Hi everybody. Welcome. This is a talk
about Sally Gearhart, a documentary film in progress, and it's very nice to have you here.
I'm going to be telling you a little bit about who I am, a little bit about who Sally Gearhart is
for those of you who haven't heard of her, and I'm going to be telling you a little bit about the
documentary film in progress about Sally Gearhart. First off, who am I: My name is Deborah Craig.
I've been teaching for 10 plus years in the Public Health Department at
San Francisco State, but i'm
also a filmmaker, and I'm making a documentary film about Sally Gearhart. It has been a little
bit of a wild ride making this film project but very, very exciting as well, so I'm going
to be telling you about that experience, and also I'm going to be focusing a lot on
this film's connection to San Francisco State. So, who is Sally Gearhart? Some of you may know a
lot about who Sally is. Some of you may have known her in person; some of you may never have heard
of her and may know nothing at all about her. Here's a picture of me and Sally. I feel lucky
to have met her and spent some time with her, and to me, one of the fascinating things about
her is this fact that some people know about her -- in fact really look up to her and see her
as somebody that was very very important -- and some people know nothing about her. So that puzzle
is something that me to me makes her very very interesting. She's almost like an icon who only
a few people know abo
ut or only a certain group of people know about, and that group might be
lesbians from a certain time and a certain place or people who were at San Francisco State
at a certain time in a certain place. Another little little thing I want to point out
is that even if you've heard nothing about Sally Gearhart, if you're interested in gay rights, if
you're interested in feminism, you're interested in brilliant women who have a strong sense of
social justice and fairness and a fantastic sense of
humor, stick around and you'll learn more
about somebody I think you'll want to know about. How did i meet Sally: Again, a San Francisco State
connection. So I got my master's in public health at San Francisco State in 2009, and then a few
years after that I was working with Mickey Eliason from the Public Health Department on a study of
the health of older lesbians, and Mickey got some great funding from the Office on Women's Health
and we were collecting data on women and looking at weigh
t and health. But what happened is i met
so many really interesting, fascinating women, I thought I wanted to make a film about lesbians and
aging, and I started that process in about 2014. Through that process, I heard about a woman in her
80s living on women's land in Northern California. Now a couple of things jumped out at me from
that. One, I had heard back in the day about women's land, but I didn't really know it still
existed. I thought it was something back from the 70s and 80s, ma
ybe. And then the other thing
I heard this woman -- the rumor had it that she's in her 80s living on her own and she still cut
her firewood with a chainsaw, so that I really, really wanted to see. So I started packing my
bags, okay? So I drove up to Northern California with a camerawoman -- my camerawoman Silvia -- and
we met Sally, a brilliant, lively 83-year-old who spent a lot of time -- a couple of days, really --
with us sharing her insights, answering questions, and when we asked her
to give us a tour, we
ended up in the back of her battered jeep with her dog Bhodi, who occupied the
front seat, and in the back there were no seats at all so we were kind of rattling
around back there on these bumpy dirt roads. But we learned a lot, and what we did find out
is this woman, Sally, very unassuming but very welcoming and living in the woods, you know,
about a half an hour out of the town of Willits, had actually made a huge contribution to
feminism and LGBTQ history in her da
y. And we started to realize not enough people
knew about her, and we thought that was wrong. So I finished up the shorter documentary I was
doing on lesbians and aging and that's available. It's called "A Great Ride" -- reach out to me if
you're interested -- and then right after that started doing a longer feature
documentary about Sally herself. What I'm going to do now is I'm
going to show you our film trailer. Hopefully it's about four and
a half minutes, and i'm hoping it'll give you
a sense of Sally's
personality and her contributions. I'm sorry, I just caught our
camerawoman, and she's smiling. It's fun having her behind the
camera. Have you noticed that? Absolutely. Oh, she's on her knees! God, I haven't had
a woman on her knees for me for a long time! This is Sally Gearhart. And would you like for me
to hold a camera for you? She is a force of nature. Here come the lesbians. Here
come the leaping lesbians. There are those people apparently who question
the health
and the beauty and the naturalness and the strength of same-sex relationships. And all
I've got to say is I wish they were here today! She reminded me of Maya Angelou, you know, the
way she would just wrap you into her words. The woman just exuded
charisma. Everything about her was as glamorous as a radical
