Sally Ride, the first American woman to explore space was a lesbian.

July 2012--So what! Grow up, America! This is called life...not the board game...real life!

Dr. Ride was known for guarding her privacy.

Wonder why...we Americans are ever so understanding. Not!

She rejected most offers for product endorsements, memoirs and movies, and her reticence lasted to the end. At her request, NASA kept her illness secret.

In 1983, writing in The Washington Post, Susan Okie, a journalist and longtime friend, described Dr. Ride as elusive and enigmatic, protective of her emotions.

“During college and graduate school,” Dr. Okie wrote, “I had to interrogate her to find out what was happening in her personal life.”

Now talk about a buried lede (introductory section of a news story intended to entice the reader to read the full story). The only thing preventing the NYT from writing an honest obit is homophobia.

Homophobia...get over it!

They may not realize it; they may not mean it; but it is absolutely clear from the obit that Ride's sexual orientation was obviously central to her life. (A brilliant deduction).

And her "partner" (ghastly word) and their relationship is recorded only perfunctorily.

The NYT does not routinely only mention someone's spouse in the survivors section. When you have lived with someone for 27 years, some account of that relationship is surely central to that person's life.

In technological terms, NASA was pushing ahead toward the 21st century. But in human terms, it had finally entered the 20th. And it could not have picked a better pioneer.

Ride's gender, not her sexual orientation. And one often over-looked aspect of this is the long-standing discomfort of some in the feminist movement with lesbians in their midst.

Feminists often "inned" lesbian pioneers, or the lesbians closeted themselves. This was not because they were in a reactionary movement; it was because they were in a progressive movement that did not want to be "tarred" with the lesbian image. (Think of Bayard Rustin for a gay male equivalent).

Now, of course, Ride chose the closet throughout her life. Given who she was, how independent and brilliant, brave and cool, this is surely testament to how deep homophobia runs in American life. But it may also, as one reader suggests, be part of a welcome shift:

We only know O'Shaugnessy is a female from that vague abstraction--partner--and from a parenthetical statement that Ms. O'Shaugnessy was the CEO of the late Ride's company.

I have no idea if Ride was out to her friends or out to the public. But this could be another replication of the Anderson Cooper phenomenon--a movement towards a gay equality where people can come out on their own terms, without making what they perceive to be a big deal out of it.

Hopefully we're getting to the point where being gay is an utterly unremarkable fact in a great American life.

Another:

I don't always keep up with the latest on who has come out openly, but this certainly came as a surprise to me.

I guess putting this information at the end of the obit is in line with the Times' treatment of sexuality; they certainly would not go out of their way to identify someone as heterosexual other than in listing survivors.

That alone shows how far we've come. But are we really in a world where the fact that one of the most respected and pioneering women of the past quarter century was a lesbian is not worthy of mentioning more prominently?

According to the obit, Ride was very concerned with promoting women's opportunities in the sciences. She apparently was not as interested in promoting opportunities, or visibility at least, for gays and lesbians (at least, no such efforts are mentioned), which is a shame.

Anybody want to guess why? Oh, let me! Could it be that her career would come to a screeching halt? After all, this is America! We are not talking about a few years of college then a cushy job on Wall Street. This woman devoted her professional life to encouraging women to enter the field of science. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a pitiful lack of female scientists in this country.

But assuming that she was not out before her death, can we judge this as a failing? We all do what we can, and play the role we are most comfortable with. Now that the information is in the open, the LGBT community has another heroine to claim as our own and celebrate posthumously.

I'm not so understanding. We can judge this decision in the context of Ride's life. Her 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. 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. She was the absent heroine.

Give me a break! How cavalier we are...we haven’t studied for years as Dr. Ride did. None of us earned a doctorate in the Sciences. Women aren’t exactly encouraged to enter those fields. Ride was in a position to encourage women, and she did.  She made it possible for many young American women to explore the sciences. On the study wall of this house hangs a photo of Dr. Ride chatting up another engineer, who today is a doctor herself.