A Forever for Sally

M. G. Lord watches National Geographic’s new documentary “Sally.”

By M. G. LordJuly 27, 2025

• Film

• Biography & Autobiography

FOR ANYONE ALIVE IN 1983, Sally Ride was a feminist superhero. Not only the first American woman to fly in space, but also, with her astronaut husband, Steven Hawley, a media magnet—a twin star, an emblem of a new, diverse NASA.

Yet paradoxically, the more the press grilled her, the more she clammed up. On The Today Show, host Jane Pauley leaned toward her. “Maybe I have no business asking,” she lowered her voice. “Do you think about children?”

“[Y]ou’re right, you have no business asking,” Ride shot back. But she shot it back with a smile. A fierce, incandescent, tactical smile. A smile that kept intruders—and sometimes even friends and family—at a distance.

Ride clenched that smile through all the hoopla attending her landmark flight on the Space Shuttle Challenger. Half a million viewers flocked to the Florida Space Coast for the launch. Many wore “Ride, Sally, Ride” T-shirts, referencing the song, “Mustang Sally.” Her celebrity was electric, unbounded, and seemed destined to last forever. Yet just as she had worked to gain recognition, she soon began working to escape it.

Sally Ride’s odyssey from public face to private person began in 1986, after the Challenger exploded, and NASA tapped her for a top-level panel to investigate the cause. What she learned gutted her. NASA had been aware that the Challenger’s rubber O-rings would not function at temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. But on the morning of January 28, 1986, the temperature was 36 degrees. And NASA launched anyway.

In 1989, disillusioned, Ride divorced both Hawley and NASA, reinventing herself as a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). As “Professor Ride,” she was still well known, but compared with the frenzy of her NASA years, she lived in obscurity.

Until July 23, 2012, that is. At age 61, after unsuccessful treatment for pancreatic cancer, Ride died. And in a head-turning New York Times obituary, Tam O’Shaughnessy, her life partner of 27 years, stepped out of their shared closet, upending the late astronaut’s public story.

In Sally, a new National Geographic documentary, director Cristina Costantini gets beneath the astronaut’s defensive smile. She shows Ride with a tenderness and intimacy that was never possible in her lifetime. The film charts her high-stakes path to low Earth orbit, but it also veers into unmapped territory, detailing her long-hidden emotional life.

“I read her obituary with the rest of the world and was like, Tam, what kind of a name is that?” Costantini told me over Zoom. “Then I googled Tam and I was like, oh my God. You know, if NASA was barely ready for women, they would not have been ready for this.”

The director reached out to O’Shaughnessy. “The more I learned about their love story, the more I felt like astronauts throughout time were able to stand next to their wives and have their portraits taken—and the wives were celebrated along with the men. Here we have this woman—Tam—who should have had that place in history.” She added, “Tam took it upon herself to correct the record.”

The movie ends with this epilogue: “In June 2014, NASA celebrated its first LGBTQ Pride event.” If I had watched the movie, say, last summer—or, better, 10 years ago, on June 26, 2015, after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage across the United States, I would have cheered. And I would have felt bad for Ride, who should have been part of what seemed like an inexorable march toward fairness.

But it is July 2025, and there is no such march. Instead, there is pushback, often delivered with a sneer. This year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth acknowledged June Pride by stripping the name of gay activist Harvey Milk from a navy tanker. He also banned trans people from serving in the military.

Lest anyone feel cozy in their same-sex union, the Southern Baptist Convention announced mid-June that they will vote on a plan to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that established gay marriage as a civil right. “Christians are called to play the long game,” Andrew T. Walker, an ethicist at a Kentucky Southern Baptist seminary, told The New York Times. It took 50 years, after all, to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The timing of Sally is not lost on Costantini. “The film is for anyone who had to hide part of themselves to get where they want to be,” she said. “An experience sadly relevant in 2025.”

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I have watched the film several times, mulling over my own 1980s-era experiences in and out of the closet. My circumstances were far humbler than Ride’s, but in the eighties, as a recent college graduate, I was one of only three women political cartoonists in what was then a small, sexist profession. I was forced to report to a misogynistic and homophobic editor, who routinely demeaned me based on my gender. Once, when I drew a cartoon that had two set-up panels and a third with a punch line, he offered his unsolicited thoughts on why three-panel structures work. The parts, he sneered, stand for “two testicles and a penis.”

