Last Updated on July 13, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
Sally Miller Gearhart was a lesbian educator, theologian, activist and author of books including the 1974 classic “Loving Women / Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church.” She died on July 14, 2021 in Ukiah, California, at age 90 after a long illness.
Gearhart’s activism for LGBTQ people in the church was significant but less celebrated, so that part of her legacy is highlighted here. This article features excerpts from two of her speeches to church groups: “The Lesbian and God-the-Father” in 1972 and “Fight Fundamentalists — with Your Love” in 1990. She summed up her approach to life on her website when she wrote, “Love is the universal truth lying at the heart of all creation.”
Gearhart is featured in several documentaries, including “Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives” (1977), “Last Call at Maud’s” (1993) and “A Great Ride” (2018). She is played by Carrie Preston in the 2017 docudrama miniseries “When We Rise.” Her memorial service is also on video.
Update in July 2024: “Sally,” a full-length documentary, had its world premiere in June 2024 at the Frameline48 San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival. It is directed by San Francisco film maker Deborah Craig. The film uses “a three-act structure we call ‘History’ (Act One), ‘Herstory’ (Act Two) and ‘Mystery’ (Act Three). We start with a more traditional celebration of Sally’s accomplishments (‘History’), but then move on to a re-investigation of her biography through the lens of feminism and collectivism (‘Herstory’). Finally, we bring together the various and vastly divergent images of Sally as remembered by those who knew her (‘Mystery’),” Craig wrote in a May 2022 message to supporters.
Sally Gearhart stood up for women and LGBTQ people
Sally Miller Gearhart (April 15, 1931 – July 14, 2021) is best known for her LGBTQ-rights activism with Harvey Milk and for becoming the first open lesbian to receive a U.S. tenure-track faculty position. She set that record in 1973 at San Francisco State University and taught there for two decades, helping found one of the nation’s first women’s studies programs.
In 1978 she gained national prominence with the publication of her debut novel, “Wanderground” and her leadership with Milk in defeating the Briggs Initiative, which would have banned lesbian and gay teachers and topics in California schools. Her role is chronicled well in the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk.” While she worked for political change, she used the utopian feminist science fiction to illuminate her ideals of women’s community in “Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women”
Gearhart was born and raised in Virginia’s Appalachian mountains in a Protestant Anglo-German family. “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,” she wrote on her website.
She found her first love at a women’s college, Sweet Briar College, near Lynchburg, Virginia, but continued “inhabiting a dark closet for twenty years.” Until 1970 she spent her academic life at Christian colleges and state universities, either as a student or a teacher of speech and drama in conservative rural communities of Texas and the Midwest. Then she burst onto the scene in San Francisco.
Sally Gearhart’s 1972 speech “The Lesbian and God-the-Father”
In addition to her celebrated political activism, Gearhart frequently participated in church events as co-chair of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in the mid-1970s. The group educated and challenged religious and political leaders about LGBTQ issues.
Gearhart delivered one of the earliest lesbian challenges to established religion in a firebrand speech to a pastors’ conference at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley in February 1972. Her speech is hailed as “the first explicit treatment of lesbians in the Christian tradition” in the book “Queer Religion.”
Her paper was titled “The Lesbian and God-the-Father, or All the Church Needs is a Good Lay — On Its Side.” It was so radical in 1973 that the Presbyterian magazine “Trends” reversed its decision to publish it. But the Philadelphia Task Force on Women and Religion published it as a supplement to their feminist newsletter and mimeographed copies were passed around from hand to hand in the early 1970s. And it’s still radical.
She attacks the subordination of women, especially lesbians, by patriarchal religion. In later years she seemed to mellow out and moderate her views when speaking to LGBTQ Christian groups, but in 1972 Gearhart was outspoken and uncompromising. Here are a few excerpts:
“I cannot separate the lesbian from the woman…. To be a lesbian is to be identified not by men or by a society made by men, but by me, by a woman. And the more I am identified by/for me, by/for my own experience, by/for my own values, the more a full woman I feel I become. More and more woman-identified women are emerging every day. More and more lesbians.
