She became the founder of a company that promotes STEM for girls. She distinguished herself as part of the investigatory teams that figured out why two space flights failed, killing the astronauts aboard, and what NASA needed to do about it. Sally Ride followed her NASA missions with a substantive career as a scientist. In our heterosexist society being out is still a major risk factor for dis-ease. So why was her loving relationship with a fine woman something to cover with a space blanket? It was not as if they were mass murderers. Sally was a hero whose brilliance and focused work helped her to “reach for the stars” as she advised the rest of us to do. Yet the thread of Sally’s love for women runs throughout her life. Only her obituary revealed that Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of twenty-seven years, survived her. Instead, I found a skillfully and tastefully written biography that traced the trajectory of a smart young tennis player who chose physics over the courts and became the first American women in space. I expected a fairly straight forward, as it were, rendering of Sally Ride’s remarkable life with a concluding chapter about her untimely death in 2012 at the age of sixty-one.
She also lived the consequences of heterosexism. This is a marvelously written, highly informative, and deeply touching story of an American hero who changed forever what an astronaut looks like. Read Lynn Sherr’s marvelous biography Sally Ride: American’s First Woman in Space for a reality check. Lest anyone think that LGBTIQ rights were accomplished when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, I beg to differ.
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