Toward Inclusivity and Belonging in the Castro
Widening History’s Lens
One Community.
One Plaza.
Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza’s Widening History’s Lens: Toward Inclusivity and Belonging in the Castro is an community-led initiative to incorporate the full, rich history of the Castro’s LGBTQ+ community into the new Harvey Milk Plaza and ensure it meets the community’s needs amidst the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights.
Planned outreach will first engage lesbians and queer women in order to understand their historical experiences and desires for public spaces in the Castro in San Francisco. Outreach will then continue as we engage others including the transgender community, LGBTQ+ youth and elders, and BIPOC community/ies.
Our hope is to surface untold histories to be archived and curated for the community in an on-site exhibit, ultimately helping reconnect marginalized segments of the LGBTQ+ community to the history of the Castro and increasing visibility and representation at Harvey Milk Plaza.
At the Castro Muni Station installation, we share histories of lesbians and queer women and invite the public to tell us who else you want to see highlighted in the new Plaza! Please take our survey here.
We have included longer biographies of the extraordinary women featured in the Castro Muni Station artwork on this page.
Sally Gearhart (1931 — 2021)
While Sally Gearhart began her career as a speech and drama professor in Texas and the Midwest, she rose to prominence after relocating to San Francisco in the early 1970s. Gearhart was hired at SF State University in 1973, earning tenure as an open lesbian after developing one of the first women and gender studies programs in higher education. Beyond the academic realm, Gearhart was a popular author. Her most well-known publications include her speculative fiction novel, The Wanderground (1978), Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church (1974), and the Earthkeep trilogy (2002 and 2003). Often tapped as a spokesperson to comment and describe the burgeoning post-Stonewall queer culture and civil rights campaigns, Gearhart appeared in LGBTQ-themed documentaries, including Word is Out (1977), Last Call at Maude’s (1993), and Superdyke (1975). However, Gearhart is best known for her work with San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, campaigning to defeat California’s Proposition 6 (aka, the “Briggs Initiative”). Gearhart and Milk conducted joint interviews, made speeches, and debated opponents to prevent Prop 6’s passage. Their successful efforts defeated a proposed ban on hiring homosexuals to teach in public schools.
Marga Gomez (born 1960)
Comedian, playwright, and performer Marga Gomez is celebrated for her insightful blend of humor, weaving together commentary on race, sexuality, and culture with biographical details. A lesbian of Puerto Rican/Cuban-American ancestry, Gomez was born in Harlem, New York, and moved to San Francisco in 1979. She soon joined several of the ground-breaking theater groups of the era, including Lilith, a women’s ensemble, the San Francisco Mime Troup, and Culture Clash, a Latino comedy group.
Gomez’s breakthrough came in the mid-1980s as a solo performer at the city’s new gay comedy clubs, including the Valencia Rose (later Josie’s Juice Joint), the Marsh, and Theatre Rhinoceros. There, she began focusing on writing, producing, and appearing in what has grown into 15 full-length theater pieces, touching on her experiences within the queer and Latin communities. Gomez has taken this work, which includes A Line Around the Block, Memory Tricks, Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty, & Gay, to college and university campuses worldwide, the international circuit of comedy clubs and festivals, and Off-Broadway and national touring productions and numerous television appearances.
Phyllis Lyon (1924 – 2020) and
Del Martin (1921 – 2008)
Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, San Francisco’s pioneering lesbian activists, civil rights trailblazers, met in Seattle as working journalists in the early 1950s. By 1953, they moved to San Francisco and, by 1955, cofounded the Daughters of Bilitis, the country’s first lesbian rights organization at the height of the repressive McCarthy-era “Red Scare.” Working from their Diamond Heights living room, they also launched and edited The Ladder, the first nationally distributed publication on lesbian themes. It was mailed to their members and subscribers in a discreet brown envelope from 1956 to 1962 during its years of publication.
As the sixties and seventies unfolded, Lyon and Martin were at the forefront of numerous campaigns to decriminalize homosexuality, expand women’s rights, serving on board of National Organization for Women (NOW), SF Human Rights Commission, collaborating with the ACLU, organizing SF’s first lesbian and gay Democratic club, representing lesbians at international feminist conferences, and insisting that issues of ageism and disability be addressed within LGBTQ and women’s communities.
