Little Secrets…

Those of us in the LGBT are good at keeping secrets; we never know how others will react to the truth. We worry about our family, we worry our friends, we worry about our jobs, and we worry just walking down the street. There is so much discrimination directed against that it makes many of us leery about coming out of the closet and if you are in the public spotlight we are afraid of any light shining on us.

Today would have been the 64^th birthday of Sally Ride,

Sally Ride’s Secret: Why the First American Woman in Space Stayed in the Closet
Slate
By Lynn Sherr
May 30, 2014

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?

Back in 1978 it was a different world, LGBT people we still piranhas, in many places we were still being arrested for being ourselves and living deeply in the closet.

She was highly educated but she was only one of 8000 applicants that wanted to go into space, I can only surmise that at that time she was so deep in the closet or in denial. If you do the math she was living with her partner Tam in 1985 before she divorced her husband in 1987 the same she left NASA.