In 1978, a group of lesbian feminists began building a community called Women’s Land in the California woods north of San Francisco. Inspired in part by Black separatists, their goal was to build a world just for women. One of those women was Sally Miller Gearhart, a radical lesbian separatist who had traveled far from her upbringing in a conservative Christian family in Virginia. Although, as you will learn in Sally!, she still put on lipstick every day, because that’s what a Southern girl does.
Sally!, directed by Deborah Craig with co-directors Ondine Rarey and Jörg Fockele, is a celebration of Gearhart’s life and work. It’s quite the story and in learning about her life, you will also learn a lot about how the feminist and gay rights movements in the United States developed and changed over the years. This documentary also provides a useful reminder of how unthinkingly sexist and homophobic American life used to be—not that it’s perfect today, but at least some things have changed for the better.
Gearhart got her first taste of living in a women’s community from being raised largely by her grandmother, who ran a women’s boardinghouse, and earned her undergraduate degree from a women’s school, Sweet Briar College. She then earned her M.A. from Bowling Green State University and her PhD from the University of Illinois; after graduation in 1956, she took up the life of a university professor. She had to live in the closet in order to stay employed, but eventually that became took much of a compromise and she chucked it all to move to San Francisco, where she could live openly as a lesbian.
Fortunately, Gearhart got a job teaching at San Francisco State, where she was one of the first openly lesbian tenure track professors in the United States. She helped developed the women’s and gender studies program (at the time a new field of study) and continued to teach at San Francisco State until her retirement in 1992. Gearhart was also a prolific author whose best-known book, The Wanderground, is a radically feminist work of science fiction about a female-only community living in the woods. She also appeared in the documentaries Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977) and Last Call at Maud’s (1993) and appeared in Barbara Hammer’s 1973 short film “Superdyke.”
While in San Francisco, Gearhart became active in politics, most famously in the campaign to defeat Proposition 6, a.k.a. the Briggs Initiative, which would have banned homosexuals from teaching in the public schools. She worked alongside Harvey Milk in this effort, making many media appearances and fearlessly taking on the bill’s most offensive supporters and countering diatribe with facts, ultimately playing a key role in its defeat. You wouldn’t know any of that from watching the biopic Milk, however, because Gearhart is not included as a character in that film. This point is underlined in a remarkable split-screen sequence comparing clips of the actual debate, in which Gearhart played a key role, with the movie version in which Milk goes it alone.
It seems patriarchy never takes a holiday, even in the queer community, a fact that underlines the need for women-only spaces like the one Gearhart helped create. Gearhart’s omission in Milk is also a metaphor for her life story: she did so much, and brought about so much change, and yet her name is not well known today. Hopefully Sally! can go some distance in correcting that state of affairs. | Sarah Boslaugh
Sally! will be screened at QFest St. Louis on June 1 at 5:00 pm. The Festival runs from May 27 to June1 at the Hi-Point Theatre. More information and tickets are available from the Cinema St Louis web site. All short film programs are free of charge through the Gay-It-Forward program.
