Alan Turing and the LGBTQ+ Footprint in Science
In this episode, we will be learning about five LGBTQ+, people in the the STEM field like Sally Ride, George Washington Carver, and more. We will explore their lives and the legacies they created across the globe in the field of sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Love our content? Join our Patreon Community ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/ClosetedHistory
📕 TABLE OF CONTENTS 📕
00:00 Introduction
01:44 Alan Turing
6:24 George Washington Carver
12:35 Nergis Mavalvala
18:02 Sally Ride
22:26 Sir Francis Bacon
27:37 Outro
🌈 Connect With Us
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/closetedhistory
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@closetedhistory
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ClosetedHistory
Our Website: www.closetedhistory.com
📱 Subscribe & Watch Here
YT: @ClosetedHistory
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/closeted-history-lgbtq-stories-of-the-past/id1627298680
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EFhnoQ0uncROlKYK2Nu9D
/ / Some of Our Faves
#1 Place to Find Keywords for YouTube: https://www.tubebuddy.com/pricing?a=CLOSETEDHISTORY
Check out some of our favorite reads, book lists, and support local bookstores with your online book purchases: https://bookshop.org/shop/ClosetedHistory
/ / About Us 🌈
Hi, welcome to Closeted History! Your number #1 spot to learn the Queer and Trans history you never knew! To learn more, check out our website ➡️ [www.closetedhistory.com] Wanna work with us? Check out our media kit ➡️ https://beacons.ai/closetedhistory/mediakit
My name is Destiny (she/they) and I am the creator behind the podcast. Educator, creative, and fellow LG(B)T(Q)+ community member. Nice to meet you!
Disclaimer: Some product links are affiliate links which means if you buy something, we’ll receive a small commission. This is at no extra cost to you and supports our channel 💖
Full Transcript
Episode Introduction:
LGBTQ+ people have always been present in fields like science, technology, engineering, and math. But their lives and the impact of their contributions haven't always been visible. Historically, many LGBTQ+ people hid their identity, whether that was their gender or their sexuality, in order to avoid persecution or punishment. Evidence for LGBTQ+ lives in the past is also harder to find because historians would refuse to document the experiences that they considered shameful at the time based on their own prejudices.
And there's also the possibility of not having labels or the vocabulary during the time of the person's life and kind of like, what their societal norms? And there are tons of factors that contribute into some of the queer erasure that we see throughout history. But fortunately, contemporary researchers are beginning to unravel some of the most significant stories. But much of this has tended to focus on the lives of British and American LGBTQ+ people, who are often white. And so, hopefully, future research projects can address this imbalance and reflect the rich diversity of experiences that we see in the sciences.
So, I think it's super important that we showcase significant stories in the STEM field to improve visibility and inspire current and future LGBTQ+ scientists. So let's explore some of the lives of some remarkable LGBTQ+ people in STEM, both past and present.
So, in today's episode, we will be exploring five LGBTQ+ people in Stem who changed the world.
Alan Turing:
Alrighty, so first up we have Alan Turing, who was a mathematician, a computer scientist, and a crypt analyst. He was an accomplished British mathematician, philosopher, physicist, biologist.
I guess he just did all the things. He is often referred to as the father of modern day computer science and is credited for breaking the Nazi Enigma code. So essentially, without him, Britain and the Allied forces wouldn't have won World War II. He believed that computers eventually would be capable of thought that was indistinguishable from that of a human. And so he came up with this simple test to assess this capability, which he called the Turing Test.
Originally called “The Imitation Game”, it's a test that measures a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior and see whether that's equal or greater than that of a human. So it's kind of like those I'm not a robot like Ketchpa test that you do on the Internet to prove that you're not a robot. Whenever you're filling out forms, it allows for them to filter out, like, the bot responses. And so obviously, the Turing Test has an enduring legacy in the field of artificial intelligence today. Which, side note, there is a video game called the Turning Test that is like a bunch of puzzles that you have to do, and it's set on Jupiter's moon Europa.
It's a really awesome game if you're into those kinds of games, like where you have to play puzzles and kind of doing like, brain mind things. I don't really know how else to describe it, but yeah, if you're into those games, then you should definitely check it out. But so, a little background about Turing. So he was born on June 23, 1912, in London, England. He was educated at a private school and later went to the University of Cambridge to study mathematics.
He studied at King's College, and it was there where his paper on probability theory was published and became widely known. It gained the attention of a lot of people, including the renowned mathematician in the US. By the name of Alonzo Church, who he later studied with when he traveled to the US. To earn his PhD at Princeton University. So Turing was an openly gay man.
