Sally!, 2024, 1h 34m
Directed by Deborah Craig

Reviewed by Evelyn C. White

Memo to Milk director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black: You’ve been cold-busted.

For Sally Gearhart, the firebrand lesbian feminist who played an irrefutable role in the ascent of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, was summarily scrubbed from your 2008 Academy Award-winning biopic.

The evidence? Check the footage in Sally! that depicts Gearhart’s takedown of then-California State Senator John Briggs (of failed anti-gay Prop. 6 fame) while Milk, laughing, revels in her mastery.

In a brilliant split-screen editing move, director Deborah Craig juxtaposes shots from the 1978 televised debate against a clip from Van Sant’s film in which Sean Penn, in his Oscar-winning role as Harvey Milk, is shown debating Briggs solo.

Moreover, screenwriter Black appropriated Gearhart’s powerful oratory from the debate and gave her lines (ventriloquist style) to Penn.

Not surprisingly, Gearhart, who died in 2021 at age ninety, had a ready response to her erasure in Van Sant’s Hollywood feature. “It happens to women all the time,” she declares in Craig’s magnificent documentary.

The blatant misstep in Milk is also underscored by Craig’s riveting footage of Gearhart as she tries to calm the enraged throng of gay activists (and their supporters) who flooded the streets to protest the voluntary manslaughter sentence (seven years) that Dan White received for his November 27, 1978 assassination, in cold blood, of Harvey Milk and then-San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

Had White been convicted of first-degree murder, his sentence likely would have been, at a minimum, twenty-five years to life.

With megaphone in hand, a visibly distraught Gearhart implores the crowd to vent their anger peacefully: “Harvey would not want violence,” she says, repeatedly, as the irate “White Night” rioters hurl rocks, smash windows, and torch police cars throughout the city.

Aside from Gearhart’s passion for lipstick (“I’ve never been without it,” she quips in the film), the native of rural Virginia routinely defied the norms for women of her generation. She eschewed marriage, earned a doctorate at age twenty-three, and secured college teaching positions in Texas. There, after being gay-baited, she bid farewell to the Lone Star state and landed in San Francisco where she soon emerged as “a radical lesbian lighthouse,” as noted in the film.

Indeed, as the first openly lesbian to score tenure at San Francisco State University, she helped to launch one of the first women’s and gender study programs in the country. Gearhart was also among the ass-kicking Amazons who appear in Superdyke (1975), the iconic comedy by pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). Craig includes engaging clips from the release in Sally!. Ditto for Gearhart’s appearance in the landmark documentary Word Is Out (1977).

Gearhart’s acclaimed novel The Wanderground (1978) features a group of women who’ve fled the city to live together in the wilderness. The book has been hailed as an early ecofeminist text and reportedly influenced Gearhart’s purchase (with several other lesbians) of a large property in Mendocino County where they built homes and formed a community.

Sally! features engrossing footage of the women working on the land and is especially noteworthy for its candid discussions about the sexual liaisons that strengthened and strained the group. It also highlights Gearhart’s polyamorous relationship with her long-time partner, Jane Gurko, also a distinguished SF State professor, who died in 2010 at age sixty-nine.

At a time of growing racial divisions in the country, all praises to Deborah Craig for including the voices of women of color activists such as Gwenn Craig, Jewelle Gomez, and Cherrie Moraga, in her outstanding documentary.

Originally published in The Bay Area Reporter

Evelyn C. White A former reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, Evelyn C. White is the author of the acclaimed biography Alice Walker: A Life and Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships. She is also the editor of The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking For Ourselves.