Top Ten Lesbian Newsmakers of 2012

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Sally Ride, American Astronaut

We all knew Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. And most of you fellow lady-geeks also probably knew that the legendary astronaut passed away in July at the age of 61, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. With one little sentence in her obituary, Sally Ride came out as a lesbian… Post-humously. Ride was already a hero to millions of women and girls, but now she enters our cultural lexicon as a whole other kind of hero — one who lived a quiet, honest, and admirable life, spending 27 years with her partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy. In December, NASA announced that it would be naming a site on the moon where it intentionally crashed two retired satellites after Ride — so now young lesbians aspiring to reach the stars can look up at the sky, and literally shoot for the moon. 

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