Historic lesbian activist Sally Gearhart is featured in Deborah Craig’s new award-winning documentary Sally!

Most people have heard of Harvey Milk. Sally Gearhart—not as much. But in fact, Gearhart sat right beside Milk as his debate partner in 1978 when they disputed—and ultimately defeated—Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative that would have banned lesbian and gay teachers and topics in California’s public schools. When their opponents quoted the Bible, Milk was at a loss. Gearhart, on the other hand, could quote it right back at them.
Born in 1931 into a Christian household in Virginia, Gearhart charted her own unconventional path from a career as a teacher at Christian colleges in Texas until she determined to live her life out in the open and left for San Francisco with no job in the early 1970s. Ultimately, she gained a position at San Francisco State University, where she became the first open lesbian to be tenured at a major university in the U.S. Alongside that, she became a formidable and historic advocate for lesbian and queer rights.
Filmmaker Deborah Craig stumbled upon Gearhart nearly a decade ago while making a short documentary about lesbians and aging. By then, Gearhart, in her 80s, was “tucked away in the woods,” the last one living on the lesbian land community she had helped form in Willits, Calif., in the 1970s.
The film shows Gearhart in all her glorious contradictions—from quoting scripture alongside Harvey Milk, to chopping wood, topless and laughing, on the Willits land. The film Sally! has already had an impressive festival run where it has won Audience Awards for Best Documentary at Seattle Queer Film Festival, Out at the Movies in Winston-Salem, Way Out West in Albuquerque and ReelQ in Pittsburgh, as well as a Jury Award at Everybody’s Perfect in Geneva, Switzerland.
This film captures so much—not only about Gearhart’s life but also about a particular moment in history of queer uprising, which is perhaps not so different from our own. Ms. writer Michele Meek had an opportunity to talk with Craig about the film and its subject, Sally Gearhart.
Michele Meek: I appreciated how the film delves into Gearhart’s relationship with religion and spirituality and the ways she allowed for certain contradictions in her beliefs. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Deborah Craig: Well, Sally was born in 1931 and grew up in the South in a little town. So, you can just imagine—it was probably extremely segregated. So, she went to church every Sunday and grew up in a conservative family. That’s the air she breathed when she grew up, you know, and I grew up in Berkeley, California. So the air we breathed was like, why would anybody go to church? What is church? But she grew up going to church, she went to a women’s college, and then she taught in Christian colleges in Texas. But eventually she transformed herself from this good southern girl wearing red or pink lipstick and high heels to this radical lesbian I found wearing paint-stained T-shirts and jeans saying we should reduce men to 10 percent of the population.
When she first came to San Francisco, she was involved in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual—a group of gay people trying to get the church to be more accepting. But she gradually moved away from that and eventually she ended up not being a Christian, but being an amorphous spiritual person whose spirituality was focused on animals and nature.
But her religion was just part of her. She knew the Bible. And the fact that she had that background helped her fight for gay rights. She would joke that Harvey [Milk] didn’t know the Bible, and he didn’t. But if they were quoting fire and brimstone, she would quote the love parts of it. Religion and Christianity were things that she both rejected and kept—that’s the contradiction. She kept the parts of universal love and the idea of connection.
She knew the Bible. And the fact that she had that background helped her fight for gay rights.
Deborah Craig

Meek: I love how your film delved into this idea of women’s lands through her story. I read an article not that long ago about how some of these places are not attracting younger people. What do you think about that?
Craig: There were so many women’s land communities at a certain point in time in the 70s and 80s. And the Willits community was one of those. Women’s land, lesbian land, and women’s communities are not necessarily something that goes back hundreds of years in the United States, but utopian communities are an American tradition. So, it was just a type of utopian community.
I came out when I was about 18 and knew about separatism—and women’s land and separatism kind of go hand-in-hand. At that time, I didn’t understand the purpose or the need for it. But learning about Sally and seeing her land really opened my eyes to the need for this kind of community at that point in time for women to liberate themselves and, it’s such an overused word, but to empower themselves. I mean, I’m 30 years younger than Sally. I didn’t need women’s land. I didn’t need separatism. But both of those things are places, in another kind of cliché, for women to create a “safe space” for themselves to come out. So I really came to see it as that. And I think one of the women in the films says how it wasn’t about men; it wasn’t about hatred of men. It was about—we need our own place to come into ourselves.
