Every year, as pride month comes around, we see many articles about the contributions of LGBTQ+ individuals to science. What isn’t so common, however, are the stories of those scientists’ personal struggles. What is it like to be queer in science? What was it like in the past? How are things progressing now? Some scientists faced issues like any other queer person would. Some faced challenges in their workspace. In this article, instead of admiring their contributions to science, let’s take a look into the ‘LGBTQ+’ part of prominent LGBTQ+ scientists.

ALAN TURING

Alan Turing was an eminent Computer Scientist who also made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of mathematics, chemistry, and biology*.

During the 1950s, homosexuality was illegal. This fact did not, however, deter Dr. Alan Turing from living as an ‘out’ gay man, both in a professional space and outside it.

In 1952, Turing started a relationship with a 19-year-old man, Arnold Murray. Shortly after this, Turing’s house witnessed a burglary, and Murray stated that he knew the burglar. When Turing reported the burglary, during the investigation, he admitted to his sexual relationship with Murray. Both of them were charged with ‘gross indecency’ (section 11 of Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885) and Turing was convicted. He was given an option of probation instead of imprisonment but this came with a caveat, an agreement for him to go through hormonal therapy to decrease libido.

Turing accepted these conditions. He had to take injections of stilboestrol (now called diethylstilbestrol) ,a synthetic estrogen, and over the course of a year, the hormones resulted in the gradual feminization of his body. Besides the fact that he was arrested on the grounds of being gay and had his own body changed in an attempt to ‘fix’ him, being convicted meant he lost his security clearance, thus having to stop his work during World War II.

*- Turing Patterns- The chemical basis of morphogenesis

Two years later, Turing was found dead due to cyanide poisoning. There were multiple speculations about how he died. Some say the half-eaten apple on his bed, although had not been tested for cyanide, was his means of ingesting the chemical. Some say the apple was just a result of his habit of eating the fruit before sleeping and that it was actually an accidental inhalation of cyanide fumes from the apparatus he had in his spare room for electroplating gold - dissolved by potassium cyanide - onto spoons. Either way, at his inquest, Turing’s death was ruled a suicide.

In 2012, Turing's then offence was granted Royal Pardon and this year, the new £50 bill introduced by the Bank of England honors his contributions by featuring him.

Turing’s authenticity and his courage to be out and be himself even when it was illegal is remarkable and must have been and continues to be inspiring to many other queer people after him.

But we also must respect that not everyone has the courage or the desire to be out in public.

Sally ride

Sally Ride, the first woman in space, came out as a lesbian only after she passed away. Her obituary mentioned Tam O’Shaughnessy, who wrote books with Sally and co-founded Sally Ride Science - as her ‘partner for 27 years. 

Sally’s sister, Bear Ride, has said that Sally had never hidden her relationship with O’Shaughnessy and that her close friends were aware of their love for each other. So why hadn’t she come out publicly?

Steven Hawley, ex-husband of Sally Ride, had said that she was a ‘very private person who found herself a public persona’ - a role which she was never fully comfortable with. Moreover, she was still struggling internally with her sexuality. When Sally was living her final days, she and her partner wanted to host an event to celebrate her life. When Tam O’Shaughnessy had asked Ride how she should identify herself at the party, Ride had told her that she wants her to decide - ‘Whatever you want to say, how much you want to say, is fine with me.’ But later she had also admitted that the two being open about their relationship might ‘be very hard’ on NASA and the astronaut corps but she is okay with that if O’Shaughnessy thinks it’s right.

Which brings us to NASA. A story by The American Prospect $^[1]$ in 2014 tried to shed some light on how NASA saw its LGBTQ+ employees around the time Ride worked there. According to that story, around 1990, NASA management tried to order a group of physicians to declare homosexuality as a ‘psychiatrically disqualifying condition’. This order did not succeed, in fact, no explicit rule was set against the LGBTQ+ society, and NASA claims that it does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Yet still, the only openly queer astronaut was Sally Ride and that too, was revealed after her death.

Sally Ride was the first woman and the first lesbian in space - a huge achievement, but a huge role to take up for the communities she was a part of. Not everyone can handle such a spotlight and not everyone wants to. But her story has always been and will continue to be a large part of the history of the LGBTQ+ society in science.

Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway started studying at MIT when she was still pre-transition. She struggled greatly with her identity - she’d experienced gender dysphoria since she was a child and attempted a gender transition in 1957-58 but the transition failed because the medical field wasn’t competent enough back then - and this led her to drop out. She worked as a computer technician for a while. After coming back onto her feet, she decided to resume her education that she’d discontinued due to personal struggles. She enrolled at Columbia University and, soon, earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering.

She started working at IBM around the 1960s and while working on the project assigned to her by the CEO in Advanced Computing Systems, she invented Dynamic Instruction Scheduling (if a computer has a large number of instructions and some at the front are slowing it down, it can be optimize to issue out of order instructions $^[2]$). This is used in almost every modern computer today so Conway’s invention was a huge leap in computer science. But for decades, no one knew it was her work.

[1] Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being The First | Prospect.org

[2] Dynamic Instruction Scheduling - IBM-ACS

In early 1968, Conway had told one of her supervisors that she was going to ‘[undertake] a gender transition to resolve a terrible existential situation’ that she had faced since childhood. Her immediate colleagues were initially supportive. Her direct supervisors worked out a plan for her to continue working at IBM by taking a leave, completing her transition and returning as a new employee with her new name and identity. But the matter escalated to the corporate executive team and they feared ‘scandalous publicity’ if the public got to know. The company’s medical director said that when employees learn she’s transgender, they might ‘suffer major emotional problems’. When this reached the then CEO T.J. Watson Jr., he cancelled the arrangement and fired her immediately. With the company’s initial support gone, her personal support - family, friends - also started to decrease.

After being fired, Conway went abroad to have surgery for her physical transition. After a successful transition, she came back to the US and decided to restart her career in ‘stealth mode’. In context of gender transition, stealth means to present and be perceived as cisgender. In extreme cases, transgender people cut off contact with those they knew before transitioning so that no one around them knew they were trans at all. While many choose this way of living to avoid discrimination for being transgender, it is also incredibly isolating.

As for Conway, she couldn’t talk about how she studied at MIT and Columbia University or about any of her previous work - including her huge project at IBM. She started over by working as a contract programmer and says that it was a very scary time. Any public outing would have ruined her new career, rendering her an unemployed “social outcast living on the streets or worse” as said by Conway herself. But in the end, she managed to move up the ranks quite quickly due to her talent and hard work without being outed.

In 1998, when Conway was about to retire as a professor at the University of Michigan, she saw stories of her work at IBM beginning to circulate. Mark Smotherman, a computer historian at Clemson University had found out about ACS and was looking into it to see if it was the first in the line of superscalar microprocessors$^[3]$. Lynn realized her involvement might be revealed and decided that she would rather it be done by herself. She contacted Smotherman and revealed her role in the project, using the documentation she had saved from her project after being fired to prove her identity and claim over her work (the company was so busy with trying to fire her without ‘consequences’ they never asked for it back). After this, she started to come out to the public as well. She began with friends and colleagues. Then she set up a website to tell her story in her own words rather than someone else spilling out something about herself without permission.

After coming out, Conway started working as a transgender activist. She consulted with big companies about discrimination policies to ensure they are genuinely inclusive and diverse. She has worked for the employment protection of queer individuals and lobbied for transgender inclusion in the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers(IEEE) code of ethics. She was even a 2009 Stonewall $^[4]$ hero.

Fifty-two years after her mistreatment at IBM, Conway was asked to speak with IBM supervisors at a virtual meeting with other employees. IBM’s senior vice president of human resources, Diane Gherson told Lynn that the company now offered help & support to transitioning employees but admitted that no amount of progress could make up for the mistreatment Conway had received in her time. The entire apology was reported by Forbes.

Lynn’s story is the biggest example of how things change with time. The struggles of being queer in science are still present but their magnitude and their nature have changed significantly.

[3] - A superscalar processor is a specific type of microprocessor that uses instruction-level parallelism to facilitate more than one instruction executed during a clock cycle.

[4] - Stonewall Riots or the Stonewall Uprising was a series of demonstrations carried out by members of the LGTBQ+ community after a police raid of the mafia-run gay bar, Stonewall Inn. It was a catalyst for gay rights movements in the US and globally.

David smith

David Smith is an openly gay nanochemist and professor at the University of York. His research was inspired by the health problems that his husband Sam had faced. He is known to be one of the most visible out gay scientists.

