Sally Miller Gearhart Lecture Series

The Sally Miller Gearhart endowment advances lesbian history and culture, promotes dialogue about sexual orientation and gender identity, supports diversity, and empowers lesbian voices in higher education.

This lecture series is funded through the Sally Miller Gearhart Fund, which was created in honor of professor, author, and activist Sally Miller Gearhart to promote research and teaching in lesbian studies through a biennial lecture series and a future endowed professorship. For more information about Sally’s life and activism, visit the Sally Miller Gearhart website.

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Sally Miller Gearhart – History, Herstory, and Mystery (Spring 2022)

Presenter: Deborah Craig, Documentary Filmmaker and Lecturer, San Francisco State University – Department of Public Health
Date: Monday, 4/25/22, 12pm-1:30pm
Location: Knight Library Browsing Room and YouTube live-stream

Sally Miller Gearhart was a tremendous force and a bit of a mystery. She was at the forefront of the battle for gay rights in the 1970s, but for her last several decades lived in a modest and rustic cottage in the words of Northern California, beloved in her small community but otherwise largely off the radar screen. She has been described as a “beacon” and a “lighthouse” by lesbians who came of age in the 1960s through the 80s, but if you ask young LGBTQ+ / queer folks about her, you’ll mostly likely elicit a blank look. This talk will show scenes from our documentary-in-progress about Sally Gearhart, and explore three key themes:

• History: Like countless brilliant women, Sally is a “hidden figure” largely written out of the story. Among other things, she played a key role in the struggle for gay rights and co-founded one of the first Women Studies programs in the country at San Francisco State University. Our film hopes to highlight her key role in our history.
• Herstory: But, by focusing too exclusively on individuals we risk perpetuating a patriarchal narrative. All of Sally’s contributions—whether activist or academic—were part of a much larger collective enterprise, driven primarily if not exclusively by women.
• Mystery: We are all different things to different people, especially Sally! Ultimately, there are many Sallys. Our documentary will weave together this beautiful kaleidoscope of different stories and perspectives, offering a window into Sally’s humanity, complexity and mystery.

[Un]Framing Sor Juana: The “Worst Woman” in the World (Spring 2022)

Presenters: Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles – Chicana/o and Central American Studies; Alma López, Visual Artist and Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles – Chicana/o and Central American Studies
Date: Thursday, 4/28/22, 12pp-1:30pm
Location: Knight Library Browsing Room and YouTube live-stream

In this “dog and pony show” (Alicia is the Dog, Alma the Horse), the author and the artist discuss the historical figure of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century Mexican nun/poet/scholar known the world over as “the first feminist of the Americas.” Alicia’s presentation, “[Un]Framing “La Décima Musa” explores Sor Juana’s veiled identity as both a feminist and a lesbian nun who challenged and defied the gender codes imposed on all women, regardless of class or caste, in the colonial society of New Spain. Alma’s presentation, “Sor Juana,” a series of 3’ x 4’ color digital photographs inspired by Alicia’s historical novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream hopes to open a dialogue on Sor Juana that not only humanizes her as a body as well as a mind, but also constructs a new community of “sisters” for Sor Juana composed of Chicana feminist and Chicana lesbian writers, scholars, students, activists, and poets who embody or in-habit the nun’s identity in the 21st century to create a more inclusive sisterhood of “bad women.”

Past Lectures

Towards a Sociocultural History of Black Lesbian Sexuality and Community (April 2019)

Presenter: Mignon Moore

This work examines the development of community and identity around sexual desire for black sexual minority women in the 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing from archival materials, oral histories, in-depth interviews, and African-American periodicals, it argues that the practice of black lesbian identity is historically shaped by two areas of social life: the church, or religious ideologies and structures that organize racial communities, and the streets, or the nightlife and informal economy where public and semi-public expressions of same-sex desire take place.

It is through the intersection of race and sexuality that we learn more about how cultural experiences unify populations organized around same-sex desire. The findings encourage researchers to think more purposefully about the relationships between racial/ethnic identity and culture in the development of sexual minority communities.

Feeling Photography, Visualizing Testimony, Imagining Alterity (January 2017)

Presenter: Juana Maria Rodriguez

What does “seeing” tell us about the subjective experiences of those whose life stories we are invested in knowing? And how does the visual presence of the speaking subject of auto/biography complicate narratives of their lives? Rodríguez probes the ways forms of representation that combine biographical narrative with visual documentation transform our affective encounters with the social and sexual lives of sex workers in order to question the kinds of interpretive practices we bring to these knowledge projects. In the process, she reflects on how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories.

Queer Longings in Straight Futures: Notes Towards Prehistory for Lesbian Speculations (December 2016)

Presenter: Alexis Lothian

The story of lesbian science fiction is generally assumed to begin in the 1970s, as feminist political and literary movements converged with gay liberation. For her forthcoming book Old Futures: The Queer Cultural Politics of Speculative Fiction, Dr. Lothian researched speculative narratives by women, queers, and people of color that are not often included in genre histories of science fiction, from nineteenth-century utopias to twenty-first-century digital media. This talk expands upon arguments made in the book, drawing on her research in early-twentieth-century feminist speculative fiction to examine moments of desire and connection among women. Appearing amid futuristic visions that otherwise reproduce straight and narrow understandings of gender, race, and sexuality, these fleeting nonheteronormative imaginaries complicate our understanding what it has meant, and what it could mean, to speculatively enact the possibility of lesbian worlds.

Afro-Sappho Futurisms: Drawing on the Past to Imagine us into the Future (April 2015)

Presenters: Ana-Maurine Lara, Associate Professor, William and Susan Piché Faculty Fellow, WGSS Director of Graduate Studies

Drawing on poetry and critical scholarship, Ana-Maurine Lara will lead audiences into the archives of the imagination, to consider some invisible spaces of lesbian desire, love and freedom from the past as a lexicon for imagining new collective futures.