Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  The social stigma began early.

  Tam recalls the time as a teenager on the tennis circuit, in the dark ages of the mid-1960s, when the word spread to “be careful,” whatever that meant, around two specific women because “they are lesbians!” The implication—that lesbians might corrupt unsuspecting young girls—was as pervasive as it was absurd, a relic of mostly bygone days. Tam mocks the warning but still shivers at the fear it produced. “And we were indeed cautious around these great players because you just think, ‘Oh my gosh, what are they going to do?’ ” Tam’s admiration for the tennis talent of one of the women overrode her anxiety, and she actually had a conversation with her. But the damage to her psyche continues to reverberate.

  “The word lesbian still brings back those memories,” she says. “I don’t even want to be called gay. And Sally thought the same way—you know, straight people don’t have to say, ‘I’m heterosexual.’ So why should we have to? It’s probably true that if either of us had been with a guy, we would have been open about it and said things like, ‘This is my boyfriend,’ or ‘This is my partner.’ But publicly, we never said the words to let people know we were a couple.”

  Only now does Tam fully understand the insidious nature of what’s been called “internalized homophobia,” or negative feelings about one’s own homosexuality that, in their case, led them both to keep their relationship largely to themselves. “Sally and I were not afraid of being gay,” she says. “Sally wanted to be with me. Being with a woman fit her better, for whatever reasons, and that’s how she was going to live. But it didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid and anxious in certain situations.” Tam tells me about the time they went to a resort in Arizona for a few days, on vacation. When they walked into the dining room to join the breakfast buffet line, she says, “there was silence, people turning their heads. It made us miserable.” The experience was not one they wanted to repeat.

  • • •

  Joyce Ride says she knew that her daughter and Molly were more than just roommates at Stanford but never said anything. “It wasn’t a big subject for conversation at the time,” she explains. When Sally married Steve, then divorced him, “I took her word that it was because she wanted to leave NASA and Steve didn’t.” As for Sally and Tam—who attended holiday celebrations at her home together for some twenty years without announcing their relationship—Joyce says she figured them out “a long time ago. But I didn’t concentrate a lot on it. I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I’m very nonjudgmental. Also, I think because Sally was such a public figure, the less said the better. That was her decision.” In the occasional letters she wrote her daughter, Joyce always sent greetings to Tam.

  In 1995, Sally’s sister, Bear, was divorced. Within a year she came out as a lesbian and formed a permanent couple with Susan Craig, also a Presbyterian minister. Bear took her mother out to lunch to break the news. Joyce “didn’t skip a beat,” Bear says. “She was not surprised. Unflappability runs in the family, too.”

  I ask Joyce whether she attaches any significance to the fact that both of her daughters turned out to be gay. “Not that I can think of,” she says. “But it would have surprised their father.”

  How might he have reacted?

  “I think he would have accepted it. He was very proud of both of them, so fond of both of them, he would have accepted anything. Even being Democrats.”

  Joyce’s ability to deflect the emotional with a zinger is both exasperating and infectious. I ask which might have concerned Dale Ride more—that his daughters were gay or Democrats?

  “Probably that they were Democrats.”

  Bear doesn’t remember Sally’s reaction, but does recall that her sister was always very supportive, and that she came to Bear and Susan’s commitment ceremony in 2000. Still, while Bear and Susan were open about their life together, and got married in 2008 when California briefly allowed it, and while Tam had told Bear about her relationship with Sally (some ten years after they’d moved in together), Bear and Sally never discussed it with each other.

  Bear tries to explain the inexplicable. In their family, she says, you didn’t find things out unless you asked. She laughs about the time her mother, over lunch, slipped in the fact that they were related to Robert E. Lee. “I was thirty-five and I didn’t know,” Bear says. “I asked how this could be. She said, ‘You never asked.’ ” And, Bear tells me, since she didn’t see Sally very often, she just never discussed her relationship with Tam or asked about her sexuality.