When he was in school in the 1980s, it was forbidden by law in the UK to talk about sexuality in a school setting. Smith has said that as a gay kid, he felt no support while struggling to address and accept how he felt. He dove into chemistry to suppress his personal identity. He is proud of academic achievements from that time but what he missed out on a personal basis leaves him with a sense of regret.

He is now quite active in diversity work. He has both written and given lectures on the representation of queer scientists. When the Royal Society of Chemistry did a survey regarding how LGBTQ+ scientists felt in their fields, he was a member of their Inclusion and Diversity committee. They found that in comparison to heterosexual cis-gendered scientists, LGBTQ+ scientists were more likely to consider leaving science because of the prevailing culture (16% and 28% respectively).

Smith says that he had once been conflicted about how he feels about queer scientists being out and visible. Scientists mostly want to be recognized for their research and are trained to think that any personal matter is not important to their role as a scientist.

But he says that he’s now realized that

“being gay in science, female in science, an ethnic minority in science, or a parent in science-all of these things influence us as scientists. And we’re wrong to just pretend we can push that into the background.”

Smith admits that he has not experienced much homophobia in his workspace besides delegates being surprised when he brings his husband to conferences, event organizers automatically assuming ‘Sam’ to be ‘Samantha’, hotel or conference staff asking if they really want a double room, etc.

Smith was shortlisted for the Gay Times Honours Barbara Burford Award for activist work representing LGBTQ+ individuals in STEM and his contributions to queer visibility in science are just as important as his contributions to the science itself.

Note: Smith’s survey also found: “specifically, the culture was more welcoming for gay men than for lesbians (perhaps linked to poor gender inclusion in the physical sciences), and the culture was least supportive to non-binary and transgendered individuals, with almost half of these respondents having sometimes considered leaving science”.

Nergis Mavalvala

Nergis Mavalvala is a Pakistan-born astrophysicist who was the first person to observe gravitational waves. She moved to America to go to college and it was during her time as a graduate student at MIT that she came to realize her sexuality.

She fell in love with a girl and her girlfriend visited her at her lab. Mavalvala states that her work environment was quite supportive. She personally thought that her sexuality wouldn’t really make a difference to the people around her and, turns out, she was right. When asked about how her family had reacted, she had said that her family was one where the stereotypical gender roles were not observed anyways. In fact, even with Pakistan’s history of LGBTQ+ rights violations, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called her a source of inspiration for Pakistani students and scientists, saying the entire nation is proud of her achievements.

Mavalvala describes herself as an ‘out, queer person of color’ and says that her realization of her sexuality came quite naturally. She credits this to the fact that she was in the US where many are open-minded and that she never felt too bound by social norms. She was recognized as LGBTQ Scientist of the Year by the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals in 2014. She currently lives with her partner and their two children in Massachusetts.

Her story indicates the Times they are a changin’ ( a Bob Dylan reference) and lays emphasis on the importance of a supportive environment.

As the days go by, people are becoming more accepting and understanding of the LGBTQ+ community. Seeing stories of LGBTQ+ scientists not only spreads awareness about the struggles people in science have to face due to them being queer, but it also is something for new LGBTQ+ scientists to take inspiration from.

References:

1. Alan Turing | Wikipedia
2. Why Sally Ride waited until her death to tell the world she was gay? | NBC News
3. This Pride, Be Inspired by Sally Ride's Legacy | Space.com
4. After death, Sally Ride reveals she was gay | Reuters
5. The first woman in space has now sparked a huge controversy at NASA after her death | Business Insider
6. Lynn Conway | Queer STEM History - Queer STEM Podcast
7. Lynn Conway- LGBT history Month
8. LGBTQ+ Tech Innovator: Lynn Conway
9. David Smith | 500 Queer Scientists
10. LGBTQ+ STEM Day: Professor David K. Smith - ACS Axial
11. Science is full of personal stories. York's David Smith thinks scientists should share them
12. 'No sexuality please, we're scientists' - Opinion | Chemistry World
13. Nergis Mavalvala, Pakistani-American & Queer Astrophysicist WeeklyTrill | Medium
14. Meet queer Pak-born astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala who's now dean of MIT School of Science | Free press journal
15. Meet Nergis Mavalvala. She’s the lesbian astrophysicist proving Einstein’s theories are correct. | LGBTQ Nation