When we lost pioneering astronaut Sally Ride in 2012, many knew that as she boarded the Space Shuttle Challenger in June of 1983, she became the first American woman in space and the nation’s youngest astronaut to ever launch into the cosmos. But few were aware that she was also America’s first lesbian astronaut in space — a quiet but powerful rebel of gender diversity on multiple levels in a field still dominated by rigid stereotypes and gender norms. At the time of her death, Ride had been with her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, for the past 27 years. And yet one can only imagine the pressures, both inward and outward, she had to withstand coming of age at a time of extreme orientation-based discrimination.

Hardly any movement has done more to alleviate the spectrum from crippling self-doubt to suicide that young queer people struggle with than the It Gets Better project, masterminded by Dan Savage and his husband of 18 years, Terry Miller. Since its conception in 2010, it has drawn thousands of brave people of various sexual orientations and gender identities, as well as a cohort of heterosexual supporters — from countless individuals to the staffers of organizations like Google, Apple and Etsy to the cast of popular TV shows like House and True Blood to President Obama himself — to face the camera and help struggling LGBTQ youth face themselves with dignity and inner peace. Thirty years after Ride boarded the Challenger, NASA joins the It Gets Better ranks with a heartening testament to the diversity of the LBGTQ community, with space agency staffers ranging from interns to managers, engineers to astronauts, and even NASA’s Chief of Staff.

It almost doesn’t matter anymore — it’s who I am; it’s one part of who I am and not everything that I am.

Complement with Dan Savage’s recently released and excellent American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics, discussed in brief here.

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