Frank Kameny

Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer, was fired from the Army Map Service in 1957 for being gay, and in 1961 filed the first petition to the US Supreme Court arguing that such dismissals violated civil rights. The court declined to hear it. He kept going with the Mattachine Society of Washington: the first organised pickets of the White House on gay rights in 1965, then sustained pressure that helped end the psychiatric classification of homosexuality as a disorder in 1973 and the federal Civil Service ban in 1975. Late in life he saw the District of Columbia repeal its sodomy law in 1993, a change he had pressed for since the 1970s.