lesbian could be, you know? She just had it and we all fell in love with her. It was such an exciting time, the '70s, and this feminist burst. There was
a big word -- patriarchy. It was
before women's studies
really had started anywhere And here was this powerful woman,
Sally, who gave women great powers in her writing and in her thinking. She also really wanted women-only space. A lot of us did. Women's land, right? And so I came to California
with the dream of having land like that. Are you a lesbian separatist? Radical lesbian feminist
separatist separatist italicized Yeah In a classic case of life imitating art, Sally co-founded a women's
land community at the same ti
me that she was writing a futuristic sci-fi novel
that became a cult hit called "The Wonder Ground." I had a friend come from the East Coast searching
for Sally Gearhart of The Wonder Ground. Well, the book is a is a fantasy about
women with all kinds of psychic powers living on the land, and flying, and you
know teleportation, the whole works. Sally was way ahead of her
time in connecting the dots. She's a visionary. She helped change history. I think she was seen by a lot of people as
a
major spokesperson for the gay community. Overwhelmingly it is true that
it's the heterosexual men, I might add, who are the child molesters. I believe that's a myth. I've
never seen, I've never... Senator, the FBI, the National
Council on Family Relations, the Santa Clara County Child Sexual Abuse
Treatment Center, and on and on and on... Sally Gearhart had a particular moment in our
history when it really mattered. She stepped up and she inspired tens of thousands of
people, articulated
the dreams of millions. She's an extraordinary woman. By now I found myself wondering, why
haven't I ever heard about Sally Gearhart? Here we go, girls! My attempt to find out... Hold on to each other's hands. We are
encouraging relationships among women. ...turned out to be a pretty wild ride. Sorry about that, girls. We're gonna be okay. Deborah Craig, she was handed a puzzle,
and it was up to her to untangle it. I hope you enjoyed that trailer, and we're gonna
move on now. One, I think th
e trailer is really aimed at showing something of Sally's spirit and
something of the the power of her voice at her heyday, her real heyday. Now it's important to
point out that I met her much later in life, so she was already in her
early 80s. But when she was in San Francisco at San Francisco State and in San
Francisco in the '70s and '80s, that was really her heyday in many ways, so I hope that that
trailer showed you her sense of fun and adventure, and it is... we really did think we
m
ight fall out of the back of her jeep, but we survived. I kind of blocked the door. And
also her wonderful warmth and sense of humor and a little bit herself a sense of self-deprecation
as well. That trailer also hopes to show that she played a key role in the battle for gay
rights and she's really up there with Harvey Milk as a figurehead, even though she hasn't gotten
the recognition that she deserves. And that trailer also touched a little bit on women's
land and this separatist communit
y that Sally and many of her friends created for themselves.
And that in itself is a fascinating topic that you know bears delving into. Separatism really
was problematic in terms of, in many ways, being a space for white women and women who could afford
to buy land, although land was very affordable at that time, but also in many ways that I learned a
lot more about in the process of making the film was really played a crucial role in lesbians'
ability to liberate themselves by stepping aw
ay from what was really keeping them from coming
into their own as their true selves. And another key thing is that San Francisco State --
not just gay rights activism but her role at San Francisco State was really, really key during that
period that we might want to call Sally's heyday, although she had many heydays. Okay, so the San
Francisco State connection is a very, very strong thread through much of the film. One, I mean
as i've mentioned i teach here. I met Sally... I heard about Sa
lly and met Sally through a San
Francisco State connection while I was working on a project at San Francisco State. My camerawoman
also was in the Cinema program at the time, and in fact I had gotten into film when i
was in my master's of public health program through a program documentary for health and
justice -- health and social justice -- that connected Cinema students and Public Health
students. I've also... I'm not just connected with our Public Health Department but have gotten a lo
t
of support from our wonderful Cinema Department at San Francisco State, and Sally herself had
a very long history at San Francisco State. She taught at San Francisco State for about
20 years and had a very key role here. And the picture on the right is... shows
San Francisco State just before Sally got here. There was a huge strike
in the late '60s -- a protest about basically the lack of minority
enrollment, lack of minority faculty, and that was the the beginning of the
creation of th
e Ethnic Studies Department at San Francisco State and also the beginning
of the real radicalization of the school. So Sally herself at San Francisco State. Sally...
