A Matter of Pride

To the moon and back

I wanted to write a Pride-adjacent post in honor of Pride Month and also to register my horror at the prospect of un-naming the USS Harvey Milk. For crying out loud, can you believe that one? The pettiness, the anti-woke signaling… stop me before I burst a valve. On a happier note, I went to a screening the other night of the new National Geographic documentary Sally, which is a fantastic film about astronaut Sally Ride. She was brilliant, cool, inscrutable, quietly charismatic, and ultimately tragic, living in fear much of her life of being outed as a lesbian. The film filled me with incredible sadness, partly because she died so young (61, of pancreatic cancer) but mostly because the idea that she could be perhaps among the most accomplished scientist of her day and still had to be afraid just kind of killed me. Highly recommend the film—the archival NASA footage alone is worth seeing. It’s so stirring and beautiful.