Being female in that environment was brutal all by itself. Even if the woman with whom I was then in a relationship had not died under tragic circumstances, I doubt I could have endured yet another burden of “otherness.” While weathering both my loss and that workplace, I met a single straight man with whom I felt a connection—and, Reader, I married him.

I was not alone in my yearning to fit in. In the new HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself, for instance, even the late comic Paul Reubens (creator of the childlike character Pee-wee Herman), who had lived in college as an openly gay man, explained how urgent it was in the 1980s for him to “pass” as straight during auditions.

Some of the people around Ride thought she might have been doing something similar. The film features interviews with Molly Tyson, a fellow Stanford student, with whom Ride lived in a romantic relationship for four years. They were not showy about it, Tyson told Costantini, but they were very much together. When NASA called, however, they parted. (Yet not, apparently, with rancor. Ride invited her as an official guest to witness her landmark flight.)

Interviewed for Sally, fellow astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan describes Ride’s marriage as a “great PR move.” Hawley, Ride’s former husband, saw it differently. Ride was not that cynical, he told Costantini. Their union had had meaning, even if it ebbed with time.

I was struck by the kindness of his words. Not all ex-husbands look back with compassion and forgiveness. My own marriage ended less politely in the 1990s.

Either way, staying in the closet certainly benefited or protected Ride, and though it’s easy to take issue with historical figures who choose to conceal their sexuality, viewing Sally might temper the rush to judgment. With a handful of news clips, Costantini evokes the overt bigotry of the 1970s. “[T]wo out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear,” one CBS news report begins. Then, in an on-the-street interview, a teenage boy blurts, “I think they should be shot, if you ask me.” Celebrities were not exempt. In 1981, Billie Jean King’s same-sex palimony lawsuit caused her to lose all her endorsements.

Ride also had a legal reason to be silent. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which, for the first time in civil service law, named “sexual perversion” as grounds for firing or not hiring federal workers. In the military, homosexuality was grounds for a dishonorable discharge. Although NASA had pointedly been established as a civilian agency, this directive made it as exclusionary as the armed services.

Eisenhower’s order reflected a McCarthy-era conflation of homosexuality with communism. Like communist cells in the United States, the pre-Stonewall gay community existed largely in the shadows. Some Americans considered that a threat to subvert US institutions, reasoning that gay people were more susceptible to blackmail or could otherwise be compromised—a perception that was heightened in later years by the revelation that Soviet agents Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were gay. The conflation was ironic. Just as the US stigmatized homosexuality as communist, the communists viewed it as a particularly capitalist practice—a bourgeois aberration that favored individual desire over the welfare of the state.

This is the context in which Sally Ride began her tenure at NASA. It’s hard to imagine a straighter, whiter, more testosterone-soaked workplace than the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in the late 20th century. In 1976, only four of the center’s 4,000 technical employees were women. This was the year NASA made the radical decision to diversify its next “class” of astronauts. Eight thousand people applied, including 1,500 women. Of the 35 who made the final cut, 25 were straight white men. But there were also “six women,” “three blacks,” and—in the vernacular of a 1970s news report—“an Oriental.”

The press glommed on to the women. “I’ve come to realize that I will be a role model,” Ride sheepishly told a reporter. So I better not “do anything dumb.” And she didn’t. She invented herself as the larger-than-life hero that the world—especially young women and girls—could look up to. She never came out.

Ride’s sacrifices were not in vain. She really did have an impact. Retired air force colonel and former astronaut Cady Coleman, for example, had never considered applying to NASA, until, while an undergraduate chemistry major at MIT, she heard Ride speak. “I don’t even remember exactly what she said,” Coleman told me over Zoom. “It was more the idea that a woman could do this.”

Later, as a physics professor at UCSD, Ride forged close professional bonds with students she mentored. In the 1990s, Sarah Mei, a computer science student, was one of Ride’s two assistants on “Earthrise,” a collaboration with NASA that involved digitizing photos made by Apollo astronauts so that they could be viewed on the internet. Mei will never forget when Ride brought the students to JSC and allowed them to sit in the Space Shuttle flight simulator. Regular tourists were not allowed to do this. The feeling of specialness—of deserved access—stayed with her. Today, Mei is the chief engineering officer for a San Francisco tech firm. “Dr. Ride showed me that you can go into a male-dominated industry,” she said, “and kick everyone’s ass.”