so she was born in 1931. She grew up in Virginia, went to school in Virginia and then
went on to graduate school. At the time that was a big deal for a woman to not get married
right away but to go on to graduate school. But she taught in Texas for many years. She
grew up in a rural environment, a conservative environment, a Ch
ristian environment, and
taught through the late '60s in Texas in a very conservative environment as well. And that
just for so many reasons she she found a way to break away from that and came to San Francisco
in the early '70s and she was a powerful force, both at San Francisco State and in San Francisco
and California communities through the '70s into the early '90s. It's hard to emphasize enough how
much that was a time of excitement and change. Some of you may have been there and exper
ienced
that, and for those of you who didn't, you know, weren't born until well after that or
didn't experience or haven't read about it, it was a time of social change in so many areas. The
civil rights movement was still going on, there was a huge, powerful anti-war movement against the
Vietnam War. Feminism was blooming, gay rights, you know, were really blossoming, and so
Sally just landed in the right place at the right time for her, and she really, as
I said before, played a huge rol
e in gay rights but actually had a foot in a lot of these
different movements. She had a foot in feminism and a foot in gay rights and had a lot of other
interests in terms of social justice as well. So she really found herself in her element there
and her background in both her education and her teaching before she got to San Francisco State
had been in theater and in communication, so when she came to San Francisco State she very first
joined the Speech and Communications Department. Soon
after that, though, Sally was a part
of a team of really powerhouse women who created one of the first women's studies
departments in the country. Very first, before it was even a department it was a program,
so they were drawing... since they didn't have an official department, these women got together.
Nancy McDermid, who taught in the Communication Department and was also a dean of Humanities;
Jane Gurko was in the English Department, and many others who started to figure out how to dra
w women
from different departments to create a program, whether they called it Women's Studies, whether
they called it, as you can see here some schedules that I found in the archives where they call it
Focus on Women, they they really pulled together an interdisciplinary department to have courses
about women, whether looking at literature, looking at history, looking at philosophy, and so
on and Sally taught a lot of very popular courses in this program. Patriarchal Rhetoric, Rhetoric
of
Sexual Liberation, and people are still studying the way that what was called then the
patriarchy -- what now might be called sexism, now might be called toxic masculinity --
the way in which language had a huge impact, and so on. So that was a a time of real excitement
and transformation for Sally and her colleagues, and also for the students in those departments.
We tend to think, "Oh, Women's Studies, that's just an option, you know, of classes you
can take or a department you can be in
," and really really it's very easy to forget that
it's not that long ago there was no such thing. Another... the thing that I found out from
learning more about the Women's Studies Program, which later became the Women's Studies Department
and is now Women and Gender Studies Department at San Francisco State -- a great, great department
that lot does a lot of excellent work, is there... I've talked to faculty in that department and
many, many former students from that department, and two t
hings that stood out to me were these
ideas of egalitarianism and activism, and so, you know, we tend to think of San Francisco
State and a lot of other universities as a fairly non-hierarchical place, but back back
in in the day when the Women's Studies Program was being created, I think they were really,
really pushing in a very powerful way to really meet those ideals rather than just pay lip service
to them. And so I've talked to students there who were involved in not only faculty meet
ings but
in hiring decisions Well, I love my department, I love San Francisco State, I've been a lecturer
at San Francisco State for probably 10-plus years -- I've never been asked to be be on a
hiring committee, even though I've heard the word equity and social justice many, many times, I've
never been asked to be on on a hiring committee, so maybe we're backsliding a little bit.
