Helen Sandoz
Helen Sandoz was born in 1920 in rural Oregon. She earned a bachelor’s degree and briefly lived in Alaska, then moved back to the Pacific Northwest, where she worked in department stores and then became a sign painter. In the 1950s, she moved to San Francisco, where she discovered the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). She was one of the only early members of the group to list her real name on the state documents that established DOB as an organization for lesbians and was heavily involved in the group’s operations, including publication of the monthly magazine The Ladder.
Sandoz, who used the pseudonym Helen Sanders for lesbian activities, became president of DOB in 1957. Also in 1957, she attended ONE's Midwinter Institute, where she met her partner, Stella Rush (also known by her pseudonym Sten Russell). They were together until Sandoz's death. In 1958, she and Rush moved to Los Angeles, where Sandoz quickly founded a DOB chapter and became its first president. She also continued to work for The Ladder, designing many of its covers, writing reports about gay and lesbian conventions, and briefly serving as editor. She was responsible for ending the periodical’s use of the term “variant,” which The Ladder had employed to describe lesbians, despite its stigmatizing connotation. She also occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Ben Cat, named after her pet cat, who is pictured above, since it appears that Sandoz did not like having her photograph taken. There are no images of her in available archives, and when she and her partner were interviewed for the Lesbian Herstory Archives Daughters of Bilitis Video Project in 1987, she chose to remain off camera.
Sandoz often reported on programs and surveys related to gay men for The Ladder. Many DOB members did not see themselves or the organization as connected to the male-dominated homophile movement, but Sandoz recognized the interconnectedness of the two communities. Both Sandoz and Rush, however, did not agree with the burgeoning feminist movement and the close ties that the lesbian community was building with feminists. They withdrew from activism in the 1960s as feminism became more central and DOB formed a partnership with the National Organization for Women.
While running an errand for her mother as a young adult, Sandoz rear-ended a truck with her car. She initially assumed that the accident was minor, but she had broken her neck. She had a full-body cast for the next year, and for the rest of her life, she could not sit in a chair or remain immobile. Some writings about her life note that she chose to become a sign painter because of this injury. There is no direct documentation of how her disability impacted her activist work in the homophile movement.