Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[Freija]

Did you forget it’s Pride Month? Your bit on Sally Ride failed to mention she was gay and in a loving relationship with another woman for 27 years!

Sally Ride was very good at keeping secrets. As the first American woman in space, she protected countless confidences during a lifetime of public appearances. During her post-NASA years, she regularly wrote and reviewed classified government material on high-profile commissions. When she died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer, a diagnosis hidden from all but a tiny handful of family and close friends, I started unraveling the mysteries for her biography. She was a brilliant, mischievous enigma.

But the most surprising revelation was the one that came at the end of her obituary: that for 27 years, she’d been in a loving relationship with another woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy. The collective gasp from an admiring public reverberated for days. A small minority complained that she’d squandered an opportunity to speak out for their rights. A few spouted homophobic hatred. Selfishly, as her pal of more than three decades, I was stunned; hurt, that I did not know Sally fully, that I could not celebrate her happiness with Tam. Then I thought, why does her sexual orientation matter? Finally, I got it.

Never before had the words astronaut and lesbian appeared in the same sentence. Google them today, and you get more than half a million hits, all pegged to Sally Ride. Most salute her as an icon with an added, posthumous message of hope for the LGBTQ community. So why the secrecy?

What made this 61-year-old pioneer—so bold in her actions, so non-traditional in her choice of careers and devotion to science; this baby-boomer whose life had been transformed by the space age and the social revolution of the ’60s and ’70s—keep silent, so long, about being gay?

Sally Ride’s Secret: Why the First American Woman in Space Stayed in the Closet

Why Sally Ride waited until her death to tell the world she was gay

Astronaut Sally Ride brought women and the LGBTQ+ community to the final frontier 40 years ago