…The woman-identified women who are being reborn every day are those who are shaking off the chains forged by thousands of years of ecclesiastical propaganda. Shaking off their definition as male property, as male’s helpmate, as the pure and enpedestaled virtue-vessels that need chivalrous male protection. They are the unladylike women, the angry women, the ones who make you feel a little uneasy with their freedom of body…
They don’t need the church. The last thing they think about now is the church. They have within themselves what the church has claimed as its own and distorted so ironically for its own economic and psychological purposes these thousands of years…
I look forward with great anticipation to the death of the church as it presently exists. The sooner it dies, the sooner we can be about the business of living the gospel.”
The whole groundbreaking speech is posted online at the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. It was also published in the 1974 book “Loving Women / Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church,” which Gearhart co-authored with William R. Johnson. In 1972 he became the first openly gay minister ordained in a historic Protestant denomination. The book consists of five essays by four contributors, a selected bibliography, and a list of resources. Chapters include: The Church and the Homosexual by Donald Kuhn, Homosexuality: A Contemporary View of the Biblical Perspective by Robert L. Treese, The Gay Movement in the Church by Sally Gearhart and William R. Johnson, The Good News of Gay Liberation by Bill Johnson and The Miracle of Lesbianism by Sally Gearhart.
In addition, the speech lives on in the 2020 book “Loud and Proud: LGBTQ+ Speeches that Empower and Inspire” and the 2014 book “Speaking for Our Lives: Historic Speeches and Rhetoric for Gay and Lesbian Rights (1892-2000).”
Eventually Gearhart left the Methodist and Lutheran traditions to embrace goddess and earth-centered spiritualities. Gearhart retired to the wild, wooded landscape Mendocino County, where she helped establish a women’s community. Her life partner was Jane Gurko, a fellow SFSU professor who preceded her in death in 2010. Even after retirement, Gearhart continued to work passionately for the rights of LGBTQ people, animals and the environment.
My personal memories of Sally Miller Gearhart
I had the joy and privilege of knowing Sally Gearhart personally. I first met her in 1990 When she came to speak at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. Of course her message was excellent, but I was struck by the warmth and compassion that she radiated as she spoke. She lit up the room. When a heckler challenged her from the crowd, she triumphed by listening and stating, “I disagree but I wish you well.”
I remember being amazed by the message that she sent to the first national conference of Christian Lesbians Out Together in 1991 in Minneapolis. She reflected on turning points in her life as a lesbian, beginning with her first kiss. At every point, she posed the question: What gave her the courage to take action as a lesbian? And every time, the answer was us — the power of Christian lesbians out together breaking the boundaries of time and space.
She encouraged me when I wrote my first novel, “Jesus in Love,” narrated by a queer Christ. “I wish you well with what sounds like a dynamite story. ‘Twill be well-told, I know, and for sure the world needs to hear it. Please count me one of the millions who will hope to read it someday, and for goodness; sake, keep on writing,” she wrote in an email to me.
She was delighted when I put a report about her 1990 MCC-SF sermon on my blog in 2010. “It’s good to hear from you — and to learn that you’re continuing to be articulate and active and in-general-rattling-the-composure-of-The-Narrowminded. I thank you for your sweet words to and about me. And I’ll be delighted and honored to be a part of your blog.”
Sally Gearhart: “Fight fundamentalists – with your love”
Sally Gearhart (Photo by Peter Carni)
I will close this tribute by re-posting that article here. The original article was posted in October 2010 as “Fight fundamentalists – with your love.”
“I call you to fight the fundamentalists — with your love,” said lesbian activist professor Sally Gearhart in a powerful 1990 sermon in San Francisco. Her words still ring true today as they did 20 years ago.
The same conflict between the Christian right and the LGBT community continues to rage two decades later. Only a few of the names have changed.
I was clapping along with the rest of the crowd when Gearhart preached the sermon on Aug. 19, 1990 at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. We kept bursting into applause as she talked about how to counteract the Christian right while rethinking our own beliefs.
I never forgot her sermon, so I decided to listen to it again recently while duplicating tapes of worship services. I was amazed by how contemporary it seemed. She could have preached it yesterday! I wrote the following summary of Gearhart’s sermon so that we can keep on learning from her wisdom.
