1985-03-12

On this date the first memorial to the Nazi’s gay victims was unveiled: a pink granite stone monument at the former Neuengamme concentration camp, inscribed “Dedicated to the Homosexual Victims of National Socialism.”

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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Died

1647 -

ALSE YOUNG (sometimes cited as ACHSAH YOUNG or ALICE YOUNG) died (b. 1600); Another victim of Leviticus, Alse Young was from Windsor, Connecticut, and was the first person in the records executed for witchcraft in the thirteen American colonies.

Witch hunts are seen as an attempt to eliminate female midwifery skills and as a historical explanation why modern gynecology - surprisingly enough - came to be practiced almost exclusively by males in state run hospitals. In this view, the witch hunts began a process of criminalization of birth control that eventually lead to an enormous increase in birth rates that are described as the “population explosion"" of early modern Europe.

Born

1938 -

PAULINE PARKER, New-Zealandic murderess, born; A woman from Christchurch, New Zealand who, together with her friend Juliet Hume, murdered her mother, Honora Parker, on June 22nd 1954.

It is believed that the two girls killed Honora because Juliet and her father were leaving shortly for South Africa and, though Pauline wanted to accompany them, her mother forbade it. According to their own accounts, Pauline and Juliet were devoted friends who collaborated on a series of adventure novels which they hoped would be bought by a Hollywood studio and made into epic films.

The girls' friendship was documented in detail by Pauline in a series of diaries during her teenage years. During their friendship, the girls invented their own personal religion, with its own ideas on morality. They rejected Christianity and worshiped their own saints, envisioning a parallel dimension called “The Fourth World,” essentially their version of Heaven. The Fourth World was a place that they felt they were already able to enter occasionally, during moments of spiritual enlightenment. By Pauline's account, they had achieved this spiritual enlightenment due to their friendship. Eventually, the girls formulated a plan to flee to Hollywood.

Shortly prior to this, Juliet had discovered her mother was having an affair and her parents were separating. This devastated Juliet as well as Pauline, who, due to having spent so much time with the Hulmes, thought of Juliet's parents as her own. Both girls were unaware of the fact that both sets of parents were collaborating at the time in an effort to separate the girls, viewing their close friendship as potentially unhealthy or homosexual (which, in 1950's, was thought of both as a crime and a mental illness). The girls' story was made into a film, Heavenly Creatures, by Lord of the Rings producer-director Peter Jackson, in 1994. Pauline was played by Melanie Lynskey and Juliet by Kate Winslet.

1951 -

SALLY KRISTEN RIDE was born on this date (d: 2012) was an American physicist and a former NASA astronaut.. Ride joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman to enter space. Age thirty-two at the time of that mission, she also became, and remains, the youngest American to enter space. In 1987, she left NASA to work at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper seeking applicants for the space program. As a result, she joined NASA in 1978. Prior to her first space flight, she was subject to media attention even being asked during a press conference "Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?"

During her career, Ride served as the ground-based Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights and helped develop the Space Shuttle's robot arm. On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on Space Shuttle Challenger for. (She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.)

On the first Challenger flight, during which the five-person crew deployed two communications satellites and conducted pharmaceutical experiments, Ride was the first woman to use the robot arm in space and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.

Her second space flight was in 1984, also on board the Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. Ride, who had completed eight months of training for her third flight when the Space Shuttle Challenger accident occurred, Ride was named to the presidential commission investigating the accident and headed its subcommittee on operations.

Following the investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., where she led NASA's first strategic planning effort, authored a report entitled "Leadership and America’s Future in Space", and founded NASA's Office of Exploration.

In 1987, Ride left her position in Washington, D.C., to work at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis and Director of the California Space Institute. During the mid 1990s until her death, Ride led the public outreach efforts in cooperation with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UCSD, which permitted middle school students to study imagery of the Earth and moon. In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia Investigation Board. She was the president and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she founded in 2001 that creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls.

According to Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned of the technical problems that led to the Challenger accident, Ride was the only public figure to show support for him when he went public with his pre-disaster warnings (after the entire workforce of Morton-Thiokol shunned him). Sally Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for his efforts. Ride wrote or co-wrote five books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.

