Sally Gearhart, Lesbian Feminism, and Women’s Studies
Sally Gearhart (1931-2021), who joined the SF State faculty in the early 1970s, is today the best-known LGBTQ person affiliated with the college in the 1970s and one of the best-known lesbian feminists of that era. Her 1978 book The Wanderground, published by Persephone Press, was a major work of speculative fiction, set in a futuristic rural world of women-loving-women with complex relationships to one another, gay men, the natural world, and dangerous cities controlled by straight men. Along with San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, Gearhart was a leader in the successful 1978 campaign against California Proposition 6, commonly known as the Briggs Initiative, which attempted to remove LGBTQ people and allies from public school teaching positions. She later left SF State and joined a rural lesbian community on women-owned land in northern California. SF State faculty member Deborah Craig directed an award-winning 2024 documentary about Gearhart titled Sally! For a clip and an OutHistory interview about the film, see Julie R. Enszer, “Sally: A 2023 Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Deborah Craig."
By the time she began teaching at SF State, Gearhart was well-known as the author of the 1970 essay “Lesbianism as a Political Statement,” published originally in the San Francisco Gay Free Press and Sisters. The essay argued that “it is in her identity as a woman” that a lesbian “finds her fundamental political identity.” It also asserted that “lesbianism is implicitly revolutionary” and argued that lesbians are more revolutionary than gay men because they are in deeper revolt against capitalism, the nuclear family, Judeo-Christian religion, the educational system, and the medical establishment.[1] In the early 1970s, Gearhart was a leader of Gay Women’s Liberation in San Francisco, but she also worked with men as a member (and later president) of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual and a member of the board of directors of the city’s Family Service Agency.[2] All of these roles provided her with powerful platforms to challenge discrimination against women, lesbians, and gay men.[3] When she was hired in a tenure-track position at SF State in 1973, she became one of the first openly lesbian women to be hired as a tenure-track faculty member in the United States. In the next few years, she helped found SF State’s women’s studies (now women and gender studies) program.[4]
In May 1971, Gearhart appeared on a panel at SF State titled “The Liberation Movement.” Organized by the instructor of a 100-student Social Sciences course, the panel included Gearhart, Karen Wells, Phyllis Lyon (one of the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, a national lesbian organization established in the 1950s), and four gay men. According to Sisters and the Advocate, the male presenters alienated their fellow panelists and audience members with confrontational attacks, leading Sisters to call the event a “farce.” “We women did our best,” Wells explained, but the men insisted on psychoanalyzing the audience, referencing “everyone’s repressed homosexuality,” and expressing “pent-up hostility against ‘white, straight society.’” “Many of our straight brothers and sisters walked out,” she noted, but “after the shouting died down,” a women’s caucus met. “There we really got it together with several of our straight sisters,” she continued. “Women really can DO this, even though we have NEVER been allowed to speak with one another much and have let our men think for us.” “Women cannot be heard with their brothers shouting around and at them,” Wells declared, and she therefore announced that she would not do another panel with men. Underscoring the significance of this, Wells claimed that she previously had been among the small minority of lesbians willing to speak with gay men, but she had come to believe that “we women are different and must be allowed our differences.” While discussions with men “invariably revolve around sex,” she observed, discussions with women “revolve around relationships and emotional ‘getting it on.’” “Cocks are fine,” she concluded, “but only for other cocks.”[5]
