Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012, American, Lesbian)
She was an American astronaut and physicist, joining NASA in 1978 after going through a tough selection process. In 1983, became the first American woman, the third woman and the first queer person to fly in space. A thread... 🧵
She was the youngest American astronaut to have flown in space, having done so at the age of 32. Her first mission with the Challenger lasted 6 days, 2 hours, 23 minutes.
She was also part of the Challenger mission in 1984 for 8 day flight which was the first mission with two women on board.
Ride started training for her third mission but it was cancelled after the Challenger disaster.
During the investigation she was invited to be part of the presidential commission that investigated the disaster and was key to find the cause.
After working in NASA for 10 years, she became a physics professor and led 2 outreach programs for NASA. The programs allowed middle school students to request images of the Earth and the Moon.
Sally had been in private relationships with other women, including children’s science writer Tam O’Shaughnessy, which was only revealed to the world after her death in 2012.
Her contributions to not only space exploration, but other fields of science she had a hand in, are still felt today.
Clara Barker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Barker
Dr. Barker is a trans woman, engineer, and material scientist. Clara Barker manages the Centre for Applied Superconductivity within the Materials Department in the University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on creating thin film high temperature superconductors that could be used a resonators for quantum computing devices.
Before she came out as Trans, she feared she would be isolated and it would finish her career. However, she was more accepted than anticipated. Unfortunately her experience is not everyone's case in STEM where the lack of role models.
She works with a youth groups and has helped Oxford City Council run an anti-HBT bullying initiative. She runs several initiatives to support LGBTQA+ visibility and diversity in STEM. In 2018, Baker gave the TEDx talk entitled "Why we need to build trust to create diversity in institutions".
Audrey Tang (18 April 1981, Taiwanese, non-binary)
They are a politician and free software programmer who served as the first Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan from Aug 2022 to May 2024.They are the first transgender person and the first non-binary gender official in the top executive cabinet.
Tang has identified as "post-gender" and accepts "whatever pronoun people want to describe me with online. They are a leader of the Haskell and Perl programming language communities, and is the core member of g0v.
Initially, she coded in pencil and paper because she didn't have a computer. She began to learn Perl at age 12. By the year 2000, at the age of 19, Tang had already held positions in software companies, and worked in California's Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur.
Tang initiated and led the Pugs project, a project to implement the Perl 6 language. Tang also made contributions to internationalization and localization efforts for several free software projects.
During their time in the Taiwanese government, they have fostered initiatives to fight misinformation in social media and provide access to non-windows computers to the administration systems.
Continuing with what we have informally called our "gayllery", today we move on to actual active KDE and @gnome contributors, starting with...
Meet Florian Müllner! (he/him)🏳️🌈 gay GNOME contributor.
...
Florian started contributing around 2009, as he said if his contribution was a person, it would be aproaching voting age right now. He contributes to gnome-shell, but also mutter, gnome-shell-extensions, polari. In addtion, as he has been around for a while, there's the occasional contribution to other bits and pieces around GNOME (GTK, control-center, gnome-settings-daemon, ...).
Florian finds GNOME a great community that welcomed him with open arms (once he dared to make the jump). He found some real friends over time.
There is also the mission. Providing a computing platform that is driven by vision and need rather than monetization opportunities and a strive for market domination is as important as it ever was.
Last but not least, when GNOME builds an OS "for everyone", that includes him. When GNOME gets better, so does his computing experience.
He likes all kinds of physical activity — walking, hiking, riding a bike. During the pandemic, he got hooked on variant sudoku, and it has been part of his daily routine ever since.
[EOF]
Jun 27, 2026, 4:48 PM@gnome@floss.social @kde@floss.social I had no idea she was lesbian. That's so cool.
