MSNBC host Rachel Maddow paid tribute
to gay icon Frank Kameny during the Wednesday night broadcast of The
Rachel Maddow Show.
Kameny
died in his Washington D.C. home on Tuesday. Authorities believe
he died in his sleep of natural causes. He was 86.
Kameny, who was fired in 1957 by the
United States government because he was gay, co-founded the
Mattachine Society of Washington, one of America's earliest gay
rights groups.
“What do you do when you're fired from
your job for being gay and it's 1957?” Maddow rhetorically asked on
the program. “If you are pretty much anybody other than Frank
Kameny you do nothing, you try to get away from this scandal.”
“But if you are Frank Kameny, you
fight it, you fight it all the way to the Supreme Court,” she said.
Kameny lost his fight when the high
court decided against hearing his case.
“We all have decisions to make about
how to live this one life we have,” Maddow added. “Frank
Kameny's choices about how to live his life changed all of our lives,
changed the world for all of us and forever.” (The video is
embedded in the right panel of this page.)
(Related: White
House calls Frank Kameny an American hero.)