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If she hadn’t seen the evidence for herself, photographer Mackenzie Calle might have laughed at the idea that Nasa once made its astronauts undergo heterosexuality tests.
To Calle, a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, the idea that a person’s sexuality could prevent them from becoming an astronaut seemed out of this world. So did the fact that an organisation – surely one of the most technologically advanced and progressive on the planet – used, among other psychological examinations, inkblot tests to determine the sexuality of its astronauts.
But delving into Nasa’s own archives, she discovered that heteronormativity and space exploration were, according to Nasa at least, part of the same realm. From the late 1950s, astronauts on Nasa’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes had to take two mandatory heterosexuality tests to ensure that anyone launched into space was a cis-gender heterosexual man (or, later, woman).
“There have been around 600 astronauts in the world so statistically about 43 or 44 of them should identify as LGBTQI+ but no one has ever flown into space as an openly LGBTQI+ person,” says Calle, whose own sexuality – she identifies as queer – and a comment by the first US woman in space, Sally Ride, roused her interest in the subject.
“I always admired Sally Ride. She was the first female astronaut with Nasa and a symbol for women in the US. She once said, ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’. I didn’t discover, until around 2021, that she’d actually had a female partner for 27 years.”
Ride waited until her death, from pancreatic cancer in 2012, to make public the fact she’d been in a relationship with a woman for nearly three decades.
Why Ride kept this quiet was the initial spark for Calle’s award-winning photography project The Gay Space Agency, which blurs the line between fact and fiction, and uses Nasa and US National Archives own material, to explore forgotten histories and queer experience.
In the first part of the project, archival material highlights the lack of representation of LGBTQI+ individuals in the astronaut corps. The second conjures up a vision of a fictional space agency that embraces diversity and acceptance.
The Gay Space Agency, with its surreal boundary-breaking photos, won Calle the 2024 World Press Photo for North & Central America Open Format award and a finalist’s place for the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards. When the World Press Photo exhibition opens in Auckland this weekend, Calle’s images will be among the photojournalism and documentary photography judged to be the best of the past year.
She hopes the more people who see The Gay Space Agency, the greater the conversations about inclusion, heroism and what it means to have the “right stuff”, and the personal sacrifices made for professional success.
“At the end of the day, your sexuality has no bearing on whether you would be a good astronaut or not,” she says. “I hope that it can start to create more of a conversation about who is selected [for the space programme] and why, but also, wider than that, about a more diverse and accepting future.”
Star gazing
Calle grew up in Orange County, California. Each year, the family would drive six hours to Mono Lake, on the edge of Yosemite National Park, for an annual holiday, which included a national park ranger talking about the night sky.
“It was the only time I could ever see the Milky Way stretch across the sky, and I think that’s where my fascination and appreciated for space came from – all because I grew up in a place where you couldn’t see all of the stars.”
An athletic student – “I’m tall, so my parents put me in tall sports like basketball and volleyball”- Calle excelled at science and thought she’d pursue that career path. But a one-off art history class flipped her thinking, leading her to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and graduate with a degree in Cinema Studies.
Ever since, she’s worked in television and as a freelance photographer for the likes of National Geographic, the Washington Post, GAYLETTER, Discovery, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal.
Working on The Gay Space Agency has seen her contemplate whether the switch from science to the arts was influenced by her own sexuality. “It really got me thinking about my own decisions and even though at the time I didn’t know I was queer, did I switch to something where you’re surrounded by people from all backgrounds, all sexualities, and it’s so open and accepting?”
After learning of Ride’s sexuality, Calle says she got curious as to why there were no openly queer astronauts, so she turned to Nasa’s own archives to investigate but found no mention or acknowledgement of LGBTQI+ astronauts.
What there was, however, was proof of the reasons for this silence. This included heterosexuality tests administered to early astronauts, including Rorschach inkblot tests and personality assessments, that ranked heterosexuality as a criterion for selection.
“At first I thought it was a joke, but the more I started to look into, the more apparent it became that it was real. Obviously, it was a time when homosexuality was considered a mental illness – so it wasn’t just Nasa where these types of tests were happening.”
Given the silences and gaps in the historical record, Calle acknowledges she’s cautious in her approach to archival material. She’ll look for secondary sources – books, interviews, videos – to support what she suspects primary sources are hinting at.
“I’m incredibly careful about what I am speaking about and putting out there publicly,” she says. “A source either has to say something explicitly or be confirmed by another, so there’s multiple documents about the heterosexuality tests and video of [astronaut] Jim Lovell talking about them.”
Calle uses a quote from Lovell in some of her publicity material: “When the inkblots came up, we looked at them and, sure enough, we’d always see some feminine anatomy in there to make sure that we gave the proper sexual response.”
She points out that this isn’t exactly distant history, saying that in 1994, Nasa asked flight surgeon Dr Patricia Santy, “to include homosexuality as a psychiatrically disqualifying condition”.
“The psychiatric team protested, but Nasa insisted,” says Calle. “A 2022 study found that LGBTQI+ astronauts felt that being out may ‘hurt their chances of getting a [Space Shuttle] flight’ and, to date, Nasa has never selected or flown an openly LGBTQI+ astronaut.”
Nor has it responded to The Gay Space Agency, described by judges of the World Press Photo Contest as a “creative and witty project that skilfully presents an under-represented story, using sci-fi elements to “highlight the irony of homophobia within the realm of space exploration”.
As Calle says, it offers a glimpse of an alternative world and a powerful reminder of the importance of representation and diversity not just in the space industry but all others. After all you can’t be what you can’t see.
The World Press Photo Contest winners and finalists are on display July 20-August 11 at Level 5 Gallery Space, Smith and Caughey’s, Auckland.