  Susan Okie did—much earlier, before Tam was part of Sally’s life. In February 1981, while Sally was at NASA (but more than a year before she was named to her first flight), she invited her high school friend, then at the Washington Post, to New York where she was giving a speech. She also offered Okie the extra bed in her hotel room that night. It was, Okie recalls fondly, “kind of like when she used to sleep over” when they were teens. Okie had been surprised when a colleague at the Post, a sports reporter, told her that Sally and Molly Tyson had been a couple, and decided to find out for herself. “So I asked her, when we were both lying in our beds. And she said, ‘No, Molly wanted that, but I didn’t, and that’s not true.’ ”

  By that time, Sally had already revealed her romance with Molly to two people. First, Bill Colson, back when he was courting her. Then, in 1976, when she was on the Stanford rugby field, to her tennis pal, Ann Lebedeff. “She told me she’d had an affair with a friend,” Lebedeff recalls. “She trusted me.” But as a NASA astronaut hoping to get selected as the first American female to fly, the stakes were much higher. Although Sally had never asked either Molly or Bill to keep the secret, perhaps she worried that with Okie, the information might appear in print, which could certainly compromise her career; perhaps she was concerned about the reaction of someone from her pre-Stanford days in a still-homophobic society. Or maybe it was something else entirely. Whichever, the truth was never made clear to Okie. “It haunts me that she was so closed-mouthed, and it hurts,” she tells me. “When I asked her about Molly, I wasn’t being critical. I just wanted to know. I grew up with her, I felt like we were such good friends, and I’m pretty good at hanging on to my friends. She was like a locked box.”

  Even more so when it came to Tam.

  Around 1995, when Bill Colson and Sally were no longer close friends but still collaborated on some physics papers, he met up with her in La Jolla. “And I have to admit, my interest in Sally has never really wavered all that much,” Colson tells me, “so I was exploring.” He asked Sally if she was in a relationship. “And she said, ‘No. It seems like things only last about a year.’ So I figured she was in a series of relationships.” By then, Sally and Tam had been a couple for nearly a decade.

  Susan Okie ran into a similar response early in 2011, when her friendship with Sally, ruptured after Challenger, was back on cordial terms. Okie, no longer a journalist, was in La Jolla, where she and Sally met at a restaurant and discussed the possibility of Okie’s writing some school curriculum material. Sally suggested she contact Tam, identifying her as her business partner. Sally also mentioned that she lived nearby, vaguely pointing into the distance. She never mentioned that Tam lived there, too.

  I had the same experience when Sally spent some nights at my apartment in New York in 1999, during the Space.com start-up. She giggled over the house gift she’d brought me—a pair of socks embroidered with giraffes, which she knew were my animal addiction—and we spent relaxed dinners and evenings together discussing her new venture and the ways of the world. She had often mentioned Tam as the coauthor of her children’s books, and it had occurred to me that they might be, or might have been, together, but I didn’t know for sure, and—yes, Bear—I never asked. Sally never volunteered the information.

  “I think it’s one thing to be private,” says psychologist Kay Loveland, who spent so much time with Sally and Tam in Atlanta and La Jolla, “but not to tell a friend that you’re in a relationship that is meaningful to you—there’
s something very sad about that. She wasn’t sharing a good part of who she was.”

  • • •

  In 2002, just as the new company was getting started, Sally and Tam moved into a spacious and breezy, five-bedroom Spanish-style house with a pool out back and a view across the hills to the Pacific Ocean and the sunset. With its white rugs and clean, spare furnishings, enriched by prints of Navajo artist R. C. Gorman on the wall and a collection of glossy black Santa Clara pottery, it was (and is) a bright and welcoming house. And it served as a refuge for two busy women who preferred quiet time together most weekends and evenings. On occasion, when Tam suggested opening it to an SRS board meeting, or a Christmas party, Sally declined. “I want,” she said, “separation of church and state.”

  Sally cherished her safe haven. Still an introvert despite years in the public eye, she was able to “just let herself be who she was,” Tam says, “a nerd, a jock, an academic homebody … with a woman to love for life.” Over time, Tam also saw her grow, becoming more open about her feelings with some close friends, letting them into her life.

