10 LGBT scientists who made history to celebrate LGBTSTEM Day

July 5, 2018 marks the first international celebration of LGBTSTEM Day, an initiative organised by a group of associations working to support LGBT+ rights in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM).

The days aims to bring visibility to LGBT+ scientists, more than 40 percent of whom remain closeted at work. According to the 2015 American Physical Society survey, nearly half of transgender or gender-non-conforming physicists experienced workplace harassment. LGBT students are also less likely to pursue a degree in STEM fields compared to their heterosexual peers.

“To solve the many diverse challenges humanity is facing in the twenty-first century we cannot afford losing people from minority backgrounds,” said Dr. Alfredo Carpineti, chair and founder of the British charity Pride in STEM—one of the main organisers of the initiative—in a press statement about the day.

“LGBTSTEMDay won’t fix all the issues, but it will shine a big light on them. We are sure it will start conversations, and that’s so important. Ignorance kills. It is time to stop pretending that the STEM disciplines are not influenced by politics and social changes. Some science might be done in a physical vacuum, but no science is done in a historical one,” Dr. Carpineti added.

In occasion of the historic occasion, let’s remember 10 queer men and women in science who changed the world—a list by no means exhaustive, as many more LGBT+ scientists keep working every day to contribute to human knowledge.

Find the 10 possibly queer scientists listed below:

1. Leonardo da Vinci

The archetypal Renaissance man made significant contributions to various fields of the sciences and the arts—and lived his life as an openly gay man, according to Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of the artist and inventor. 

2. Sir Francis Bacon

Sometimes referred to as the “the father of modern science” for developing the scientific method of investigating an hypothesis, Bacon was also a politician, a philosopher and a jurist. His fellow member of parliament Sir Simonds D’Ewes, a puritan, outed Bacon in his “Autobiography and Correspondence” in a passage that, according to gay history writer Rictor Norton, was suppressed from the book’s published version in 1845 and largely ignored by Bacon’s biographers.

3. Sir Isaac Newton

The scientist who first understood how gravity works was known to be an introverted character who suffered from mental health issues. He left no private diaries and little correspondence and, according to Oxford University’s Newton Project, it remains disputed whether the troubled scientist was a “repressed homosexual,” but “if true [this] would undoubtedly have placed a man of his background and upbringing under extreme mental strain.”

4. Florence Nightingale

Nightingale devoted her life to helping the sick and the poor, played a key role in helping wounded soldiers in the Crimean War and is referred to as the founder of modern nursing. A deeply religious woman and an icon of the Victorian era, her sexuality remains disputed—but a controversial BBC documentary in 2001 suggested the “Lady with the Lamp” was a repressed lesbian.

5/6. Sara Josephine Baker and Louise Pearce

The two American women both made huge contributions to public health, and knew each other. Baker, a doctor, devoted her career fighting infant mortality in New York’s poorest neighbourhoods, while Pearce helped develop a treatment for a deadly African sleeping sickness through her work as a pathologist at the Rockefeller Institute. The two women lived together with author and scriptwriter Ida A. R. Wylie, who reportedly self-identified as a “woman-oriented woman.” The three women were all members of Heterodoxy, a feminist luncheon club whose membership was largely made up of lesbian or bisexual women.