LGBTQ+ History Month

You may have heard that the tiny island nation of Grenada is best known for producing some of the best spices in the world (especially nutmeg), but you may not have heard that Grenada is also the birthplace of the happiest mathematician on the planet, Dr. Ron Buckmire.  

Buckmire was born in Grenville, Grenada, on May 21, 1968, but he didn’t live there long.  When he was two, his father moved the family to the US while he earned his doctoral degree at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst.  Nine years later, Buckmire’s dad decided to move the family back to the Caribbean; he didn’t want his kids to attend high school in the United States, where the education system wasn’t near as good as it was back home. 

The family settled in Barbados, which has a 98% literacy rate and one of the top ten best school systems in the world.  Buckmire attended Combermere High School, where he excelled.  He had long been interested in math, but now became fascinated with chess - and he quickly became very good at it.  By the time he was 18, Buckmire had earned the titles of US National Master, US Senior Master, and FIDE (International Chess Association) Master, and won the British Chess Championship.  He is still both nationally and internationally ranked.  You can see one of his most famous games online, in fact -- the Buckmire-Lawson match, where he beat an International Master in 1985, in just 14 moves.  Buckmire was only 17 at the time.

In 1952, a US Army veteran named George Jorgenson went to Denmark for sex reassignment surgery; he returned as Christine Jorgenson.  “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty!” the New York Herald proclaimed.  While some people were horrified, most viewed Christine’s transition as a novelty.  She was charming and witty, but this sex-change business shouldn’t be taken seriously.

But to shy and lonely 14-year-old Lynn Conway, Christine Jorgenson was an inspiration.  Lynn was not known as Lynn then; she wouldn’t be able to use that name for another 14 years.  She was still called by her birth name - a boy’s name since Lynn had been born male.  Like Christine Jorgenson, Lynn knew that being in a male body was a mistake.  Until Christine’s revelation, Lynn had no hope of ever being the female she knew she was. 

Lynn was born on January 2, 1938 in White Plains, New York.  Three years later, the family welcomed Lynn’s younger brother.  As a child, Lynn became fascinated with radio, not only the broadcasts (especially those from the BBC during the war), but also the machine itself -- how did all those little glowing tubes transmit sound -- and from so far away?

Her father, a chemical engineer, gave Lynn The Wonder Book of Knowledge which explained where electricity came from, how radios operated -- and most fascinating for Lynn -- all about electrical engineering and the wonderful things it could lead to.  Lynn was hooked.

At PARC, Lynn invented a system of modern VLSI (Very Large-Scale Integration) design methods, which had an enormous impact on applications and the cost of computers and digital systems.   She also conceived of and wrote the bulk of Introduction to VLSI Systems, one of most influential, best-selling textbooks in history, with her colleague Carver Mead, an engineer at Caltech.  Thousands of students have learned the craft of chip design from Lynn’s book and much of modern silicon chip design revolution is based on her work.

In 1985, Lynn was hired by the University of Michigan as Associate Dean of the College of Engineering.  She also began teaching electrical engineering and computer science as a full professor.  She was superb in the classroom, inspiring and encouraging thousands of students.

In 1999, Lynn retired from U of M with Emerita status.  She is a member of The National Academy of Engineers (the highest professional recognition an engineer can receive) and holds five patents. 

Lynn fully intended to remain in stealth mode in retirement; she was in a stable, loving relationship, had just finished a very successful career, and was looking forward to spending time on her 23-acre spread in rural Michigan. 

But 1999 was also the year that computer historians discovered Lynn’s past.  While researching the origin of DIS (the innovative procedure Lynn had created while at IBM), experts were shocked to discover that it wasn’t recent -- that it had in fact, been invented way back in 1965.  Further digging revealed that the inventor was Lynn, who was still living as a male then.

Best of all, Lynn no longer had to live in stealth.  She was finally free to connect with family members she hadn’t seen in decades, especially her two now-grown daughters (who had been told nothing of Lynn’s transition; they always thought their father had just abandoned them).

She didn’t set out to become famous or make history.  All Sally Ride wanted to do was “to soar into space, float around weightless inside the shuttle, look out at the heavens and gaze back at Earth.”  She fulfilled that dream, but in the process, Ride - astronaut, physicist, author, athlete, teacher, and by all accounts one of the nicest people on the planet - became very famous indeed and made quite a bit of history as well.

Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951 in Los Angeles.  Two years later, her only sibling Karen arrived.  Little Sally couldn’t quite pronounce her sister’s name, so she called her “Pear” and it morphed into “Bear,” which is what everyone started calling her.

Bear Ride writes,

“Our parents…encouraged us to study hard, to do our best and to be anything we wanted to be…(They) encouraged us to be curious, to keep our minds and hearts open and to respect all persons as children of God. Our parents taught us to explore, and we did. Sally studied science and I went to seminary. She became an astronaut and I was ordained as a Presbyterian minister.”

Ride attended a private high school, Westlake School for Girls, where she excelled not only in math and science, but in English Literature.  She went on to earn bachelor’s degrees in physics and English in 1973 (her specialty was Shakespeare), a master’s degree in physics in 1975 and a PhD in astrophysics in 1978, all from Stanford. Her graduate work involved X-ray astronomy and free-electron lasers.  On the advice of her good friend Billie Jean King, Ride briefly considered abandoning her studies to become a professional tennis player (she was that good), but ultimately chose science over a sports career. 