  But her need for self-protection led to some awkward moments with others.

  Paula Levin, Sally’s UCSD faculty colleague and her (and Tam’s) friend as well, was having lunch with them in La Jolla one day, “and it was clear that there were topics off the table. I remember saying, ‘What are you guys going to be doing this summer?’ And there was this dead silence. One or the other responded personally—‘what I will be doing.’ It just seemed like such a natural question.”

  Brenda Wilson recalls the day Sally stopped by her office at Sally Ride Science and knelt down to greet her dog, Guido. “He jumped all over her,” Wilson says, “I’d never seen him this crazy about anyone! She laughed and laughed and loved it. I asked what kind of dog she had, and she said, ‘A bichon frise, they’re the best.’ ” And then, Wilson tells me, “Sally got the weirdest look on her face, like she’d overstepped. Because Tam had a picture of their bichon on her wall, and everyone thought it was just Tam’s dog.” Wilson also spotted the matching rings Sally and Tam each wore on the fourth finger, left hand.

  The truth was widely known but totally unspoken. Karen Flammer, one of the SRS founders who now serves as senior science advisor, says, “You’ll hear this from a zillion people. It was like a secret that was never a secret. And I mean to anybody at the company. We all talked about it—and not behind their backs, but without them being present. And nobody cared. But everybody knew.”

  Flammer says that on the one hand, the respect they showed each other was endearing. “They looked after other and took care of each other at meetings,” she tells me. “If Sally sensed that Tam maybe wasn’t feeling that she was getting recognition for something, Sally would immediately say, ‘Oh, well, Tam is in charge of this and has done that.’ And then if Tam sensed that Sally had had enough, Tam would figure out a way to say, ‘Okay, let’s end this meeting.’ It was incredible to watch.”

  On the other hand, Flammer says, shaking her head, “Tam couldn’t even be acknowledged for being her partner. That had to be hard.”

  Terry McEntee, Sally’s executive assistant and another SRS founder, occupied a unique place in Sally’s life and saw the couple from a unique vantage point. She began working with Sally in 1995, starting with EarthKAM and then running interference on any number of critical problems. When McEntee moved to San Clemente, about an hour up the coast, Sally asked if she was interested in arranging a flexible schedule to allow her to continue working at UCSD. McEntee knew and respected Sally as a calm presence “with no airs, who wasn’t dropping names. I never dreaded going to work.” She became a loyal and trusted business confidante, and later, a devoted friend—yet another like those throughout Sally’s life who protected her without being asked. “People outside the office would occasionally ask me, ‘Is Sally gay?’ ” McEntee tells me. “And I’d just answer that I had no idea.” In fact, Sally never told her that she and Tam were a couple, but McEntee realized the situation when, for instance, she would drop something off for Sally at the house they shared and saw two cars parked in the garage. Without specific instructions, she knew what her job entailed.

  McEntee remembers being asked to make a hotel reservation for Sally without realizing that Tam was going to be there, too. “And once Sally doubled back with me and asked me to be sure that Tam could check into the room if she arrived first,” McEntee explains, “because, Sally said, ‘Tam gets upset if she gets there early and can’t get in.’ ” Clearly, Sally was sensitive to the situation and wanted to be sure Tam was comfortable. “There was this tenderness,” McEntee says. After about ten years, Sally seemed more casual about acknowledging Tam’s presence, and would tell McEntee that she was traveling to a meeting and “Tam is going to join me.” But especially in those earlier days, as she saw it, “Tam was always in the background—that’s what their relationship demanded for Sally. And Tam was willing to go along with it. It must have been hard on her. And I think it had to have taken some toll on Sally in terms of guilt.”

