Kameny’s ousting from the Defense Department prompted his devotion to LGBTQ activism for more than a half-century afterward. At the time, American psychiatrists considered homosexuality a “sociopathic personality disturbance,” and same-sex relations were illegal in parts of the country. Scouring the documents, Cervini discovered that Kameny was fired from his job as an astronomer for the Defense Department in 1957 after his superiors found out about his sexuality. the “not cute part” of the James Madison Memorial Building, Cervini noted - where Kameny had left over 80,000 documents after his death in 2011.
After initially stumbling across Kameny in his school library’s database, Cervini took a bus to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