I hope not, but I was very, very impressed to hear the way in which students were drawn
into not just into the
conversation but into the decision-making process at that time and
the deep commitment to not, again not just talking about social change but practicing it
in the department. And another story illustrates that fact: If you've heard of Angela Davis, which
again I think and hope many of you have -- some of you may not have, in which case, look her up right
away -- she was a very powerful force in activism and the '60s and '70s and is still teaching at
Santa Cruz. Now she may be retired, but
she had been banned from teaching in the UC system because
of her radical politics and the San Francisco State Women's Studies faculty and students banded
together and decided that they wanted to bring in Angela Davis to the Women's Studies Department,
that it was the right thing to do, she had the, you know, the power and the the the voice that
would make sense in that department. So they came together and made it happen, and it was a battle.
It wasn't an easy hire, and in some ways it may
have paved her way to go on to a fruitful academic
career. The second theme that I really came... stood out to me in the the early formation of that
Women's Studies Department is activism, and again, true activism, not just saying, talking about
the importance of activism but practicing that. And so a lot of faculty were maybe activists
and community organizers that taught a class, or maybe taught a class or two, and
some, like Sally were full-time faculty but were engaged in social moveme
nts and were very
actively engaged in the push for social change. And so there was a back and forth and an ebb and
flow, and a really powerful interchange on what was happening on campus and what was happening
out in the real world in the various pushes for social change that was happening. So Sally's
activism took many forms. Most people who do know anything about her know about her involvement
in the Briggs fight against the Briggs Initiative, Proposition 6, and that was in the late 80s,
and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. She was also involved in something
called the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. As mentioned, she had been very involved in the
church in her earlier life, and she gradually moved away from that, but before she did that,
she was involved in this very progressive council of religious folks who were trying to push
the church to be more accepting. At certain points Sally started writing about the church
in ways that were very, ver
y radical. And it's hard to tell with her sometimes if things are
real or tongue-in-cheek or a little bit of each, but she would say things like, "I'm looking
forward to the death of the church so we can start practicing the gospel," and she talked
a lot about the patriarchal formation of the church and how the church keeps women down, and
so she did gradually move away from the church. But before she did, she was sort of trying to
blow up the church from the inside in some ways. She was al
so very concerned about animal
rights and about environmentalism, and so she had a lot of interests, but again she
put a lot of her energy at a certain time point in time in in fighting for gay rights in this
particular homophobic initiative in California. And again, I worry, and I'm not meaning to point
the finger in in any way, but I do know that in the academic community, there's so much focus
on, you know, publishing, on doing research, and the cost of living is so expensive and we're
so busy with our lives that sometimes a little bit of that activist spirit feels like it's hard
to keep that spark going. And I know I find it inspiring to look back at Sally's days on campus
and talk to people, other people from that time to what the the lengths to which they were going
to push for positive change. So here's a little bit more about the Briggs Initiative that Sally
played a key role in, for those of you don't know. So the Briggs Initiative would have banned gay
people from
working in the California public schools in any capacity, you know, from
teaching on down or up, and it's shocking for us to think about it this time, and i think
especially for young people to think about a time where it was not only not socially acceptable to
be gay, but you really put your work life at risk, and sometimes your life at risk to be a gay
person. So for Sally, this was personal, because she had been a teacher her whole life.
That was her career; it really was her calling in
so many ways. So she jumped in there and,
you know, wholeheartedly decided to help out and was connected with Harvey Milk, and they
became figureheads. It was very purposeful that they had a male figurehead and a female
figurehead, because the whole No on 6 campaign was based on showing that it was both men and women,
and it was also based on an egalitarian ideal of having both men and women participating in the
movement and spearheading the movement. So Sally and Harvey spoke together all
over the state.
They participated in a debate on on California television, KQED television, where debated Briggs.
