Fun fact for LGBTQ History Month: Ada Lovelace, widely acknowledged to be the world’s first computer programmer and the founder of scientific computing, had a queer dad.
Lovelace’s father was George Gordon, Lord Byron, the Romantic poet whose flamboyant personality and affairs with both men and women made him one of the most colorful figures of his age. If one were to apply a modern term, we’d probably call him bisexual, but given his personality, I’m guessing he might identify as “pansexual” himself if born today. We should always be careful applying such terms to historical figures, of course—but at the very least, it seems clear he fell under our big queer umbrella.
Granted, Lord Byron left Ada’s mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, Baroness Wentworth, a month after their daughter’s birth, and died in 1824 when the girl was eight years old. He’s hardly a model of fatherhood. Nevertheless, Ada knew he was her father and had read his poetry, although, the Finding Ada website tells us, “she cared little for it.” She felt a bond with him, however, the site says:
The older Ada got, the more she identified with her father, writing once that she understood his impulses as she too hated any kind of restraint. In the end, she chose to be buried next to him at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham.
That means computing and everything built on it—from the Internet to the decryption of the human genome to the Roomba—owes a great debt to someone who today might proudly call herself queerspawn.