Gearhart taught speech and women’s studies at San Francisco State University, where she was the world’s first open lesbian to obtain a tenure-track faculty position (in 1973). Her books include the lesbian utopian novel “The Wanderground” and “Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church.” She lives in California.
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Gearhart opened her sermon with a friendly question to the congregation of MCC, which affirms the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community as people of God. “Who else could better confront the people who CALL themselves Christians than a church that I think understands Christianity far better than they do?” Gearhart asked.
She described her recent visit to a conference sponsored by the Traditional Values Coalition, a Christian right group founded by Lou Sheldon. The theme of the conference was “eradicating homosexuality.” This evoked lots of laughter — she called the congregation “rowdy.”
Gearhart was surprised to find some shared concerns with the right-wing activists. They discussed common issues such as, “What do you do when you’re getting ready for a demonstration?” It turns out there were other proudly gay and lesbian people there to check it out, too.
Then she posed the question: Why should we concern ourselves with the Traditional Values Coalition? When we do, “we’re right at the heart of the storm… at the fire’s center” “They’ve got us on their hit list. We are second only to abortion.”
She pointed out that conservative Christians are effective and control a lot of media. She said that televangelism scares her, especially the hypocrisy of preachers involved in sex scandals such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.
“The mindset underlying fundamentalism is the thing that’s doing most of the damage to the world. Christian ideology is supplying a lot of the rationale for the destruction of the earth and for the oppression of women and for the oppression of people of color, etc. etc. etc.,” Gearhart declared.
In her view, the root of capitalism is greed. It comes from the feeling of not having enough, not feeling loved. She described how the oppression of women leads to overpopulation and more unloved people. Lack of love also manifests as theology that condemns sex is sin, dating back to Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century.
“Saint Augustine hated his penis,” Gearhart joked, provoking HUGE laughter and squeals!
She contrasted “God the Father” as an outside authority versus God inside each individual. She critiqued the exclusivity of the fundamentalist approach. “‘No one comes to the Father but by me’ leads to nothing short of judging other people,” she said.
Gearhart advocated pluralism. “The more ways we see to salvation… the better off we actually are,” she said.
She admitted that she used to espouse a kind of lesbian fundamentalism. She recalled telling her classes that all women are lesbians and all women are superior. “Now I’m a lot less certain, but a lot more secure,” she confessed.
She urged the crowd to rethink the concept of salvation, asking, “What is it that we need to be saved from?”
Gearhart identified the root of the problem as the concept of original sin. “We’ve got to stop believing that we’re bad…. Original sin is the source of a lot of self-hatred,” she said.
She got HUGE applause when she stated, “The only bad we have in the world is the bad of serving someone else at the expense of ourselves.”
Finally Gearhart issued a call to action: “I call you to fight the fundamentalists — with your love.”
She recommended the following tactics:
- Education (not persuasion because “persuasion is violence”)
- Living our lives as an example
- Telling our own stories
- Listening. She emphasized the importance of listening by quoting feminist theologian Nelle Morton’s vision of God as “a great ear at the heart of the universe.”
Gearhart concluded by listing the particular strengths of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. (“Transgender” was not yet part of the common vocabulary in 1990 when she gave this sermon.)
1. We have a special capacity to perceive, understand and affirm variety and difference.
2. We have some growing understanding of death and dying. (This evoked BIG “amens” from the crowd, which included many people with AIDS at a time when there was no effective treatment and a lot of people were dying.)
3. We know something as a community about feminism, which Gearhart called “the transformative philosophy of our time.”
4. We know something about love.
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Related links
Lesbian educator Sally Gearhart dies (Bay Area Reporter)
Sally Gearhart website: sallymillergearhart.net
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Top image credit:
Sally Miller Gearhart, 2013 (A. Kate Fritsch / Wikipedia)
This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published on Q Spirit on July 15, 2021, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on July 13, 2024.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
Kitt, Thanks so much for this story and update including information about the new documentary film! I was familiar with Gearhart’s work, but you have added much to my knowledge. She was truly an incredible lesbian!
Sally is a strikingly strong looking woman which makes her very attractive in her fashion-not un-like the native american woman who even without cosmetic aid, exudes a strength through her femininity…though her type of beauty and femininity may be atypical.