Briggs was the guy who started that initiative, and they kicked his butt. In particular, Sally,
and one thing to know about Sally is not just that she was really smart, but she
was trained. She was trained in theater, she was trained in communication, she was
a trained debater, she was a trained debate coach, and she just eviscerated Briggs and his opponent,
and again, it was p
ersonal for her. She had taught for many, many years, she was at the, you know,
peak of her teaching career involved in creating women's studies programs, and she also had come
to California to come out and in Texas had been closeted and had suffered from that
and she was not about to go back, so she had a very powerful influence, and there's
some folks who say Sally motivated us and Sally helped change people's minds. And so I think we
underestimate her role it that's our loss our loss and
our peril, and again, unfortunately,
it's too often that we've written women out. So here's an interesting thing. So that's Sally at
her apex, but our film is is a very ambitious one, and we're really hoping to look at her whole life
trajectory, not just Sally sort of at the height of her fame, in the height of her powers, but
what happened earlier in her life. Where did she come from, and then what happened later
in her life -- where did she go when she retired and in some ways disappeare
d off
the radar screen? So to help you understand, I'm just going to tell you a teeny bit about the
way documentaries are made, and I sometimes use a quilt metaphor, sometimes use a puzzle metaphor,
probably many other metaphors that will work that those work for me, but the the way documentaries
are different from most films is that most fictional films, you create a script. You map out
ahead of time the story that you want to tell, and then you create the pieces
that can tell that story.
Well, documentary is very different -- you may have a
really good idea of the story you want to tell, but then you kind of go on this big quest or big
fishing expedition to find those puzzle pieces, and they may not be what you expect. You
might not find what you're hoping to or what you want or what you expected to, and you
might find some other treasures that you had no idea about that you were lucky enough to find.
And so you take what you have and you construct a map or a puzzle or a q
uilt with
those pieces that you found, okay? And so we've had a whole long journey finding
those puzzle pieces and then constantly kind of changing our map or our idea of what we're
going to do, so it's been a big adventure for us and a long, complicated journey because
Sally is not a one-dimensional person, so i sometimes tell people we're trying to
make a film a little bit like a recent film that was made about Dolores Huerta, who was a
farm worker worked with farm workers alongside Cesa
r Chavez and had a really seminal role in
that movement but was not given the recognition she's due. So Dolores Huerta was a brilliant,
powerful person who's still doing the work, but she had one focus. Sally had so many.
Sally was interested in communication, she was interested in theater, she was interested
in feminism, she was interested in gay rights, she was interested in speculative fiction,
she wrote fantasy novels, she was interested in the land and land communities, she came from a
background of religion and kind of left the church but maintained a spiritual outlook and an interest
in spirituality, and she knew so many people, many of them just as brilliant and as fascinating
as herself. So our puzzle and our quilt have gotten bigger and bigger and more complicated as
we go along. And then sometimes things seem like they're going to fit and work beautifully together
and sometimes think complicated and complex and contradictory, and that is just (a) part of
human nat
ure (b) especially part of the way sally operated. She seemed perfectly comfortable
in her contradictions. She was a separatist, which meant a lesbian who was particularly
interested in being in community with other women, and she loved a lot of men too, and she had been
friends for for decades, and she embraced them and learned from them, and they learned
from her. And she was an environmentalist and she lived on junk food and Pepsi and so
on and so on. So one friend of hers told me Sally
sometimes said, "I live in Northern
California on a mountain of contradictions," and I love that because it's it's funny, it
shows her deprecating self sense of humor. So here's what our our quilter puzzle is
looking right at the moment, is that one, and it's fairly common it's not required but
it's one way of approaching documentaries also is again not to have a script but to have a