But when we got to Women’s Land in Willits, it had fallen apart. We thought immediately, what went wrong? Sally’s here alone. She’s can’t really talk on the phone well. She’s losing her ability to drive. She’s having memory issues. What went wrong? Was there a big dispute? Some cataclysm? And that really was a mystery to us for quite a while. And then finally we figured it out.
What happened was not a cataclysm. It was life. People got older. Somebody died. Somebody moved away. And, as one of our interviewees said, communities have lifespans. Especially utopian communities.
So Sally just lived a long life and in some ways softened some of her super radical stances, but didn’t soften her determination to stay on the land. And that was a huge challenge because it’s not a picnic to live out in the woods semi off the grid. It’s not easy. And then when you’re in your 70s and 80s, it was a huge challenge for her physically and otherwise. And I think it’s similar in many other women’s land communities. They were a success. They were a haven and a refuge and like a salon in the woods for so many people. And then they just came to the end of their lifespan.
And they were also victims of their own success. This was a group of women who fought for women’s liberation, fought for gay liberation, and they succeeded. They succeeded so much that young gay or queer people didn’t feel the need to create that kind of community for themselves.
Meek: I’m wondering what happens to such spaces now. Of course, in many ways, it feels untenable. And yet we haven’t gotten to a point in society where everything is fair and equal and women or queer people have an equal voice. So, where does that leave us?
Craig: It’s so refreshing and wonderful that young people are, again, shattering stereotypes about what gender means. But then do people who still experience oppression, all of us who are different in any way, who are non-white, who are non-male, who are non-privileged, who are nonbinary, who are non-cis, do we need our own space? And how do we create that without excluding others or breaking laws? I don’t think there are easy answers other than to try to be welcoming to one another, which was what Sally always wanted.
One thing about Sally to understand is that she could be very radical in a way that might seem dogmatic, but she was also the opposite of dogmatic because she was always willing to change her point of view and be like, oh maybe I was wrong, maybe we need to do it this way or that way. Because of where she lived and because of her memory loss, she wasn’t that connected to what’s happening in the queer and trans community now, but I think Sally was endlessly curious and always willing to move and change and shift.
And no matter how radical the things she would say were, they were said with a little bit of a smile and a twinkle in her eye. Sally was just so sweet and hilarious and warm. And she would say stuff like, we should reduce men to 10 percent of the population. But then if you look at her own life, she always had men in her life—boys, straight men, gay men, old colleagues from way back in the day. So Sally always was saying really radical things. She just wanted to wake people up and shake things up. But in her actual life, it was much softer than that.
In one of her books, she wrote a little blurb about herself, and it said, Sally Gearhart lives in Northern California on a mountain of contradictions. So she knew, and she was okay with that.
Sally always was saying really radical things. She just wanted to wake people up and shake things up. But in her actual life, it was much softer than that.
Craig
Meek: What’s your hope for the film?
Craig: I really hope that people see Sally, not just as, ‘oh, she did these important things in the ’70s and ’80s,’ but as a role model for how to be an activist, a role model for how to live your life on your own terms, a role model for how to fight like hell for something, without taking yourself too seriously and thinking you always have the right answer, and without acrimony for those you disagree with.
We did focus groups with young queer people because there’s so much, not necessarily tension, but separation in the gay community. I mean, young people often don’t even call themselves lesbians. So we wanted to make a film that wasn’t just for people over 50 or 60. And I think and hope we did. I mean, in focus groups, people really seem to connect with her. She’s so vibrant and irreverent—a very compelling character.
When she went to the supermarket, she knew everybody and wanted to know everybody regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation, regardless of political affiliation. And that’s the other reason we are so convinced everybody needs this story. We’re losing the ability to talk to people we disagree with because we don’t know them. We’re losing that ability to just want to sit with somebody who’s different and hear what they have to say. But you can’t survive without it.