Rachel Maddow's Frank Kameny obituary

GLBTQ, in its entry on Frank Kameny, documented the flashpoint which radicalized Kameny and which Maddow glossed over.

Late one night in 1957, Kameny was arrested on a morals charge in Lafayette Park, a popular gay cruising area in Washington, D. C. He was released, and nothing immediately came of the incident. It was not long afterward, however, that an investigator from the Civil Service Commission came to question him about rumors that he was a homosexual.

That fall, after serving in his job for only a few months, Kameny was fired from the Map Service, and early the next year he learned that he had been barred from all future employment in the federal government.