structure or a narrative arc, and sometimes which falls into three acts or chapters or
whatever you might w
ant to call them. And so currently what we're looking at is this, until the
next time we change what we're doing depending on what comes in. We're currently looking at Act One,
really Sally at the height of her fame, teaching at San Francisco State, leading the charge
against the Briggs Initiative, and really at the the height of her fame and influence. From there,
so we're kind of starting in the middle in a way. Not starting at the beginning, and in a way, when
you meet people, that's not
how many stories are told, that's not usually how history is told, but
that's usually how we get to know people is we get to know them when we meet them, and then we learn
about their past. So then what we're going to do in Act Two is we are going to go backpedal and
go back into that backstory to try to find out how did this person come about, where did Sally
come from, how did she get to be who she is and so we actually had the the incredible opportunity
to go back to Sally's hometown. S
he grew up in small town Virginia -- a little town on
the West Virginia border, very Christian, very conservative, and her brother, half brother, still
lives right near where she grew up, so we got a tour of the town, and we got a chance to interview
him. And so that was really, really fascinating to get a little sense of where she came from and also
what a what an incredible trajectory her life took to end up on the other side of the country and
on the other side of the political spectrum
in so many ways as well. So, and then Act Three
we kind of come back to the present and then go on from there. When i met Sally, she was
already towards the end of her life in what we're looking at as Act Three in her later
years, and part of the puzzle for me was how did she end up here? Here's somebody who
should have been, you know, in the history books, and she's living in a little rustic cabin
in the woods outside of a small town where people in the town know her, but you know,
people
taking queer history or, you know, learning about Harvey Milk don't necessarily know about
her, so what happened. So in those later years, those were rewarding years for her. She might have
been off the radar for a lot of people, but she looks as though she may have moved there
because she wanted small-town life. She grew up in a small town; she ended
up in a small town. She grew up where she knew everybody; she ended up where she
pretty much knew everybody in town. And she created a women
's community in Northern
California that really thrived for many, many years but gradually, gradually just fell apart
little by little. People... women moved away, women died, women ended up feeling not so capable
of living in the woods and maybe off the grid in their later years, so Sally was very
hardcore about that she wanted to stay there, she wanted to stay in her cabin, she
liked being out in nature, but she grew more and more isolated and the last few
years I was visiting her I was
concerned, you know, was she able to live there on her
own? Was her community crumbling around her? Were her finances okay? Was her health okay?
And those were some of the main concerns I had and was exploring in her later years. And
the other thing was just, is she relevant now to all of us, and I think I was also really
interested: Is she interesting and relevant to young queer people who are looking back at their
history but also looking forward to somebody who might be a role model for
the new battles
that we're fighting today. Times have changed. Maybe they'll change back, but I haven't met
that many young lesbians or queer people or non-binary folks, trans folks, etc. who are dying
to move out into the woods and make a life there, and so our challenge among other things was
not just to figure out who Sally is, but how she strikes a chord with
us now and feels relevant now. Okay, so what I'm gonna do now
is play a scene from Act Three, which is at the end of Sally's lif
e, and
then I'll go on to wrap up, and we'll talk a little bit about more about why how and why
we really think Sally has a message for us, not just about what important things she did
in the past but she has a message for us now. Oh, it's rain pouring. It's fucking
pouring and we're going out into the woods. So what is up with Sally? A lot of people say they
don't know. You know, even to have people say, "Well, I haven't seen her in 20 years"
or "I haven't seen her in five years." What is
going to happen to her? Like, you know,
here's somebody who was this brilliant woman who worked hard her whole life, and now she's in
this precarious situation. Okay, here we go. Sally would never admit to it on camera,
