In the name of US gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, a recently founded asteroid would be named. It has been claimed by Canadian amateur astronomer Gary Billings, who found Minor Planet 40463 in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It was told that he died at the age of 86, last year. His gay status pushed him out of his job as a US government astronomer at the US Army Map Service. “Frank would show up as a little dot that moves between two points”, said Richard “Doc” Kinne, an astronomical technologist at the American Association of Variable Star Observers in Cambridge, Mass.

It was shocking to know that he was being treated as an "automatically a security risk" and a "disruptive personnel factor”. Though, he tried to challenge the same in the US Supreme Court. Apparently, he also founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, which is among the earliest gay and lesbian campaigning societies, and later in the year 1971, he was chosen as the first openly gay candidate for Congress.

It was only after Gary Billings came to know his story that he along with his colleagues approached the Paris-based International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through a citation.