed in the Library of Congress. The Smithsonian Institution’s collection includes signs that he carried at protests in front of the White House. And, perhaps most fittingly, asteroid 40463 Frankkameny was named in his honor in 2012.
The world has come a long way since the days of the Lavender Scare, but homophobia persists.
Four decades after Frank Kameny was fired, my cousin Brendan was murdered at the age of 22 when a hate-filled bigot lured him from a nightclub and shot him for the ‘crime’ of being gay. And just last year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found enormous differences in views on homosexuality worldwide. In Sweden, for example, 94 percent of people surveyed say that homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared to only 14 percent in Russia and 7 percent in Nigeria.
Frank Kameny died in 2011 at the age of 86. We’ll never know what astronomical discoveries he might have made if he hadn’t been denied the opportunity because of his sexual orientation. Yet his fight for equality continues to inspire countless people around the world.
June is Pride Month, when we celebrate diversity by recognizing the LGBTQ+ community. As Audre Lorde, the American writer and social justice activist, reminded us, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
It’s a sentiment that astronomer and gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny would have agreed with wholeheartedly.
Dr. Michael West is an Astronomer at Lowell Observatory. He received his PhD in astronomy from Yale University and held research and teaching positions around the world before coming to Flagstaff. Find out more about his background and research interests here. Michael is also an enthusiastic writer, with publications in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Postand Scientific American, as well as author of a new book titled A Sky Wonderful With Stars, published by University of Hawaii Press.