but the more i visited her on women's land, the clearer it became that
her utopia was crumbling. You were filming me putting on shoes Yeah None of us are living there full time now
except for Sally. None of us. It's shocking. Could be as many as 10 years
that I haven't bee
n there. Um yeah, I'm gonna let that rest right there. You know, she doesn't really know everything, but
she knows how all my friends have abandoned me. That that is not what The Wonder Ground promised. And where's my, where's my... You're looking at me I'm looking at you. Okay. What had happened? It seemed almost impossible
to untangle the tension and drama swirling around Sally's situation, but everything pointed
to the pivotal moment when things changed. And I'm fucking this up pretty bad,
huh? One weekend while we were
filming, we stumbled upon a clue. No, that was, I think that was great. We might come back later this afternoon. I'm sorry? We're gonna go see Carol
Orton depending on how long -- How come you're gonna go see Carol Orton? Carol is going to talk about the land. Okay, okay. I don't have... I'm just... I don't
mean to be nosey, I just wanted to know why... She says to say hi. Okay. Yeah. Carol Orton was Jane's lover. Sally and I became partners. We then separated
and became friends and family and Carol entered my life, and she has been part partnering with
me on the land that i still co-own with Sally. Sally was invited to come and meet me by Jane,
because Jane had made it clear to me that if there was going to be any relationship with her,
Jane, I would need to know who Sally was and have kind of passed some kind of
something between Jane and Sally. Problems, though. Problems We have had problems. Some of the problems that come because of boys Who
knows about this, Carol? New lovers New lovers with sons Jane did the unthinkable thing of partnering up
with somebody with two sons -- not just one, two. Janie met them and that's really
who she fell in love with. She, unlike Sally, really wanted to have kids. And when i first got together with Jane, before
we were even together, when we first even were having little dinners together, she explained
that this was women's land, and that there was a chance that, you know, it would not be
appr
opriate for my children to come here. That was a big discussion. Many times. And I didn't know what it all
meant, really, truly didn't. It actually doesn't mean no men or no boys. No. What it means is we want the land to
continue to be owned and controlled by women. Early on, no, she was really vociferously not
interested in having boys on the land at all. They were the first and probably forever the
only male children who were welcome there. Being a young man, I would say
a boy, mostly, on
women's land in that period of time was
very difficult at times. I wanted to read you something from "The
Future--If There Is One--Is Female," and then we can talk about it, so... Oh, my god. The ratio of men to women
must be radically reduced so that men approximate only 10
percent of the total population. I have had to answer for that...
I have had to answer for that so many times. I just... This came
because I studied the Amazons one time. Was Sally serious when she said she wants to
get rid of all men? At times, yeah, i think so. We fought about the role of men. I couldn't go along with Sally wanting
men to jump off the edge of the earth. Jane wasn't having it. Jane came to me at one point and said, "I'd
like to just check in with... I feel like I want to be known as a godmother, a real parent.
They will be my inheritors." I said, "Okay." Jane's death absolutely rocked Sally,
and just grieving the loss of her best friend and the most significant
sweetheart she'd ever h
ad I mean we were the couple, if you could call us, I mean if you if you're talking
about lesbian coupledoms It was a huge loss. Very much. Yeah, and
I think Mary and I sometimes talk about how after Jane died, relationships were
more challenging than they had been. Yeah, losing Jane, it set off
an avalanche of kind of really really unfortunate interactions
between my brother and I, Sally, my mom He was devastated by Jane's loss, that
she was a really important person to him, but also very
awkward around
having the house left to him. In a lot of ways I would say it
led to a fracturing of a lot of the original intent of what
women's land was supposed to be. How nice to be speaking from a pulpit. Sally didn't want the boys on the land, so Sally
became more rigid than i've ever known her to be. I think Daniel was really
heartbroken and perplexed about how to be a young man respecting Sally's wishes
and how to do this. He couldn't figure it out. Jane's, you know, written
inten
t to to leave Terpsichore to my brother and I, I fought for that.
