LGBTQ Community Leaders Remember Sally Miller Gearhart
Susan Leo, July 14, 2021:
Sally slipped these earthly bonds last night after a long illness. In her last days she had been visited by many who loved her, both in the flesh and in spirit and she seemed ready to let go.
Sally was remarkable: sharp in her thinking, clear in her politics, fiercely determined, warmly compassionate. She was an immense presence in San Francisco, arriving in 1970 and becoming the first openly lesbian professor at San Francisco State University in 1973.
In 1978, she worked closely with Harvey Milk (1930–1978) in leading the campaign against Proposition 6, the California ballot measure that would have banned openly lesbian and gay teachers from public schools.
In Memoriam: Sally Miller Gearhart (1931–2021) In Memoriam: Sally Miller Gearhart (1931–2021)
Lesbian activist Sally Miller Gearhart, who helped launch the field of Women’s Studies and with Harvey Milk was key to the defeat of anti-gay Proposition 6 that would have banned LGBT teachers from public schools, died on June 14 in Ukiah at the age of 90. One of the most prominent and influential out lesbians in Bay Area history, Gearhart was the first openly lesbian member of the boards of the San Francisco Family Service Agency and the San Francisco Mental Health Association. Through such positions, she fought homophobia and misogyny and advanced civil rights for all.
By Deborah Craig–
Sally Gearhart was a toweringly brilliant woman I encountered quite by accident. I teach Public Health at SF State and am a filmmaker too. While helping LGBTQ public health expert Mickey Eliason with a study of lesbian health, I met so many perceptive and funny women that I began a short documentary about lesbians and aging. Mickey’s collaborator Penny Sablove mentioned an octogenarian she knew still living on women’s land in Northern California and cutting her own firewood with a chainsaw. Naturally, I zoomed up to meet her.
At this point, I knew little about Sally other than the chainsaw anecdote. But I trekked to Willits with my camerawoman Silvia Turchin in the summer of 2014 to find out more. Though 83, Sally kept us on our toes. She expounded on topics from aging to feminism to gay rights to environmentalism. She recited poetry and prose. She took us with her beloved dog Bodhi on a walk in the local woods where we scrambled to keep up with her. And we
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Sally Miller Gearhart was raised in Virginia and began her teaching career in Texas. She lived her life in the closet until the beginning of the modern gay rights movement brought her to San Francisco.
She became the first out lesbian to receive a tenure track position at San Francisco State University, where she would teach speech, and later women’s studies. Gearhart stepped into activism in 1978 to fight against the Briggs Initiative. The proposition aimed to ban gay teachers in California. It didn’t pass.
Throughout her life Gearhart marched alongside gay men for equal rights, but she believed that gays and lesbians were different, telling
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