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Video of Memorial Service

The video of the Memorial Service is now available here.


Public Memorial Celebration for Sally

Dear Sally Gearhart friends, family and fans,

We’re reaching out to let you know that friends of Sally’s have organized an outdoor public memorial service to celebrate her amazing and adventure filled life. Here are the details:

WHEN: Sunday, September 19th 2021, 12:00pm

WHERE: Recreation Grove Park in Willits, CA 95490

Everyone is welcome. The event will run about 2+ hours and there will be remembrances, music, poetry and possibly some photos and video of Sally.

Although the memorial can’t be live streamed, it will be videotaped and posted online shortly thereafter. We know that many of you won’t be able to attend in person, but we’ll share the link when it’s available so you can experience Sally’s life celebration after the fact.

If you show up in person, our video crew will be there, so come find us if you want to share your favorite Sally story or memory on camera.

Thanks so much and we hope to see you in Willits on September 19th.

Deborah, Ondine and Jörg


“If there’s a need for some sort of ‘closure occasion,’ please just be sure it’s a celebration
and that there’s lots of dancing and singing.”

– Sally Miller Gearhart

 

“Sally” Documentary Webpage


From the New York Times

By Annabelle Williams
Published July 26, 2021Updated July 28, 2021

Sally Miller Gearhart, Lesbian Separatist and Activist, Dies at 90
She fought anti-gay policies alongside Harvey Milk, wrote influential books, including science fiction, and founded a women-only refuge in the woods.

Sally Miller Gearhart at a rally and street party in San Francisco in 1979. Her community, Women’s Land, in Northern California, was home to an eclectic group of women, many of them lesbians, who wanted to be closer to nature and farther from men. Credit…Daniel Nicoletta

Sally Miller Gearhart, a feminist, lesbian activist and prominent opponent of anti-gay policies whose writings included a classic of lesbian science fiction about a women-only society, much like the one she later founded in Northern California, died on July 14 in Ukiah, Calif. She was 90.

Deborah Craig, a friend and the producer of a forthcoming documentary film about Dr. Gearhart, confirmed her death.

Dr. Gearhart rose to prominence in the 1970s when she campaigned with Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city supervisor and the first openly gay politician elected in California, against Proposition 6, a ballot measure that would have banned gay and lesbian teachers from public schools.

In 1978, on television, Dr. Gearhart and Mr. Milk debated the measure’s main backer, State Senator John Briggs, who said at one point, “We cannot prevent child molestation, so let’s cut our odds down and take out the homosexual group and keep in the heterosexual group.”

Dr. Gearhart responded: “Why take out the homosexual group when it is more than overwhelmingly true that it is the heterosexual men, I might add, that are the child molesters?”
She refused to back down and cited data on the topic, staring straight into the camera as if daring viewers to disagree with her.
In large part because of Dr. Gearhart and Mr. Milk’s efforts, the proposition did not pass in the November election that year. Less than three weeks later, Mr. Milk and Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco were fatally shot in City Hall by a conservative former city supervisor.

In 1973 Dr. Gearhart had become one of the first openly lesbian tenure-track professors at a major American university when she was hired at San Francisco State. She taught classes on women and gender studies. In 1977, she appeared in the noted documentary “Word Is Out,” which interviewed gay and lesbian people about their experiences and is considered one of the first feature films about the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

She wrote widely, both fiction and nonfiction, focusing on the environment, religion, feminism and lesbianism. Her writings include scholarly works examining the relationship between Christian churches, including Catholicism, and homosexuality; “The Feminist Tarot” (1975), which examined tarot card practices from a women’s studies angle; and “The Wanderground, Stories of the Hill Women” (1978), a book of science fiction.
Editors’ Picks

“The Wanderground” is about a utopian community of women who communicate psychically with one another. It explored themes of women’s inherent connections to the Earth and to one another. Remaining in print for over two decades, the book was one of the first major instances of lesbian representation in science fiction, a traditionally male genre.

Dr. Gearhart created her own Wanderground later in life: a community she called Women’s Land in Willits, a city in redwood forest country about 140 miles north of San Francisco. She considered it the culmination of her lesbian separatist philosophy.

“I keep saying that feminism as I understand it is an ideology of possibility, not probability,” she said in an interview in 1980. She lived there with her “land partner,” Jane Gurko, her dog, Bodhi, and an eclectic group of women, many of them lesbians, who wanted to experience life closer to nature and, in many cases, farther from men.

