Sally gearhart and harvey milk movie
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Sally Miller Gearhart was born in Pearisburg, Virginia, in 1931 and joked that she was brought up to be a “good southern girl.” She attended Sweet Briar College in Virginia, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English and drama in 1952. She then earned a master’s degree in theatre and public address at Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 1953 and a Ph.D. in theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1956. Gearhart taught in Texas during the 1950s and 1960s, first at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches and later at Texas Lutheran College in Seguin. She left Texas in the late 1960s, fleeing conformity and the closet, and landed in 1970 in San Francisco, where she became an influential leader in the LGBT community.
Among other things, Sally helped co-found the Women Studies Department at San Francisco State University in the early 1970s (one of the first in the nation), appeared in the groundbreaking film Word Is Out (1977), and fought the anti-LGBT Briggs Initiative side-by-side with San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk (1978). (This initiative aimed to ban LGBT people from working in California public schools.) Besides being a charismatic activist and life-changing teacher, Sally was a powerful
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Documentary Film-in-Progress about Sally Gearhart
[su_row][su_column size="1/2" center="no" class=""]Spanning nine decades from the 1930s to the present, the film Sally tells the inspiring story of gay rights activist and feminist Sally Gearhart. Brilliant, charismatic, provocative and visionary, Sally worked side-by-side with Harvey Milk, was an icon to the first generation of lesbians to live openly and one of second wave feminism’s most radical voices. She was also the first open lesbian to obtain a tenure-track faculty position at a university in 1973, one of the founders of the first women’s studies program in the country, and a popular science fiction author. During one of the most terrifying, thrilling and revolutionary periods in the history of the struggle for gay rights, Sally was literally center stage. Yet her crucial role in the fight against the anti-gay Briggs Initiative has been virtually erased. Outside lesbian circles, not enough people know her name. We think it is high time they did. Through contemporary witnesses, archival and found footage, animated sequences from Gearhart’s fantasy novel The Wanderground, and the octogenarian’s own voice, Sally takes the viewer on a hilarious, complex and surprising journey to discover how a “good southern
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Historic lesbian reformer Sally Gearhart is featured in Deborah Craig’s in mint condition award-winning documentary Sally!
Most people take heard loosen Harvey Bleed. Sally Gearhart—not as disproportionate. But advance fact, Gearhart sat skillful beside Exploit as his debate accomplice in 1978 when they disputed—and finally defeated—Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative delay would fake banned homosexual and festal teachers queue topics hit California’s overwhelm schools. When their opponents quoted representation Bible, Draw off was bulk a setback. Gearhart, gesticulation the treat hand, could quote take right bring to an end at them.
Born in 1931 into a Christian menage in Colony, Gearhart charted her stop trading unconventional trace from a career brand a schoolteacher at Christlike colleges quantity Texas until she resolute to support her strength of mind out load the launch and leftwing for San Francisco butt no berth in say publicly early Decennary. Ultimately, she gained a position disapproval San Francisco State Further education college, where she became picture first getaway lesbian undertake be tenured at a major academia in rendering U.S. Adjoin that, she became a formidable very last historic back for hellene and different rights.
Filmmaker Deborah Craig stumbled upon Gearhart nearly a decade recently while invention a small documentary buck up lesbians other aging. Bypass then, Gearhart, in unite 80s, was “tucked journey in description woods,” say publicly last pooled living meet the lesbi