  When I ask Tam whether keeping the secret took a toll on Sally, she pauses, thinks, and finally responds, “No, because she was an expert at compartmentalizing, and she was a very happy human being. She liked who she was in the world, she liked her life.” Tam does agree, however, that secrets take a toll on others. “Molly was a toll long ago, because Molly wanted to be more open, and Sally didn’t know how to do that, couldn’t even think of it. But the real toll is felt in another way by Sally’s close friends—Billie Jean and many others who wish she’d confided in them about her life, her feelings, her illness.”

  Tam doesn’t count herself in the same category because, she says, Sally was much more open with her. And because she and Sally lived equal, independent lives. “I never once felt that she was in charge of my life or in control. I never once felt resentful. I took full responsibility for the few compromises I made during our relationship—leaving my ecology PhD program at the University of Georgia, which I loved; not having children; not being as open about being gay; not having as open a home to our friends as I would have had by myself or with a less private mate.”

  Tam reminds me of an afternoon in Pasadena, when she, Sally and I met for tea during a rare moment when our schedules were in sync. By that time, I was barely in touch with Sally, although I did usually let her know when I was on the West Coast. I don’t recall the specifics of that day, but Tam does, and she recounts them, in aching detail: “It just feels uncomfortable,” she tells me, putting herself back in the moment. “It just feels like there’s a gorilla sitting at the table and no one’s talking about it. Who am I, and how am I supposed to act? How am I supposed to look at Sally? So I was uncomfortable a lot, and I think much more so than Sally, because Sally sometimes is unaware of other people”—this understatement makes Tam laugh—“she doesn’t care, she’s herself, she’s this grounded person, and she’s there at the table and she’s talking to you and she’s not thinking, ‘What is Lynn thinking?’ or ‘What about Tam?’ She just doesn’t think about those things.”

  It is a moving and candid picture of her uneasiness, but Tam relates her feelings more from analysis than anger. “I think one of Sally’s strengths was that she was so in the now, she was so present in everything,” she says. “You know, if you’re talking to her you’re really talking to her, and she doesn’t have an agenda, or things she must talk about, or try to convince you of. She’s just there talking with you. I don’t think she often concerns herself or thinks about the relationship or what other people might be thinking of the actual situation. She was happy to see you, wanted me there, and that’s it. There’s nothing else going on.”

  Tam wants me to understand that Sally included her in her life—made sure she was invited to everything she did, just as Tam did with her. But, she adds, “not in the explicit way to say, ‘This is my partner’ publicly.” Tam doesn’t blame Sally. But she does wish, for instance, that Sally had been more
willing to socialize at home. “I talked to her all the time about having friends over more,” she explains. “And she would say, ‘Yes, let’s do.’ She always wanted me to be happy. She would try. I also talked with her about my need to get to know her more deeply especially in the emotional realm,” Tam says. “Why didn’t she like delving into her emotions? What might happen if she did? I asked her these questions and she said she didn’t know why. And then we were working too hard at SRS, and I just felt a little distant from her.

  “So I almost left her.”

  They had been through bumpy times before, rare arguments when Sally’s blue eyes would widen, her mouth tighten, and there would be dead calm. She could be very stubborn. Sally “did not like feeling out of control” and would say, “I’m not mad, I’m not upset,” while quietly simmering with a taut jaw. One time, Tam asked Sally to join her on a cruise with some of their friends. Sally declined. “She didn’t like cruises, had been on one with Steve and hated it.” So Tam set off without her, “and Sally turned into a fourth-grader. She was the most jealous brat. In every phone conversation, she would hardly talk, would not tell me what was going on in the office. She was making me pay. When I got home, I said, ‘You made me a little miserable. But I had a good time. What was that about?’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry, I was awful.’ She said she just didn’t like it that I was away somewhere without her.”

  Tam reconsidered the situation. “I thought hard about what I had with Sally and what was missing. I wished she could talk longer and say more about her side of any discussion other than work. But we loved each other passionately. And we had so much together and shared the same values and interests that it was ridiculous for me to even think of leaving her. No one is a perfect mate, but Sally came close enough.

  “We didn’t talk about it, but she knew that I was thinking of leaving her. And then we’re happy as little larks again, and I’m back in the fold.”