In recognition of their 55-year-long relationship, they were the first same-sex couple to be officially married in the U.S. This celebration first took place in 2004 when then-mayor Gavin Newsom issued marriage licenses to all, and again in 2008 when the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriages legal. As Marcia Gallo, author of the biographical Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis, wrote that Lyon and Martin practiced the “social part of social change. Their big hearts, sharp intelligence, and quick wit inspired a wealth of love and commitment from colleagues, friends, and extended family throughout the world.”
Soni Wolf (1948 – 2022)
San Francisco Bay Area resident Soni Wolf cofounded the Dykes On Bikes/Women’s Motorcycle Contingent in 1976, which soon led the city’s annual LGBTQ+ Pride Parade for decades. Wolf’s goal was to celebrate the group of bikers as out, loud, and proud, reclaiming the word “dyke” from its pejorative use as a slur. She was instrumental in obtaining the legal right to use “Dykes on Bikes and won trademark battles for the organization’s name and logo with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. With those victories, Wolf built local chapters of Dykes on Bikes in cities throughout the U.S., as well as Australia, England, and Iceland, where the group focused on philanthropic work for LGBTQ+ causes and empowerment.
Jewelle Gomez (born 1948)
Jewelle Gomez is an acclaimed African-American author, poet, playwright, and activist, best known for her groundbreaking work at the intersection of African American and queer narratives. Born in Boston in 1948, Gomez relocated to San Francisco in 1993.
Her most famous work, The Gilda Stories (1991), is a groundbreaking novel about an African American lesbian vampire that blends elements of science fiction, fantasy, and folklore. Throughout her career, Gomez has been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, and women's empowerment.
She is a founding member of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), president of the San Francisco Library Commission, and well as working with the San Francisco Arts Commission and Horizon Foundations and serving as a board member of the Astraea Foundation. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in more than a hundred anthologies and publications. In addition to authoring 2010’s Waiting for Giovanni a play about James Baldwin, Gomez has written for public television, including Say Brother, WGBH’s longest running program by and for African Americans.
Donna Hitchens (born 1947)
Donna Hitchens, a Massachusetts native and graduate of Berkeley Law School in 1977, was the first open lesbian judge elected to the bench in the United States after winning a campaign in 1990 as Presiding Judge for the Superior Court of San Francisco County.
As a recent law school graduate, Hitchens was inspired by a law school clinic to fight against gender discrimination in family law, employment or housing discrimination. Once inspired, Hitchens’ founded The Lesbian Rights Project immediately after getting her degree, providing legal assistance to low-income lesbians facing legal consequences over their sexual orientation.
The Lesbian Rights Project became the National Center for Lesbian Rights in 1988, expanding their mission to focus on discrimination faced by the national LGBTQ+ community. Hitchens brought the same commitment to fighting institutionalized inequality to her work as a Superior Court Judge. During her twenty years on the bench, Hitchens created several programs to help marginalized and low-income individuals including the San Francisco Unified Family Court, making sure one judge would oversee and address the overlapping issues in cases centered on marriage, divorce, adoption, domestic violence, and juvenile delinquency.
Pat Norman (1939 – 2022)
Pat Norman was a pioneering lesbian health advocate and leader at several San Francisco healthcare commissions and agencies beginning in the 1970s until her retirement in 2002. In 1971, she founded the Lesbian Mothers’ Union to address child custody issues for lesbians. One year later, she was the first open lesbian hired by the San Francisco Department of Health. There, as Coordinator of Lesbian/Gay Health Services, Norman was instrumental in developing a collaborative guide for AIDS-related care and treatments, described as the “San Francisco Model” adopted by city agencies, hospital, organizations, and healthcare workers.
Norman later founded and served as CEO of the Institute for Community Health Outreach, which focused on training healthcare workers in underserved and stigmatized communities. Many will remember her appearance on a GLAAD-sponsored billboard featuring Norman with her then-pregnant wife and the tagline “Another Traditional Family.
As a lifelong fighter for lesbian and gay rights, women and people of color, Norman also co-chaired and served on numerous public commissions and political committees. These included the Police Commission, Fire Commission, and the state’s Human Rights Commission as well as chairing or serving on organizing committees for the California State Mobilization for Peace, Jobs, and Justice (1984), the National March on Washington for Lesbian/Gay Rights (1987), Democratic National Convention delegate for Jesse Jackson (1987), the Nelson Mandela Reception Committee (1990) and the Stonewall 25 Organizing Committee (1994). As her son, Zach Norman, recalled for his mother’s memorial, Pat Norman “was a righteous woman.”
