“Being a gay dated isn’t the safest option for a job.”Įven all the literary agents, publishers were saying, there’s no market for it. “I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t think about resigning and pursuing other things,” he added. Cervini said that while his friends were getting “very comfortable” private industrial jobs in technology and consulting, he wanted to continue studying Kameni’s story and turn it into a book. He was among a group of protesters who organized what is believed to be the first gay demonstration outside the White House.Ĭervini will make Kameni the subject of his senior thesis at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 2014 (and from where Kamini received his Ph.D. At the time, Kameni sued the federal government in what is considered the first civil rights suit based on sexual orientation to be brought to the Supreme Court He co-founded the Washington State Machinery Society, one of the oldest gay rights groups.
Kamini’s dismissal from the Department of Defense propelled his devotion to LGBT activism more than half a century later. At the time, American psychiatrists considered homosexuality a “sociopathic personality disorder,” and same-sex relationships were illegal in parts of the country. Searching the documents, Cervini discovered that Kamini was fired from his job as an astronomer at the Department of Defense in 1957 after his superiors learned about his sexuality. the “not-so-cute part” of the James Madison Memorial, Cervini noted - where Kamini left more than 80,000 documents after death in 2011. Kamini’s story will catapult Cervini from inquisitive college student to New York Times bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a pioneer in the LGBTQ community in his own right.Īfter initially stumbling across Kameni in his school library database, Cervini took a bus to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Cervini’s curiosity in Milk led to another pioneering gay rights discovery he hadn’t heard of: Frank Kameni.