A year later, now teaching an SF State course on “the rhetoric of gay liberation,” Gearhart appeared on another campus panel, this one part of a large gay liberation symposium attended by 250 students in May 1972. Once again, conflicts erupted, as was captured in a San Francisco Chronicle headline: “Gay Battle of the Sexes.” According to the Chronicle, the panel included three gay men and three lesbians, all of whom agreed that “our common oppressor” was “the heterosexual white male.” The article suggested, however, that they agreed on little else. “Gay women,” the article asserted, “seem to care far more about the women’s lib struggle than they do about the sufferings of their gay brothers.” Jim Willeford, described as “the bearded, longhaired 32-year-old secretary of the Gay Liberation Front,” estimated that there were 600-700 “homosexuals” at SF State, “not to mention all of the closet people.” “As a gay man,” he reported, “I have been brutally oppressed by the police. I have been raped in prison by heterosexual men. I’m discriminated against due to my arrests. I can’t find work with the federal government or travel abroad.” Willeford then pleaded with “liberated gay women” for support. Wells, described as “a slim and pretty blonde lesbian,” responded, “I don’t know if I can do that…. Ninety-nine and nine-tenths of my energy has to go to my sisters and myself.” Along similar lines, Gearhart, described as “a graying, attractive lesbian of about 40,” said that “she was sympathetic to the problems of gay men,” but “if she ever had to choose ‘my sisters, gay or straight, would have to come before my gay brothers.’”[6]
In 1973 and 1974, campus and community periodicals regularly mentioned Gearhart as a prominent lesbian feminist academic and activist. In March 1973, Sisters indicated that Gearhart and Ruth McGuire would be speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, on the topic of “The Daringly Different (I): Lesbianism Now.”[7] Around the same time, the Phoenix reported that Gearhart and Rita Mae Brown (a well-known lesbian activist and author) had spoken about lesbianism to an SF State political science class titled “The Problems of Political Theory—Women.” Identified as a speech communications lecturer, Gearhart joined Brown in emphasizing that lesbianism was “more than sex” and the women’s movement was not a sexual movement. Instead, the movement asked women to declare their “complete loyalty and commitment” to other women. “All feminists should be called lesbians,” according to Gearhart, because “if they are really loyal, they won’t be afraid.” While she argued that lesbianism was about more than just sex, Gearhart also celebrated lesbian eros, asserting that “men do not understand women’s bodies,” “women could stay in bed for three days and enjoy sex,” and “the two sexes are incompatible in age terms because men reach their sexual peak at 18 and women at 35.”[8] In October 1973, the Phoenix reported that Gearhart had invited three improvisational performers to the Women’s Center, where one of the women “stripped to the waist to display her two breasts complete with a third nipple.” Gearhart said that her goal was to encourage women’s creativity.[9]
In February 1974, Gearhart revealed details about her evolution as a feminist and lesbian when she spoke in a women’s studies series at the University of Washington in Seattle. “I lived a very different life in a very dark closet for about 20 years,” Gearhart explained. “Then I left a job, security, a home, a reputation. But I also left hiding, lying, hypocrisy, secrecy and isolation.” After moving to the Bay Area, she was “thrilled to find herself accepted as a lesbian in the women’s movement,” but “the magic of sisterhood began to fade” as “various disagreements within the movement arose.” Gearhart nevertheless continued to affirm “lesbianism as a feminist lifestyle,” arguing that “to the extent that any woman is coming to know and love herself, she is beginning to know the lesbian in herself.” She continued, “If a woman is moving towards feminism she could be called a lesbian even if she has never had what the patriarchy insists on defining as lesbian, a sexual relationship with another woman.” “Lesbianism,” she explained, “has to do with my earth-touching, of being in touch not only with other women, but with life itself, and being in touch with a planet that has been devastated by male energy.”[10]
Later in 1974, Gearhart continued to share her ideas in essays published in California lesbian periodicals, including Lesbian Tide and Sisters, and mixed-sex LGBTQ periodicals, including the Gay Alternative in Philadelphia and The Body Politic in Toronto. For example, “Lesbian Debutante,” originally published in the Los Angeles-based magazine Lesbian Tide, was a funny coming out guide for lesbians and a plea for “lesbian etiquettology.”[11]
