This guide was created in honor of LGBTQ+ History Month and includes a selection of resources about and by LGBTQ+ scientists, engineers, and mathematicians from Syracuse University Libraries' collections. Linked materials include not just biographies and memoirs, but also articles and textbooks, and archival materials authored by prominent LGBTQ+ researchers.
Some of the individuals highlighted in this guide lived when the terminology many LGBTQ+ communities use today did not exist, and when it was less common to be publicly "out". Care has been taken only to include those individuals who were or are "out", or who historians broadly agree lived in same-sex relationships or gender identities that did not conform to contemporary societal norms.
For these reasons, and because of well-documented historical barriers to women and people of color entering STEM fields, this list is not a comprehensive picture of the LGBTQ+ community's presence in science and engineering. It is intended as a starting point for further research and conversation. The final page of this guide provides resources for researching the work and experiences of LGBTQ+ scientists and engineers.
The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist
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Ben Barres was known for his groundbreaking scientific work and for his groundbreaking advocacy for gender equality in science. In this book, completed shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer in December 2017, Barres (born in 1954) describes a life full of remarkable accomplishments--from his childhood as a precocious math and science whiz to his experiences as a female student at MIT in the 1970s to his female-to-male transition in his forties, to his scientific work and role as teacher and mentor at Stanford. Barres recounts his early life--his interest in science, first manifested as a fascination with the mad scientist in Superman; his academic successes; and his gender confusion. Barres felt even as a very young child that he was assigned the wrong gender. After years of being acutely uncomfortable in his own skin, Barres transitioned from female to male. He reports he felt nothing but relief on becoming his true self. He was proud to be a role model for transgender scientists. As an undergraduate at MIT, Barres experienced discrimination, but it was after transitioning that he realized how differently male and female scientists are treated. He became an advocate for gender equality in science, and later in life responded pointedly to Larry Summers's speculation that women were innately unsuited to be scientists. Privileged white men, Barres writes, "miss the basic point that in the face of negative stereotyping, talented women will not be recognized." At Stanford, Barres made important discoveries about glia, the most numerous cells in the brain, and he describes some of his work. "The most rewarding part of his job," however, was mentoring young scientists. That, and his advocacy for women and transgender scientists, ensures his legacy.
Neuroscientist Ben Barres advanced scientific understanding of glia, cells in the brain that aren't nerve cells. His lab's research showed that these cells play an active role in brain function, contrary to earlier theories which credited nerve cells (neurons) for all brain activity. Barres died in 2017 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but his autobiography speaks to the legacy of relationships he built with fellow scientists, especially women and other LGBTQ+ professionals.
Alan Turing: the Enigma
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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira KnightleyIt is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades--all before his suicide at age forty-one. This New York Times-bestselling biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing's royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life.Capturing both the inner and outer drama of Turing's life, Andrew Hodges tells how Turing's revolutionary idea of 1936--the concept of a universal machine--laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing's leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic account of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program--all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime.The inspiration for a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, Alan Turing: The Enigma is a gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution.
Alan Turing is often referred to as the father of the computer for his work designing some of the first digital computers and programming systems. The British mathematician became famous for his work breaking the Enigma cipher, a machine generated cipher used by the German military during World War II. In 1951, Turing was charged with and convicted of "gross indecency" after he acknowledged his sexual relationship with another man. He was placed on probation and required to undergo chemical castration. Turing was found dead in his home from cyanide poisoning in 1954. Queen Elizabeth II posthumously pardoned Turing in 2013, and Parliament passed the "Alan Turing Law", retroactively pardoning men convicted for homosexual acts, in 2017.
Women Spacefarers
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This book tells the fascinating stories of the valiant women who broke down barriers to join the space program. Beginning with the orbital flight of USSR cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, they became players in the greatest adventure of our time. The author contextualizes their accomplishments in light of the political and cultural climate, from the Cold War in the background to the changing status of women in society at large during the Seventies. The book includes the biographies of, and in some cases interviews with, the sixty women who flew in space in the first half century of space history. It reports their achievements and some little known details. The result is a gallery of pioneering women who reached for the stars: women who, with exceptional skill, hard work, and dedication, reached impressive careers as accomplished pilots, researchers, and engineers; many are now in high level managerial positions both at NASA or in public and private organizations, and all left a legacy of strength.
This anthology includes a profile of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. In her obituary and in a posthumous documentary, Ride's family and her partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, disclosed Ride's bisexuality. This disclosure made Ride the first known LGBTQ+ astronaut. Ride was an applicant in the first astronaut class to accept women, and her training as a physicist and athleticism from years of competitive tennis landed her a spot in a class of 35 astronaut candidates, 6 of them women, in 1978. Ride flew on two shuttle missions as a flight engineer and supported several more from the ground during her time at NASA and spent the rest of her life teaching and advocating for the sciences.
Conway co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a foundational work in microchip design, while she worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center engineering computer chips. Very Large Scale Integrated chip design research led to the microprocessor, the technology behind today's smartphones and PCs. Over a decade before this book's publication, Conway was fired by IBM when executives learned she was planning to medically transition to female. IBM apologized to Conway in 2020 and awarded her their Lifetime Achievement award.
Introduction to VLSI Systems
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Goresky and MacPherson developed the theory of Intersection Homology, a new mathematical approach to representing singularities that changed the topology, and how mathematicians think about naturally occurring singularities like black holes. Partners as well as collaborators, the two men have lived together since the 1980s. Their first papers on Intersection Homology can be read at the links below.
Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and world-renowned sexologist. Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, one of the first LGBTQ+ rights advocacy groups in the world, in 1897, and opened the first research center for the study of human sexuality, the Institute for Sexual Science, in 1919. Himself a gay, Jewish man, Hirschfeld was later personally targeted by the Nazi regime and had his German citizenship revoked by the Nazi government in 1933, the same year books from the Intsitute's library were looted and burned by German students.
The Hirschfeld Archives
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Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century. Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence--including persecution, death and suicide--shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism. The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.
Hirschfield wrote privately about his sexuality, although he was not publicly out, and scholars such as Heike Bauer have used archival materials such as these to piece together the lives of Hirshfeld and other LGBTQ+ figures who remained closeted throughout their lives
Access archival documents related to Magnus Hirschfeld's life, including correspondence and photos, through the Sex and Sexuality collection from Adams Matthew Digital.
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