She and other women formed a barbershop quartet and performed in Willits, where she was also involved in community theater. By then, many of the cabins had electricity, heat and plumbing.
#ANIMAL LIBERATION FRONT SHIRT FULL#
In the 1990s, she retired to the land full time. And she and Milk traveled the state working to successfully defeat the bill. With calm confidence, Gearhart outargued State Senator John V. In 1978, she helped change history when she and Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city supervisor, led a campaign against the Briggs Initiative, a state bill that aimed to ban gay men and lesbians from teaching in public schools. Within a few years, she helped found one of the first women’s-studies programs in the country at San Francisco State, where she taught popular classes like “Patriarchal Rhetoric” and “The Rhetoric of Sexual Liberation.” “Hi, I’m Sally Gearhart - I’m a lesbian,” she would say, shaking strangers’ hands on the street. But love for a woman and a hunger for change took her to San Francisco in 1970, where she threw open the closet door and strode out. As a theater and speech professor when she was in her 30s, she was a devotee of Ayn Rand and wore patent-leather heels, red lipstick and nail polish. That’s where she learned to recite passages from the Bible (she also could deliver soliloquies from Shakespeare and poems by T.S.
Gearhart was thousands of miles and a political world away from where she grew up, in a conservative Christian family in Pearisburg, Va. Her 1978 speculative-fiction novel, “The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women,” imagined a world in which women lived together in nature, teleported, used psychic powers to communicate among themselves and with animals and strove to keep violent men off their land. She wrote and spoke about a hoped-for future in which biological techniques would allow two eggs to produce only females and men would slowly be reduced to 10 percent of the population. They usually lived there on weekends and during the summer, along with their partners, friends, families. At its height, 10 women owned several connecting parcels totaling more than 100 acres. The community that Gearhart and others formed in Willits, Calif., about 140 miles north of San Francisco, was small compared with others.
They were inspired in part by Black separatists and the belief that to liberate yourself from the oppressor, first you had to join with your own people and strengthen your self-identity.
And some went further, turning away entirely from the patriarchy and forming back-to-the-land separatist communities (Rainbow’s End, Fly Away Home, WomanShare). They organized rape hotlines and domestic-violence shelters. Gearhart and other radical lesbian feminists strove to create an alternate, self-sufficient, women-centered world: During the apex of the movement in the 1970s, they generated dozens of newspapers and magazines (The Furies Purple Rage Dyke, A Quarterly) and created women’s (or womyn’s) music festivals, food co-ops, bookstores and record labels. Or when she spoke at lesbian and gay rights rallies or jumped on the classroom table to get her students’ attention at San Francisco State University, where she was a professor of communications, the first open lesbian hired there in a tenure-track position. They felt it when she strode into Maud’s, a lesbian bar in San Francisco, or when she placed her hand on their shoulder. Women said they could feel her charisma from yards away. Her sonorous voice was laced with a Southern accent. She was 5-foot-9 with thick, short brown hair, warm, deep-set eyes and majestic hands that animated the air as she spoke. Several of the women were pioneers in the lesbian feminist movement, but Sally Miller Gearhart stood out. They vowed that they would own this place together until their final breaths. There was no running water, no electricity, no phones, no men. One summer day in 1978, deep in the woods of Northern California, a group of lesbian feminists, tanned and shirtless, tool belts strapped to their waists, hard hats on their heads, began building a house on what they referred to as “the land.” The air smelled of evergreens, sweat, idealism. A radical lesbian feminist, she helped build a haven without men in the California redwoods.
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