Ride endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008. She was a member of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, an independent review requested by the Office of Science and Technology Planning (OSTP) on May 7, 2009.

Ride married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982; they divorced in 1987. From 1985 until her death, Ride's partner was Tam E. O'Shaughnessy, a professor emerita of school psychology at San Diego State University, and a childhood friend who met Ride when both were aspiring tennis players. O'Shaughnessy became a science teacher and writer and, later, the chief operating officer and executive vice president of Ride's company, Sally Ride Science. She co-authored several books with Ride. Their relationship of 27 years was revealed in Ride's obituary, which was released by Sally Ride Science and confirmed by Ride's sister. Her sister stated that Ride preferred to keep this information private during her life

The Challenger commander, Robert L. Crippen, said he chose her for the 1983 mission in part because of her expertise with the device. She was part of a crew of five that spent about six days in space, during which she used the arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite.

At Cape Canaveral, many in the crowd of 250,000 that watched the launching wore T-shirts that said, "Ride, Sally Ride" - from the lyrics of the song "Mustang Sally."

The next day, Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. magazine at the time, said, "Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists."

When the shuttle landed, Dr. Ride told reporters, "I'm sure it was the most fun that I'll ever have in my life."

Noteworthy

1951 -

DONALD MACLEAN and GUY BURGESS, British spies; No…both spies were not born on the same day. But it is the day that the two British Foreign Office Officials defected to Russia, setting in motion an English witch hunt as vicious as America’s contemporary McCarthy investigations. Unfortunately for their Gay brothers, and especially for their old Oxford classmates, Maclean and Burgess were homosexuals. Their actions brought new meaning to the dreaded term “security risk” and cost numerous innocent Gay men and women their livelihoods and, in some cases, (as in the mathematician Alan Turing) their lives. No, Virginia, not all Gay men are good Gay men. And here's a surprise...neither are straight men.

Born

1954 -

ALAN HOLLINGHURST, British novelist and poet, born; Hollinghurst won the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. His poetry collections include Isherwood is at Santa Monica from the Oxford: Sycamore Press and Confidential Chats with Boys, Oxford: Sycamore Press 1982. He was the The Times Literary Supplement’s deputy editor from 1982 to 1995. In 1989, he won the Somerset Maugham Award for The Swimming Pool Library. In 1994, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction with The Folding Star.

Hollinghurst is gay and lives in London with his partner Paul Mendez. Hollinghurst previously described: "I'm not at all easy to live with. I wish I could integrate writing into ordinary social life, but I don't seem to be able to. I could when I started [writing]. I suppose I had more energy then. Now I have to isolate myself for long periods."

He won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. His next novel, The Stranger's Child, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011.

1985 -

SARAH DILYS OUTEN MBE FRGS is an English athlete and adventurer born on this date. She is also a motivational speaker in the United Kingdom and internationally. In addition to rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, Outen was the first woman and the youngest person to row solo across the Indian Ocean and also the Pacific Ocean, from Japan to Alaska in 2013.

On the North Pacific row she battled dangerous seas, isolation, cargo ships, sickness and currents that often tossed her boat in the wrong direction. She was nearly hit by a cargo ship after her radar failed. Outen described seeing a "big black wall" coming through mist in a phone interview posted on her website.

On September 23, 2013, after 150 days and 3,750 miles at sea, she became the first woman to row solo across the North Pacific ocean. Outen arrived at Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands, rowing to within half a mile of a rocky coastline before being towed through the channel between Adak and Kagalaska Island. She was originally bound for Canada, but punishing currents and inclement weather forced her to change destinations for Alaska.

She also tweeted about whiteout fog and exhaustion-induced hallucinations in the final, treacherous miles to Adak. The 3,750 miles took Outen 150 days to complete. In 2009, Outen became the first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean. Outen got engaged to her girlfriend while on the journey.

Tweeted Outen upon arriving on the Alaskan shoreline: "Wobbled my way ashore, patted Happy Socks. Then hugged... Relief. Joy. Disbelief. Happy happy days."