Coming Out Posthumously: Sally Ride and questions of how to memorialize semi-closeted public figures
In the first obituaries about former astronaut Sally Ride, the news was easy to miss - buried at the end of the stories, after many hundreds of words about her achievements, was a variation of this sentence: “Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy.”
Many readers didn’t understand, on first reading, that Tam was a woman. To the LGBT community, which had had no inkling that this American hero was in a same-sex relationship, the revelation was big news. But the question of what journalists should do when writing the obit of a semi-closeted public figure is one that comes up over and over again.
Chris Geidner, a political reporter at Buzzfeed whose beat is LGBT politics, was one of the first to focus on Ride and O’Shaughnessy’s relationship (The other was the Broward-Palm Beach New Times).
“I think we live in a time when it does still matter when somebody comes out, as we’ve seen with Anderson Cooper and Frank Ocean,” Geidner told CJR. “The reason I started looking into it is that initial tweets made it clear that people didn’t know this about her.”
When it became clearer to the general public that Ride had been in a longterm relationship with a woman, a spate of criticism was launched at the writers of the first obits, particularly The New York Times.
Andrew Sullivan, the Daily Beast writer whose blog hosted Cooper’s coming out announcement earlier this month, called the Times’s Ride obit a result of “homophobia.” He wrote, “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. To excise it completely is an act of obliteration.