This week, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Ride made history when she shot into space aboard the Challenger shuttle in 1983, a feat she repeated in 1984 before retiring from NASA. Later, she would be the only person to participate in probes of both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 2003 Columbia crash, and in 2001 started a company, Sally Ride Science, to encourage young people, particularly girls, to pursue science and engineering. And she left a final mark on American history in the obituary her company provided, which says (presumably with her approval) that she is survived by her partner of 27 years, a woman named Tam O'Shaughnessy. "With that simple statement," says Chris Geldner at Buzzfeed, "Ride came out." Some gay advocates have voiced disappointment that Ride didn't acknowledge her sexual orientation sooner. Should this influential role model have come out before her death?
Yes. She abandoned the gay rights movement: Ride's "achievements as a woman and as a scientist and as an astronaut and as a brilliant, principled investigator of NASA's screw-ups will always stand, and vastly outshine any flaws," says Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast. "But the truth remains: She had a chance to expand people's horizons and young lesbians' hope and self-esteem, and she chose not to." We can "judge this decision in the context of Ride's life," much of which was spent during a time when homophobia was more widespread. Still, it's clear she was an "absent heroine" of the gay rights movement.
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