The name Sally Ride carries with it the hushed whispers of greatness. As the first American woman to go into space in 1983, Ride became an icon. Young girls who saw the famed astronaut on the cover of Newsweek, People and even Ms. Magazine witnessed a world of possibilities open up for them.
That was the case for filmmaker Cristina Costantini. Her documentary “Sally,” which premiered at Sundance, is an ode to her childhood hero. It will be broadcast Monday at 9 p.m. on National Geographic before streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
“I have been a fan of Sally since I was a little kid,” the filmmaker says on a teleconference call alongside Ride’s longtime partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. “I painted a mural of her that still exists on my elementary school wall. I did a book report about her. The equation was simple: Seeing a woman doing big, brave things that women weren’t supposed to be doing made me think that maybe I could do big things, too.”
But “Sally” isn’t just a portrait of how a young Dodgers fan from Encino with wild ambitions made her way to NASA and became, as Costantini jokingly puts it, “the very first Valley girl in space.” Instead, the documentary threads that well-known tale with a private one about how Ride kept her nearly three-decade relationship with O’Shaughnessy a secret until her death from cancer in 2012, when Ride’s obituary made it public.
Now, “Sally” puts their love story front and center. Dramatizations, love letters, photographs and home videos paint a portrait of a happy couple who squirreled a life for themselves away from the public eye. Ride’s sexuality is not treated merely as a footnote to her story, and the documentary asks viewers to understand why the astronaut opted to cordon off a part of her life and live inside a closet of her own making.
“I was worried that the film might be too hard on Sally,” O’Shaughnessy admits.
“Why couldn’t she come out and‘oh, poor Tam’ and all that, you know?” she asks rhetorically. “But that’s not how it comes across. The fact of the matter is when Sally and I got together in the mid-‘80s, it was a little dangerous to be open. You could miss out on lots of opportunities with your career, with projects you wanted to be involved in.”
And like then, it feels dicey again today to be out, she says. “But I think it’s really good for young viewers of the film to see that there were good reasons for Sally and I to not be open to the public.”
For context, “Sally” offers two other contemporary coming-out narratives: those of Billie Jean King, whom Ride and O’Shaughnessy met during their tennis-playing years, and Karen “Bear” Ride, Sally’s sister. The former lost endorsements after her secretary outed her just as her tennis career was flourishing; the other was a trailblazing lesbian Presbyterian minister who advocated for the LGBTQ+ community. The experiences of King and Ride’s sister, the doc suggests, influenced how and why the astronaut chose to marry a man while working at NASA — Steven Hawley, who appears in the film — and later decided to live a quiet, private life with O’Shaughnessy.
Over the course of her career, Ride encountered sexism and misogyny from her peers and the press alike (“In your training, when there was a problem, how did you respond? Did you weep?” she was asked at a press conference). As a result, viewers might begin to understand why the famed astronaut chose to avoid further scrutiny, and likely homophobia, because of her public-facing role as NASA’s poster girl.
While the documentary neither castigates Ride for her choices nor absolves her of the thorny calculations she’d made to build the life she wanted for herself, “Sally” is a poignant reminder that it’s not always easy to parse questions about visibility and representation.
So in her absence, O’Shaughnessy tries to set the record straight. Costantini’s emphasis on their relationship in “Sally” aims to show how it was integral to Ride’s storied legacy.
“I think the kind of bravery that Sally had was the kind of bravery that as a kid you understand,” Costantini explains. “Going up on basically a bomb into space — that’s pretty scary in the moment and scary in a physical way. So as a kid, you have a fascination and appreciation for it.
“But Tam’s kind of bravery — the ability to say who you are, even if you are hated for it, to have the moral courage to be who you were born to be, to tell the truth — I think that, as an adult, is a much harder thing to do,” she adds.
As a portrait of a trailblazer, Costantini’s film shows us that heroes are fallible. Learning about their humanity and the ways they wrestled with making their way in this world can be as eye-opening as it is enriching to their legacy.
“The project of the film is to place you in the history books alongside your amazing life partner,” Costantini tells O’Shaughnessy, fighting back tears. “There’s something about seeing you celebrated for the beautiful love story that you two had together, in public, that always gets me.”
“Even though Sally wasn’t verbally out and definitely not out publicly, she still lived her life exactly the way she wanted to live it,” O’Shaughnessy says. “She did the things she wanted to do. She loved the people she wanted to love. She was true to herself.”
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