When I met Sally Ride
Everywhere I go I meet girls and boys who want to be astronauts and explore space, or they love the ocean and want to be oceanographers, or they love animals and want to be zoologists, or they love designing things and want to be engineers. I want to see those same stars in their eyes in 10 years and know they are on their way.
-Sally Ride
When I was a kid, my dad took me to Berkeley to see a speech given by Sally Ride. It was about how to get more women in STEM. There was a Q&A afterward. I didn’t know what I would ask, so I stayed in my seat. She was an astronaut, which is admittedly the coolest career to a kid, but she was not yet a true hero of mine, because she had not come out as LGBT, and neither had I. In the final line in her obituary, they mention her partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy. When I read the news, I thought back to when I had met her, and I felt sad, like I had missed my chance to ask her something, though what, I still don’t know.
There’s one question, that I couldn’t’ve asked her then, but that I really want to know: the question of why Ride didn’t come out when she was still alive. Of course, she never would’ve been selected as the first American woman in space if anyone had suspected she was a lesbian back then. But she had a long career after NASA, mostly advocating for women in STEM. I think she figured she could do more good in the world, for women, if she kept her personal life private. Her family and friends all knew about her partner. It took strength for her to decide to come out posthumously, which she must have done, when she knew she was dying of pancreatic cancer.
I read a biography about her in college, one that had come out after she had died. I wanted to make a musical of her life. I had grand ambitions for someone who had never studied music theory, who’d never written a single song. In the end, I don’t think a musical is a good idea for an astronaut. Maybe a fictional one, with aliens. But being an astronaut in real life is lonely. I wondered if she ever thought about Tam while she was up there, looking down on the blue marble from space, or if the timeline doesn’t line up that way. She started dating her in 1985, and the last time she was in space was 1984. But they met before that, so maybe. Maybe she looked down at the Earth and thought of Tam, and in that moment knew she had to divorce her husband, she wanted to spend her life with someone else.
The first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, is still alive at eighty-seven. She was born more than ten years before Sally Ride was. She is an active politician in Russia. As far as I know, she’s homophobic: she was on a committee dedicated to Christian values, and voted to make Orthodoxy part of the constitution in 2013. In 2022, she voted to invade Ukraine.
There’s no justice in death, except for that it comes for us all. Why did Sally Ride only get sixty-one years? If she was still alive now, would we know she was gay? I’d like to think yes, that enough has changed in the twelve years since her death, that she would want us to know. But maybe not. Maybe her death was part of some cosmic plan: a utilitarian but unfeeling God chose her, knowing full well all that would follow, and what it would mean to people like me.
Sally Ride died in 2012, a year after I saw her in 2011. I came out in late 2013. I don’t know if Ride influenced me as much as, say, the lesbian health teacher I had freshman year, or my cishet male government teacher, who was the advisor of the GSA. Even someone like my parents’ gay friend from high school, who I’ve never met, probably had more to do with me coming out than Sally Ride.
I wonder if I should tell them. I never got the chance to tell Sally. You are also heroes to me. Thank you.