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Queer Trivia
She was an American queer rights activist.
She was born on June 20, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children in a Russian Jewish immigrant family of modest means. Her childhood was shaped by the hardships of the Great Depression, during which her father lost both his candy-and-ice-cream shop and the family’s home above it. While in school, she occasionally encountered anti-Semitism. Though she dated boys her age, she later recalled having crushes on girls.
She earned her bachelor's degree from Temple University in 1950. In 1955, she began graduate studies in mathematics and received her master’s degree from New York University in 1957. Soon after, she joined IBM, where she worked for the next sixteen years. During her time there, she was awarded an IBM fellowship and spent two semesters studying applied mathematics at Harvard University.
After earning her master’s degree in mathematics from New York University in 1957, she began her career at IBM in 1958, taking on senior technical and management roles. Her work focused primarily on systems architecture and the development of operating systems and natural language processors.
Her older brother’s best friend, whom she had known and respected for many years, attended college with her. During their third year, he proposed marriage, and she accepted. However, their engagement was briefly broken when she fell in love with a female classmate. Ultimately, deciding she did not want to live as a lesbian at that time, they reconciled and married after graduation in May 1951. Less than a year later, they divorced on March 3, 1952, and she confided in him about her true desire to be with women.
She met Thea Spyer, an Amsterdam-born psychologist, in 1963 at Portofino, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. At the time, both were involved in other relationships. Over the next two years, they occasionally crossed paths at events, but it wasn’t until a trip to the East End of Long Island in late spring 1965 that they began dating. To keep their relationship secret from her coworkers, she created a fictional brother named Willy—actually a childhood doll of hers—to explain Spyer’s phone calls to the office.
In 1977, Spyer was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis, a disease that gradually led to increasing paralysis. Following her early retirement, she became Spyer’s full-time caregiver, and together they continually adapted their daily lives to manage the challenges.
Spyer passed away on February 5, 2009, due to complications from a heart condition.
Upon Spyer’s death on February 5, 2009, she became the executor and sole beneficiary of Spyer’s estate through a revocable trust. However, she was required to pay $363,053 in federal estate taxes on the inheritance. Had their marriage been legally recognized under federal law, she would have qualified for an unlimited spousal deduction and owed no estate taxes.
She sought to claim the federal estate tax exemption available to surviving spouses but was denied due to Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined "spouse" exclusively as a union between a man and a woman. As a result, the IRS rejected her claim and required payment of the estate taxes.
She was the lead plaintiff in the 2013 Supreme Court case United States v. [redacted], which struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. The decision marked a landmark victory for the same-sex marriage movement in the United States.
On September 26, 2016, at the age of 87, she married Judith Kasen, who was 51, in a ceremony at New York City Hall.
She passed away on September 12, 2017. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech at her funeral.
Do you know her name? The answer is at the bottom of the email.
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