Members of the community, which fluctuated in size, lived in cabins in the woods, outside of patriarchal confines, in Dr. Gearhart’s view.

Sally Miller Gearhart was born April 15, 1931, in the Appalachian town of Pearisburg, Va., and raised in a conservative Protestant family. Her father, Kyle Montague Gearhart, was a dentist; her mother, Sarah (Miller) Gearhart, was a secretary.

“Mine was the childhood of the penny postcard and the ten-cent movie,” Dr. Gearhart wrote in an autobiographical sketch on her website, adding, “We were salt-of-the-earth people, believing in the Threefold God and in the everlasting virtues of hard work, a clean house, and strong drink.”

Her parents divorced when Sally was young, and she spent much of her childhood with her maternal grandmother, who ran a women’s boardinghouse. It was her first taste of a female-only community and one that stuck with her throughout her life.

She attended Sweet Briar College, a women’s college in Virginia, earning a bachelor’s degree in drama and English in 1952. She received a master’s degree in theater and public address at Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 1953 and a doctorate in theater from the University of Illinois in 1956.

Dr. Gearhart hid her sexuality throughout her time in college and graduate school. She recalled ripping up books with gay themes lest anyone discover that she had read them. She did not come out until she moved to San Francisco in 1970.

And she rejected marriage, even once it was legalized for gay and lesbian couples, viewing it as a regressive, patriarchal institution. Ms. Gurko died in 2010. Dr. Gearhart left no immediate survivors.

Despite her forceful views, she was a figure of some contradiction — and openness. Ms. Craig, the filmmaker, described Dr. Gearhart this way:

“A lesbian feminist tree hugger who lived in a rustic cabin in the woods but ate only Pepsi and junk food.

“A disrupter who rejected the church and the ‘patriarchy,’ but knew the Bible through and through, had many close men friends and admirers, and enjoyed the company of conservatives so she could explore what made them tick.”

Finally, Ms. Craig said, Dr. Gearhart was “a master debater who rejected persuasion and rhetoric as violence and sought more equitable and mutually respectful forms of communication.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2021, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Sally Miller Gearhart, 90, Lesbian Writer and Activist.


Obituary by Christine Cole

Sally Miller Gearhart, educator, author, scholar, lover, and activist, died peacefully after a gradual denouement on 14 July 2021. Born in Pearisburg, Virginia, on 15 April 1931, Gearhart studied rhetoric and theater, leading a conflicted life as a lesbian in three closets: the 1950s, academia, and the American south. She blew those doors off their hinges by moving to California and became the first openly lesbian tenured professor in the US while teaching at San Francisco State. She was a trailblazing political activist, working with Harvey Milk to defeat Proposition 6 and advocating for lesbians, animals, and the environment throughout her life. Her writings include science fiction (The Wanderground, Earthkeep Trilogy), theology (Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church), and the esoteric (A Feminist Tarot). She featured in films including Word is Out: Stories of Some of our Lives, The Times of Harvey Milk, Last Call at Maud’s, Framing Lesbian Fashion, and No Secret Anymore.

Gearhart’s dream of a community of women, which she imagined into being, existed for decades north of Willits, where she was known as ‘the Mayor of Chinquapin.’ She entertained fine women, cats, dogs, racoons, deer, birds, and the occasional bear and human male with her stories, her music-making, and her imaginative appreciation of the diversity of the human experience. Willits was a sanctuary for her which she extended to many beings. The town offered her both welcome and challenge, as she delighted in the company of free spirits and loggers, left- and right-wing thinkers, actors and reactors, and learned yoga, Spanish, and piano at an age when most people are satisfied merely to teach. Her sonorous speaking voice, her open heart, and her ready laughter drew others to her, and she relished the dichotomy of having the seclusion of her life on the land while still connecting to the many communities that Willits nourishes.

While Sally’s presence will be missed, her influence continues, not just as ripples on the surface of a pond, but as the pattern of ripples caused by a skipping stone. She referred to death as ‘dropping my body,’ and saw it not as an end but as the next step on an adventure. Sally is remembered by many who love her, many who learned from her, and many who only know her by her words–but those words, like Sally, reach toward eternity. In lieu of flowers, donations, or memorials, go out and love more.

Documentary Film-in-Progress
about Sally Gearhart

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