He was arrested and prosecuted for his sexuality by the same government that he had so honorably served years before. Again, because we couldn't have won World War II without the work of Alan Turing. So after the war, he taught at the University of Manchester and began work on what is now known as artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, in the midst of this groundbreaking work, turney was found dead in his bed, poisoned by cyanide. His death followed his arrest for gross indecency and a sentence of twelve months of hormone therapy.
He died on June 7, 1954, and the coroner ruled that he died by suicide. But people, including his own mother, have protested against the ruling, saying that it was an accident. And at the time of his death, at his side lay a half eaten apple. Biographers have speculated that he ingested the poison, like, with the apple to kind of disguise the taste. But the apple was never forensically investigated, so we'll never know.
And I think that's just really sad that Alan Turing, who has since been acknowledged as one of the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century, died as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws, as an LGBTQ plus person, and forced to endure chemical castration. Because that's what the therapy if you can't hear my air quotes, that's what the therapy he was sentenced to was. And Britain didn't even take their first steps towards decriminalizing homosexuality until 1967. In 2009, the British government apologized for this treatment. And in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II gave Turing, like, an official royal pardon, which, I mean, nice gesture, but a little too late, if you ask me.
But nonetheless, Alan Turing's contributions to artificial intelligence, mathematics, computer science, and so much more, he deserves to be recognized for his contributions to the world, which is exactly why he is number one on this list.
George Washington Carver:
So, moving on number two, we're going to talk about George Washington Carver, who was a chemist, a botanist, and one of the greatest inventors of American history. Carver is most well known for his agricultural research, which helped to develop techniques to improve soil with peanuts. And contrary to popular belief, he actually did not invent peanut butter. But instead he found over 300 uses for peanuts, which helped aid the impoverished, mostly black farmers of the south in their economic recovery after the war.
In the era of Jim Crow, he encouraged farmers to look to the land for what they needed, which gave black farmers the means to stay on the land. And because of this work with peanuts, he became known as the Peanut Man. But he was so much more than that. A little background about George Washington Carver. He was born on a farm near Diamond, Missouri, and it's unknown whether his birthday is in January or June, but he was born in the year of 1864.
He, his mother, and his sister were kidnapped from the Carver farm and sold in either Arkansas or Kentucky. I saw both of the states listed on several sites. Only George was able to return to the Carver farm, and there have been many conflicting accounts about what ultimately happened to his mother and sister. And ultimately, because there are so many conflicting accounts of his early life, unfortunately, we'll never really know. But despite the systemic and personal hardships that he faced, his challenges served as a motivator.
As he commented in one of his written letters when he says, this simply sharpened my appetite for knowledge. George became the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894. In 1896, Carver earned his Master's of Agriculture degree and immediately received several offers, the most attractive of which came from Booker T. Washington, whose last name George would later add to his own of Tuskegee Institute, which is now Tuskegee University in Alabama. Washington convinced the university's trustees to establish an agricultural school, which could only be run by Carver if Tuskegee was to keep its all black faculty.
And Carver accepted the offer, and he would work at Tuskegee Institute for the rest of his days, like he worked there until the end of his life. And Tuskegee actually is ranked number four nationally as an HBCU, and the campus has been designated as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site by the National Park Service. So he really helped to kind of create this legacy at Tuskegee University. So it was really awesome getting to read about that part of his life. Now about George Washington Carver's sexuality.
So it's been speculated that George Washington Carver was bisexual. In her 2015 biography, Christina Vella reviews his relationships and suggests that Carver was bisexual and he was constrained by the norms of his historic period. Of course, we'll never know, but what we do know is that he was never married, and he had a relationship with a woman at the age of 40 for a short while, but it ended when she moved to California. And he would often kind of refuse the matchmaking attempts of his peers at the university. But he formed a series of long lasting friendships with his male students, wrote them very affectionate, although not sexually explicit, letters and was known to enjoy getting therapeutic peanut oil massages from handsome men.
Apparently, university colleagues also claimed that he would kind of, like, horse around with many men. And some of the administrators there at the university were concerned about a potential scandal because of all of the persistent rumors about his sexuality. But again, of course, we'll never really know for sure. However, Carver did establish a life and research partnership with the scientist Austin W. Curtis, Jr.
Who was a graduate of Cornell University. They lived together until his death in 1943, and the two men kept details of their lives together very discreet. So historians know very little about how these two men understood their relationship and how they would describe the context of their relationship and how they kind of saw it. But upon his death, he willed his assets to Curtis and super suspicious and kind of strange. After George passed away, curtis was actually fired from the university.
So I don't know if those rumors and they got rid of him after George passed away. It's really sad to kind of see it happen that way. But on January 5, 1943, dr. George Washington Carver died. He was 78 years old, and he left behind a legacy as not only one of America's greatest inventors, but also as a pioneering agriculturalist award winning artist and humble humanitarian.
