Sally Miller Gearhart grew up in Virginia and found her first love
at a women's college. After inhabiting a dark closet for twenty years,
she burst onto the political scene of the San Francisco Bay Area in
1970. San Francisco State University hired her as an open lesbian and
tenured her in 1974. She taught there for two decades, helping to found
the school's radical Women's Studies Program and publishing three
books. Scores of her articles and stories have been anthologized in
feminist publications.
Sally is well know for her leadership
(along with Supervisor Harvey Milk) in defeating the 1978 Briggs
Initiative in California, which was designed to bar homosexuality and
homosexuals from schools. This decisive victory helped turn the tide
for lesbian and gay civil rights across the country. In 1984, Sally
appeared in the The Times of Harvey Milk, the Academy Award-winning
documentary that chronicled that political era. She has also been an
activist for animal rights and Earth First!, and now lives on a
mountain of contradictions with many cats and a blue-tick coon hound in
a Mendocino County women's community.