Unfortunately, because I think, you know, looking back at this point, ideally, I
wouldn't have fought for that -- not that piece I don't think we're there yet. I
think we still need, unfortunately, more Sally-esque energy kind of flag-carrying
at the extremes. This space is protected space for this group of people who are not yet
sufficiently protected in our society. Regularly now women went to Remember Rooms
in the complex
to watch as remember guides rechannel the old stories. More and
more stories. More and more horrors. As a woman shared, she became
a part of all of their history. So what did you mean when you
said the future is female? I meant that women were
going to be running things. Today is an act of resistance. That we're tired of this damn patriarchy that
hasn't done anything but exploit other people, and and we're ready for a
women's world. Let's go, girls. Anything that stirs the heart in a
pos
itive way is possible for us all. I hope you enjoyed that trailer, and again,
I think what we're hoping to try to do is show a little bit of the tragedy of her
final years and her isolation and her struggles, but also really powerfully show that we're gonna
try to show that people stepped up to support her in aging, and I don't think I mentioned that,
but sadly she she died last summer at age 90. But there are also a couple of
objectives that we have in the film. So one, to recognize her. S
he's one more, as I
mentioned, she's one more hidden figure. There's so many women, not to mention women of color
and people of color, who haven't gotten the recognition they're due for their contributions,
and and our film hopes to remedy that. But we also feel very strongly that Sally is relevant today.
Just as a person she's captivating, she's funny, she's brilliant, and her life story shows this
incredible transformation, I mean that coming from the time and place that she came from, if
she
had done what everybody in the whole culture was telling her what to to do, she would have maybe
gone to college and then married and had children and stayed in Virginia, and and instead she just
knew that wasn't for her and sought another path. The other thing is so many of her key
concerns are still relevant today, so if you heard her reading from her fantasy
novel, The Wonder Ground there, and The Wonder Ground envisions a
female utopia, a community of women that live together and
also can communicate
telepathically and have all these superpowers, but it also envisions the city, a world of men
and violence against women, and her concern in the Remember Rooms is where women go to remember
those violent that those violent experiences in an attempt to heal themselves. And of
course, violence against women hasn't gone away, and you know, just count, you can,
more fingers... we we don't have enough fingers to count the Bill Cosbys, the Harvey
Weinsteins, and the Donald T
rumps and on and on, so that's absolutely still relevant today. Sally
also really cared about environmental devastation, and she wrote about that in some of her
fantasy novels and some of her other writings, but look now here we are today. They weren't
talking about climate change back in the '70s, but she sort of envisioned this, you know, global cataclysm from not protecting an
environment, and we're actually living that today with fires in California, you know,
flooding in Texas and Flor
ida, and so on. In fact, Sally at one point in the last six months of her
life, she had to evacuate from her cabin because of fires nearby. And finally, Sally was somebody
who really liked to stir things up. She liked to say controversial things like "We should reduce
men to 10 percent of the population" or "I'm looking forward to the death of the church,"
so she liked to rile people up but always with a sense of humor, self-deprecation, and she had
this incredible ability to connect with p
eople who were different from her. So always always this
radicalism kind of combined with this overpowering urge to connect and to really love people, not to
make enemies of people but to fight for what was right, and here's a quick story that illustrates
that: When she was fighting the Briggs Initiative, she was apparently at a very big rally speaking
out against the Briggs Initiative, and people were cheering her on, and she said, "If Briggs
were here right now, what do you think I would
do?" and everybody's going "Yeah," you know hoping
she would say she was gonna punch him in the chin or something, and she said instead, "I would give
him a big hug and a kiss on the lips." And that was Sally, is I'm gonna do battle with you, but
really, really it's not coming out of hatred. And later in her life she also wrote something
called "Notes from a Recovering Activist," and it was all about not wanting to be an activist
anymore but really wanting to reach across the aisle. And I t
hink really what it was is that
she wanted to be an activist who did reach across the aisle, and we certainly need that spirit
today in this time of division that's so extreme that we can't even have a conversation where
we agree to disagree so much of the time. So thank you. Thank you so much for listening,
thank you so much for watching. Here are a few pictures of Sally that I love. On the left is
her at her cabin wearing a leather jacket and looking tough and laughing about it. And then
to the right of that is her with Harvey Milk. To the right of that is another black and white
picture of her in her cabin smoking a pipe. Again, she was an environmentalist who ate
junk food and smoked for most of her life. And then on the right is Sally with two incredible
gay rights pioneers, lesbian feminist activists Phyllis and Del. All right, so thank you again
so much for watching and listening. If you have any questions any feedback, any thoughts,
there's my email. Thanks so much.
Take care.
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