During her final year at Stanford, Ride came across an ad from NASA in the student newspaper seeking women who were interested in becoming astronauts.  Stanford wasn’t the only university to run the ad; over 8,000 women from all over the country applied.  Only 35 made the cut; Ride was one of them. 

Ride worked for NASA for several years (specializing in the development of the “Canadarm” robot arm) before it was announced she would be the first female American astronaut to travel to space.  There was a media frenzy -- but the focus was entirely on the fact she was female, not on her scientific accomplishments.

Before her historic first space flight, Ride never lost her cool (she never lost her cool her entire life), and patiently endured cringe-worthy questions from the media like, “Will you wear a bra and make-up in space?”  “Will space affect your reproductive organs?”  “Do you cry on the job?”  Johnny Carson said that the flight would probably be delayed while Dr. Ride “found a purse to match her shoes.”

On June 18, 1983, the orbiter space shuttle Challenger was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida.  Ride made history that day as the first American woman in space (she was the third overall, after two female Soviet astronauts), the youngest American to travel in space at 32 years old, and the first LGBTQ+ astronaut in space (although that fact would not be known until after her death).  During the mission, Ride operated the crew’s robotic arm and managed the communication satellites.

The six-day mission was a success and the Challenger touched down on June 24.

Her death on July 23, 2012, came as a shock.  She was only 61 years old.  But Ride was an intensely private person, and few knew she had been battling pancreatic cancer for the previous 17 months.  It wasn’t until her obituary was published that the public became aware that Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessey were much more than business partners; they were life partners and had been for the past 27 years. 

Many wondered why Ride remained silent about her sexual orientation.  Her sister Bear, herself a gay activist who’s been arrested for public protests, explains: 

“She just didn't talk much…If you read interviews from years and years back, you'll see that there was always a major frustration that she didn't comment much on 'how it feels to be the first American woman in space' — she just didn't think that way. She wanted to get the job done. Her personal feelings were just that: personal…Sally never hid her relationship with Tam…We consider Tam a member of our family.”

He was, without question, a genius; the father of modern computing, the mind behind cracking the ‘uncrackable’ Enigma Device, and the first to establish profound insights into artificial intelligence (AI).

Yet instead of earning respect and admiration, Alan Turing - who was also a bona-fide war hero - was arrested and prosecuted for being a gay man.  His enormous contributions to computer science, encryption, and the war effort received no official recognition until more than 50 years after his death. 

Alan Mathison Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912, the younger of two sons of a British diplomat and his wife, who had met while working in colonial India.  Shortly after Alan arrived, his parents returned to India -- but without their boys, who they left in the care of a friend. 

A lonely child, Turing found solace in school, especially in math and science. He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree (both in math) from Cambridge University, and a doctoral degree (also in math) from Princeton in 1938.

Turing returned to England after earning his PhD and was promptly recruited by the government to work at Bletchley Park, a super top-secret code-breaking agency.  There, he was the major force behind breaking the Nazis’ infamous Enigma Device.

The Enigma Device was an encryption machine used to send code on the location of Allied ships in the North Atlantic so that the German subs patrolling those waters could destroy them.  The only way for Allied ships to avoid the deadly subs was if British cryptologists could decode the Germans’ messages.  It seemed hopeless, though.  The Enigma Device was said to be capable of generating 159 quintillion permutations, so the Nazis were confident they held the upper hand.  However, they did not. Alan Turing did, and he broke the code.  Solving the Enigma riddle greatly shortened the length of the war and saved thousands of lives. 

After the war, Turing remained a consultant at Bletchley, but went to work at Manchester University’s computing laboratory.  And after a brief engagement to a female friend and fellow codebreaker (which ended amicably), he began to recognize and explore his own homosexuality.

In early 1952, Turing, then 39, began seeing 19-year-old Arnold Murray.  Shortly after, Turing’s house was broken into.  When the police arrived, both Turing and Murray were home.  The cops asked Turing who the young man was; Turing (who could have lied) told them that he and Murray were romantically involved.  

Both men were charged with "gross indecency" under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (England didn’t decriminalize homosexuality until 1967).  Turing was deemed a security risk and immediately fired from top-secret Bletchley.  In court, Murray was given probation, but Turing was given the choice of either prison or probation with one year of chemical castration (i.e., taking female hormones, thought to eliminate all sexual urges).  If he had taken the prison sentence, he would have lost his position at Manchester University as well, which meant no access to the only computing facilities in England at the time.

There was nothing indicating that Turing was depressed or in a suicidal mood in the days leading up to his death.  The court order to take the chemical castration drugs had ended a year earlier.  His friends reported him as being in a “cheerful” mood.  There was no suicide note, but there was a list of things to do found later his office desk, left there the day before he never returned.  His mother Ethel never bought the suicide verdict either.  Like Copeland, she always believed her son’s death was an accident, which it might very well have been. 

Turing was famous for conducting chemical experiments in his house, in a tiny room he called “the nightmare room.”  Cyanide was one of the chemicals he kept on hand and one he was known to work with.

For all his brilliance, Turing was extremely careless when it came to his experiments.  He nearly electrocuted himself once, and he was notorious for tasting chemicals to identify them.  Regarding his death, Copeland believes that Turing may have accidentally set his apple in a puddle of cyanide before eating it, or (more likely) he accidentally inhaled cyanide vapors from his bubbling experiment, which would have taken awhile to kill him. Copeland points out that the distribution of poison in Turing’s organs was more consistent with inhalation than with ingestion.