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“Sally” now exists as more than her historical self. She is an archetype, a trope, a means to explore themes of otherness, authenticity, personal integrity, and survival strategies within a hostile, conformist culture. Since 2012, the idea of a queer woman astronaut has permeated the popular imagination, emerging in films, episodic TV, and both commercial and literary fiction.

In Apple TV+’s For All Mankind (2019– ), an alternative history of NASA, a high-profile lesbian astronaut in a lavender marriage leaves NASA for politics, defeating Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1992. But early in her term, when her gay husband is caught in an affair with an intern, she resolves to prevent her opponents from using the story against her. Taking control of her own narrative, she comes out as a lesbian at a press conference on national television.

In Away, a Netflix series that streamed in 2020, a Chinese woman astronaut on a multinational Mars mission must hide communication with her woman lover, who works in Mission Control. Back in China, the astronaut has a husband. And Chinese authorities, wary of scandal, monitor her every message.

In her new novel Atmosphere, best-selling author Tara Jenkins Reid rachets up the stakes, deploying not one but two queer women astronauts who fall in love. They are in the class admitted after Ride’s, and all of the women in that group watch her first flight with anxiety: “If Sally so much as sneezes at the wrong time, everyone will blame it on the fact that she’s a woman. And then none of us will go up there for a very long time.”

Eisenhower’s executive order hangs over Reid’s novel. Defense work requires a security clearance, the head of the astronaut office reminds one of the women. “Sexual perversion” is grounds to take it away. This leads to an agonizing conflict. The women must choose between the job they love or the person they love. They cannot have both.

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Much has changed in spaceflight since Sally Ride made history. NASA no longer controls who gets to leave the planet—private companies do. If you have a few million bucks and you want to see the curve of the Earth from space, you can buy a seat on a suborbital flight. Virgin Galactic’s space plane or Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard rocket can take you there. Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 can even get you into orbit. Before 2022, the FAA awarded “astronaut wings” to travelers who reached an altitude of 62 miles above the planet. But the glut of space tourists put an end to that practice. In April, when Bezos launched his now-wife Lauren Sánchez and her celebrity gal pals on an 11-minute, multimillion-dollar, all-woman suborbital flight, the public backlash was brutal.

Ride, Costantini thinks, would not likely have warmed to the pricey stunt: “Sally’s whole life project was to prove that women were so dependable that they could go into space. Bezos’s whole life project is to prove that his rocket is so dependable that even women can go into space.”

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Sally is as much a portrait of Tam O’Shaughnessy as it is of its title character. She, too, has a gripping backstory. As teens, she and Ride met on a tennis court; they were both nationally ranked players. O’Shaughnessy deferred attending college to play professional tennis on the Virginia Slims tour, an environment where she learned to be open about her sexuality. Eventually, she returned to university, earning a BS and MS in biology, and later, after she and Ride were together, a PhD in school psychology.

Their professional partnership was instrumental to Ride’s legacy. Together, they formed Sally Ride Science (SRS) in 2001, a foundation that encourages adolescent girls to stick with STEM, supporting them at an age when, as research has shown, girls start to lose confidence.

I thought about Sally Ride Science in June when the Supreme Court ruled that public school parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, were allowed on religious grounds to yank their kids from classes with LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks. This maniacal push for censorship has dogged libraries and public schools since the culture wars first broke out in the 1990s. I suspect Ride may have stayed closeted to protect her foundation—and the girls it served—from accusations or innuendo about LGBTQ+ content.

Still, O’Shaughnessy grew frustrated with the secrecy. “I wanted the relationship validated,” she told Costantini. It “ate at me.” This perception—this frustration—became the heart of Costantini’s film. “With many of our heroes,” she told me, “we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. Sometimes they hurt the people closest to them for the benefit of those that they will never meet.”

Ride’s reluctance to make long-term plans also frustrated O’Shaughnessy. “In 1985, when Sally and I first became a couple—when our friendship was suddenly romantic—I wanted to know where we both stood in the relationship,” O’Shaughnessy told me over Zoom. She asked Ride: “Is this forever for you?”

The astronaut hesitated. “I’ve never been able to look very far ahead,” Ride replied. “Five years is about it.”

“I was like, are you kidding me?” O’Shaughnessy said. But soon, the idea of a five-year check-in stopped being a joke. It became their special ritual.

I like the idea of a five-year check-in. Over time, we will understand more about where Sally fits into the canon of queer biography. Is Sally a poignant record of a past that is safely behind us? Or is it a playbook for the future? Ask me in five years.