Thank You, Sally!

The documentary tells the story, unknown to most and deliberately obscured, of Sally Gearhart, a militant woman, fantasy writer and professor. If we may not know her name, I, for one, regret and lament this because of the classic damnatio memoriae that history reserves for marginalised communities. Patriarchy is nothing new to us, with all its subtle declinations and the various axes of oppression that subdue us. It is no coincidence that everyone, at least once and at least by chance, has heard of and celebrated her political counterpart, Harvey Milk. Well, in the San Francisco of the LGBTQ+ liberation struggles of the 1970s, Sally Gearhart and the lesbian community that supported her, coexisted and had a respective influence. 

But let's proceed step by step. Through its choral portrayal of Sally's life, the documentary provides us with an exciting socio-cultural snapshot of that quivering decade. Like a kaleidoscope, it captures and refracts the different moods and demands of the civil rights struggles of the 1970s. It portrays the incendiary anger and collective resistance of grassroots movements to oppressive policies, neighbourhood community uprisings and the grandiose feeling of being able to actually influence institutions. And in part, this was true. Sally Gearhart blossomed in this fertile environment. 

Born in the 1930s into a Christian family in the American Deep South, she stood out from a young age as a pioneering figure, earning a PhD at 23 and becoming one of the first women to teach at Christian colleges in Texas. Closeted out of necessity, for survival and ambition, it was only in the early 1970s that she decided to come out and leave for feverish San Francisco. Once there, she was swept away by the city's cultural and social turmoil, which shaped her political and radical thinking. She became the first open lesbian to gain tenure at San Francisco State University, where she co-founded the first Women's Studies programmes in the country. A missed religious preacher, but successful magnetic seductress, she became the voice of the city's lesbian movement and, to all intents and purposes, a celebrity. Despite Gus Van Sant's attempt, with his Milk (2008), to erase the figure of Sally and her political relevance, Sally! loudly reclaims the role that she played in the rejection of the infamous Briggs law. But the aesthetic gentrification of queer stories and history is again nothing new… nice try, Gus.

“Anything that leaves out community is not real, anything that leaves out relationships is not real”, says Dorothy Haecker, one of Sally's closest friends and, of course, past partners. And I believe that the whole point of the film, and I dare to say also of Sally’s life, is encapsulated in this simple statement. She was not a monad born out of nowhere and destined to disappear into nothingness, but a small piece nourished by many other subjectivities that loved, treasured and elevated her. There would be no Sally if it weren’t for the strong community behind her, with whom she grew up in both political struggle and private life. And it is precisely this community that is entrusted with the film's narrative and with the construction and preservation of Sally's memory. 

Beyond the skilfully used archive material, the documentary thrives on the candid, poignant and adoring interviews with the people who dotted Sally's life. Whether they were colleagues, lovers, friends, or all three, it didn't matter; they were finally loving beings free from heteronormative constraints. Its disruptiveness laid in the fact that there was no distinction between the private and the political: these “private” relationships were just as inherently important as the political struggles she pursued, because in loving, she transformed and revolutionised. The only viable responses to male violence and oppression became care and community, an uninhibited affirmation of the self that sublimates into the collective. 

In response to this seemingly unescapable male domination, the '70s-'80s enthusiastically welcomed the rise of a new literary genre: feminist science fiction. Proposing utopias to tend towards or dystopias to avert/thwart, this genre addressed the multifaceted conditions of women and how to envision a possible future for and with them. If on the East Coast, Lizzie Borden was fantasising about an armed, urban, socialist, and female revolution with Born in Flames (1983), on the West Coast, Sally Gearhart was giving birth to a spiritual, ecofeminist experiment. Together with her close-knit community, and after her metropolitan interlude, she decided to move out of the city and found a commune in the forests of northern California. In perfect continuity with her Sci-fi novel The Wanderground, she will embrace what was the counter-cultural Womyn's Land Movement (with all its contradictions and profound criticalities). With these people, she will create a separate oasis of love and revolution.

Every utopia, however, is only such when imagined. After an initial period of harmony and hope, disillusionment begins to take hold. Past glories become nostalgic weariness, and fading loves bring new balances into play. Sally will decide not to leave the commune, remaining the only one left in the land until shortly before her death in 2021. 

What remains of this story now? What kind of legacy has she sown around itself? The demands of 1970s feminism—often too bourgeois, white, and cis—are no longer enough for us today. But if we allow for a more contemporary translation of her thinking, in practice, Sally Gearhart helped us build alternatives. She showed us how to fight for the affirmation of our existence—together, with anger and with love—redefining what our real possibilities can be.

The article was written within the framework of the 4th Verzió Young Documentary Film Critics Workshop. Tutor: Steve Rickinson.