Carver was buried next to Booker T. Washington on the Tuskegee University grounds. It's been really interesting reading these things about his life, because I feel like when I was in grade school, I learned about George Washington Carver, but my most vivid memories are about the peanuts. So it's really great to see other aspects of his life now as an adult.
Nergis Mavalvala:
Alright, and next we have Nergis Mavalvala, who is an astrophysicist.
And in 2015, Nergis Mavalvala was among a team of scientists who first observed gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes. Two black holes. So gravitational waves, which are extremely faint ripples in spacetime, it was previously an unproven phenomena predicted by Einstein in 1916 in his theory of general relativity. But it wasn't until this discovery that these waves had actually been observed. And so there's this quote by Nerdgis, and she says, we think that when we make a discovery, we've answered a question, but almost always what we've done is pose a new question.
And I just love this mindset and perspective on learning that as we learn more, that we will just continue to pose new questions and just continue on our journeys of learning. And that that's just going to enable us to learn more is by asking one question that will lead to another. That will lead to another. And so I love that. So a little background about her.
She was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1968, and after graduating from high school, she moved to the United States to study physics and astronomy. At Wellesley College, she completed a doctorate in Astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also known as MIT, and really interesting about her PhD. So initially, she failed her PhD candidacy exam, and I wanted to include this in the episode because I think that it serves as a really great reminder that those who are successful also experience failure. It's an important part of growing and improving our skills, getting better at what we do. And I just love how resilient she is and ambitious and driven, and that despite having this initial failure and disappointment and let down, that she continued to strive for what she wanted.
And ultimately, it led to her getting her PhD and then being able to study astrophysics and witness this groundbreaking thing with the gravitational waves. But so when it comes to her identity, she is openly gay. She's an advocate for LGBTQ Plus inclusion in Stem, and she was even named the 2014 LGBTQ Plus Scientist of the Year. She says that she discovered her sexuality while in grad school, but remembers feeling out of place for doing things that were seen as gender nonconforming, or tomboyish, as she describes it. In an interview, she recalls an experience where she was 14 or 15 in Pakistan, and at the time, the buses were divided by gender, so women in the front, men in the back, and then they even had separate doors and a divider between them.
And one day, she and her friend got on the bus in the front section, and the bus driver started yelling at her to go to the back because she was dressed very boyishly. And she said that the bus driver was apologetic when she was like, hey, I'm supposed to be here. I'm a woman. But she says that her tomboyish nature really fed into her other identities, like athlete, scientist, and gender nonconforming, and that these parts of her identity influenced her to be more tomboyish. And it's interesting because while her home country of Pakistan is really proud of her contributions and her discoveries, but if she were to return home, parts of her identity would not be accepted there.
So it's interesting to see how she is celebrated since she lives in the know. So overall, she is a noteworthy role model for people who are interested in the sciences everywhere. She notes that much of her success came from her mentors in both Pakistan and the US. In a television interview in 2016, Mavavala stated, when everyone has access to education, that's when all the other things come into place, you've got to do what gives you pleasure, got to find a way to do it. People should just do what they enjoy most.
And I think for all of society, whether it's in Pakistan or elsewhere, we have to create opportunities for young girls to do what they're good at and do what they love to do in order to cultivate the sense of wonder in a child. And I just really love that and love her outlook on education and really how important that is and how much she really kind of emulates the role model persona that she knows that people look up to her and she stands as an advocate and is openly gay. And so I just really admire her and really admire the scientific discoveries that she has made in our lifetime. So I am glad to include her in this list.
Sally Ride:
Next up on our list, we have Sally Ride, who is an astronaut.
The late Sally Ride was the youngest astronaut ever at the age of 32, and the first American woman in space in 1983. She was one of six women in the program to be selected for the Cohort of 1978. And out of thousands of applicants, only 35 people were admitted to the program overall, and she was one of six women. So such a badass a little background about Sally. So she was born on May 26, 1951.
Dr. Sally Ride grew up in Los Angeles and went to Stanford University, where she was a double major in physics and English, which I thought was really super cool as an English teacher, and I was also an English major. So go, Sally. She later went on to get her master's and doctorate in physics. And so here's the thing.
Her sexuality is not something that was widely known or really talked about, and most people didn't even know until an obituary from her educational organization, which is called Sally Ride Science, named Tam O'Shaughnessy as her partner of 27 years. And in an essay as a tribute, her sister writes, my sister was a very private person. Sally had a very fundamental sense of privacy. It was just her nature because we're Norwegians through and through. Most people did not know that Sally had a wonderfully, loving relationship with Tam O'Shaughnessy for 27 years.
