Sally Miller Gearhart

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.