“Sally Gearhart: Cultural Feminist,” published as part of a roundtable in Lesbian Tide, was a more serious effort to define lesbianism, which Gearhart described as one of the “logical extensions of feminism” and “a remnant of self-love in a society that would otherwise have me hate myself.” According to Gearhart, the women’s movement of the past was “racist and heavily middle class,” which she hoped would not be the case in feminism’s second wave. At the same time, she was skeptical of orthodox Marxism and socialist feminism, which too often fought “battles that are more primarily men’s battles,” and she was concerned that cultural feminism too often failed to address the race and class privileges of middle-class white women like herself. She thus identified as both a lesbian feminist and “a cultural feminist who feels herself growing into some kind of class-consciousness.” She continued to believe, however, that “the primary contradiction” in society was “man over woman,” not “capital over labor,” and that “all other power relationships” grow “from male dominance.” The essay concluded with the choices cultural feminists could make about how to resist patriarchy. One option was the “science-fiction” approach, which involved saying, “I’ve got to get my own head together and when everyone does that, poof, all of a sudden, full-grown, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, society is going to change.”[12]
Throughout this period, Gearhart continued to work on her groundbreaking gay and lesbian studies scholarship, much of which focused on religion in general and Christianity in particular. Notwithstanding her arguments about identifying primarily as a feminist and lesbian, Gearhart co-authored a 1974 book with Rev. William R. Johnson, whose 1972 ordination as the first openly gay United Church of Christ minister (and possibly the first openly gay Christian minister in any denomination) had generated national media attention. The book, titled Loving Women, Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church, was published by Glide in San Francisco and reviewed in multiple LGBTQ publications. It featured five chapters, one co-authored by Gearhart and Johnson (about the rise of gay and lesbian activism within religious denominations) and one authored by Gearhart (about her rejection of the Christian church).[13] The latter overlapped with her essay “The Lesbian and God-the-Father,” which was published in Gay Alternative in Summer 1974 and later that fall in The Body Politic. Based on her 1972 presentation at a Pacific School of Religion conference in Berkeley, “The Lesbian and God-the-Father” originally was supposed to appear in the July 1973 issue of Trends, published by the United Presbyterian Church, but church administrators decided not to publish it, presumably because it strongly criticized Christian beliefs and practices.[14]
[1] Sally Gearhart, “Lesbianism as a Political Statement,” San Francisco Gay Free Press, Nov. 1970, 10, 11, and Sisters, Dec. 1970, 2-5. The essay was also reprinted in Sisters, Nov. 1972, 1-5; and Sisters, July 1974, 26-31.
[2] “Brief Report on the Glide Symposium on the Homosexual,” Sisters, Dec. 1970, 22-23; “Family Service Agency to Name Gays to Board,” Advocate, 6 Jan. 1971, 1; “Gays Go Radical,” Sisters, Jan. 1971, 5, reprinted from Christianity Today, Dec. 1970; Nick Benton, “‘Be Kind to the Homo’ Shuck,” Berkeley Barb, 19 Mar. 1971, 4; “What Is the CRH?” Bay Area Reporter, 15 May 1971, 16, 17. “Homosexuals Elected by S.F. Family Service,” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 Jan. 1971, 23; “Gay Liberation Headlines,” Sisters, Feb. 1971, 15; “Gays Named to Board of S.F. Family Agency,” Advocate, 3 Mar. 1971, 1, 14; Alan Jacobs, “Family Agency includes Gays,” Vector, Apr. 1971, 45; Maitland Zane, “Anti-Sex Bias Law Is Urged,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Aug. 1971, 2; “Gay, Straight Leaders Push S.F. Hiring Law,” Advocate, 15 Sept. 1971, 14; “Women Join Men to Lead Discussion on Homosexuality,” Mother, Nov. 1971; “Lesbian Mothers Win Support from F.S.A.,” Sisters, Nov. 1971, 27; “Gays, Psychiatrists Rap at VA Hospital Meeting,” Advocate, 22 Dec. 1971, 5; “S.F. Candidate Stokes Having Woman Trouble: Lesbian Mothers Say He Let Them Down,” Advocate, 7 June 1972, 10; “Gay Businesswoman Named to Family Board,” Advocate, 5 July 1972, 14; “Aid to Gay Moms Passed,” Advocate, 30 Aug. 1972, 12; Del Martin, “The Politics of Mental Illness,” Sisters, Nov. 1972, 16-23; “Ordained As Gay: Reverend Johnson Takes CRH Post,” Advocate, 14 Feb. 1973, 7; John Callahan, “S.I.R.’s Speakers Bureau,” Vector, Aug. 1974, 27, 29.