Sally never hid her relationship with Tam. They were partners. Business partners. And Sally ride science. They wrote books together.
And Sally's very close friends, of course, knew of their love for each other. We consider Tam a member of our family, and her sister is actually part of the community as well. And I think that it's really great that her family was accepting and that she never had to hide her relationship from her family members and her loved ones. But I think that it's also really sad that it wasn't part of her public identity because of some of the discrimination and pushback that she would have experienced. And so actually, this coming out in her obituary actually sparked some controversy for NASA and their discriminatory practices throughout the years.
NASA had to start considering women for the program when the Equal Opportunity Act of 1972 forced them to do so. And a 2014 story in The American Prospect hinted at NASA's attitude towards the LGBTQ plus community around Ride's time there. And this is a quote from the article coming out doesn't seem to have occurred to Ride and certainly would have jeopardized her chance to go to space if not killed outright. Around 1997, years after Ride's historic flight, NASA management quietly ordered a working group of physicians to declare homosexuality as a psychiatrically disqualifying condition. Yeah, and to this day, it's still incredibly rare for astronauts to be openly gay.
There are a few, but not many, and I think that Sally Rides coming out now kind of like, put an eye on NASA and forced them to change some of their practices, which is obviously a good thing. And now I think that people are paying attention to how NASA reacts to these issues. Her sister went on to say in the same essay, sally lived her life to the fullest with boundless energy, curiosity, intelligence, passion, joy and love. Her integrity was absolute, her spirit was immeasurable. Her approach to life was fearless.
Sally died the same way she lived without fear. Sally's signature statement was Reach for the stars. Surely she did this and she blazed a trail for all of the rest of us. So thank you, Sally Ride, for your contributions, and I definitely enjoyed learning more about her life. So, last but not least in our list of five LGBTQ, plus people in Stem who changed the world, is Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher, historian, lawyer and more.
Sir Francis Bacon:
He's known as the father of empiricism and modern science. Sir Francis Bacon was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and as the Lord Chancellor of England. His works are credited with developing the scientific method, which is pretty important, and remained influential throughout the scientific revolution. And some scholars even think that Bacon is the author of plays that are attributed to Shakespeare, which, as an English teacher, I'm not really sure how I feel about that. So I don't know.
I don't know enough about it. I've looked into it a little bit, but I'm not really sure how I feel about that. So if you have any opinion in the Shakespeare debate versus Sir Francis Bacon, be sure to send me a message. You can email me at closetedhistorypodcast@gmail.com. I would love to hear your thoughts about the Shakespeare debate, but I'm not really sure where I stand.
But so, a little background about Sir Francis Bacon. He was born in 1561. He attended Trinity College at Cambridge and he later studied law. He became a Member of Parliament and he rose to be Lord Chancellor, but he fell into debt in 1621. He was convicted of corruption and unfortunately, debarred from holding further offices.
But after this downfall, he began to write. And many of his essays reflected upon men morals and manners. And at the time when moralists described gay love as unnatural lust and a variety of other very degrading terms, sir Francis Bacon was actually the first person in the English language to use the non stigmatizing phrase of masculine love. And he used this in his writing new Atlantis. And so about his sexuality.
Although he was once engaged to a woman, there has been a lot of speculation about his sexuality, and it's been widely accepted at this point in history that he's part of the LGBTQ plus community. And even during his life, there were accounts of him having male lovers, and he left some items to a few people in particular that he had relationships with. So it kind of seems like it his devotion to scientific experiments is said to be the cause of his death. He died of pneumonia after stuffing a foul with snow to study the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat on April 9, 1626. So it's super important to study Sir Francis Bacon because his legacy and impact on the world, with his scientific contributions, his writings, and more, all kind of helped us enter into this new era of human understanding and discovery.
Conclusion:
So this brings us to the end of the episode. Thank you so much for exploring five LGBTQ plus people in Stem who changed the world. In this episode, we talked about Sir Francis Bacon and his scientific method, Sally Ride, and her unprecedented progress for women in the astronaut scene. We also talked about Nergis Mavavala, who is an astrophysicist who was able to observe gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes, a theory that was only proposed by Einstein. And now we have the evidence for.
We looked at George Washington Carver and his contributions to the agricultural world, how he was able to help black farmers in the south make progress and be able to stay on their land. And we also looked at Alan Turing, the man who is pretty much responsible for artificial intelligence and breaking the code that help us beat World War II. So thank you so much for looking at these amazing LGBTQ plus people with me in today's episode. I would love if you would give me some feedback about this different format. Or maybe you want to see a full on biographical episode about one of these LGBTQ plus people in particular.
You can send me a message over on the Instagram page, or you can send me an email at closetedandhistorypodcast@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.