[3] Gearhart’s name, for example, was listed as a supporter in advertisements for Municipal Court Judge candidate Ollie Marie-Victoire, U.S. presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, and San Francisco Community College District Board of Governors candidate Rick Stokes. See Bay Area Reporter, 31 May 1972, 17; Vector, May 1972, 18; San Francisco Chronicle, 5 June 1972, 16; “S.F. Candidate Stokes Having Woman Trouble: DOB President Says He’s Good Man, Anyway,” Advocate, 7 June 1972, 10. She also was listed as a signatory of a Students for a Democratic Society advertisement in the Phoenix that challenged a racist advertisement in the American Psychologist. See “SDS Comment, A Reply to Racism,” Phoenix, 10 May 1973, 5.
[4] “Women’s Studies Block,” Phoenix, 13 Dec. 1972, 3; “Local Lesbian News by a Local Lesbian,” Sisters, Nov. 1973, 31.
[5] Karen [Wells], “Some Observations Upon Co-operating with Men,” Sisters, June 1971, 17. See also Douglas Dean, “San Francisco Rap-Up: Hate-Trip at S.F. State,” Advocate, 7 July 1971, 9; “Cross Currents,” The Ladder, Oct. 1971, 48.
[6] Maitland Zane, “Gay Battle of the Sexes,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 May 1972, 6. See also Jay, “Gay Symposium,” Gay Scene, June 1972, 11.
[7] March calendar listing, “The Daringly Different (I): Lesbianism Now,” Sisters, Mar. 1973.
[8] Pat Sobel, “Something More Than Sex,” Phoenix, 15 Mar. 1973, 8. See also Judith Nielsen, “The Case for Lesbianism?” Sisters, Aug. 1974, 3-9.
[9] Judith Nielsen, “Bare Breasts in Advertisement Building,” Phoenix, 18 Oct. 1973, 8. See also Daniel Saks, “A New Majority in AS Politics,” Phoenix, 9 May 1974, 12; Local Lesbian News By Your Local Lesbian,” Sisters, June 1974, 31.
[10] Erin VanBronkhorst, “Lesbian Feminists Speak: ‘My Lesbianism Is My Love of Myself,’” Pandora, 5 Mar. 1974, 3.
[11] Sally Gearhart, “Lesbian Debutante: A Plea for Information,” Lesbian Tide, Mar. 1974, 22-24, reprinted in Sisters, June 1974, 3-8.
[12] Sally Gearhart, “Sally Gearhart: Cultural Feminist,” Lesbian Tide, June 1974, 3, 25, 26; “A Kiss Does Not a Revolution Make: A Search for Ideology,” Lesbian Tide, July 1974, 10-11, 28-30.
[13] “Local Lesbian News by a Local Lesbian,” Sisters, Nov. 1973, 31; Charles Lee, “San Francisco Rap Up: Dianne, Beefcake, and Hondas,” Advocate, 5 June 1974, 37. See also Sammy Staggs, “Books: Authors Offer Church Struggle History,” Advocate, 20 Nov. 1974, 34; Ed Jackson, Loving Women Loving Men, Body Politic, Nov. 1974, 20-21; Frank Howell, “Relevant Reading,” Vector, Nov. 1974, 8, 49.
[14] Sally Gearhart, “The Lesbian and God-the-Father,” Gay Alternative, Summer 1974, 10-13, reprinted in Body Politic, Nov. 1974, 12-13, 23.