American educator and activist Sally Miller Gearhart was BOTD in 1931. Born in Pearisburg, Virginia to a middle-class family, her parents separated when she was a child and she was raised by her maternal grandmother. She studied English and drama at the all-female Sweet Briar College in Virginia, continuing her drama studies at Bowling Green State University and the University of Illinois. After graduating, she she taught drama at universities in Texas, though struggled with her identity as a closeted lesbian, and was the target of multiple blackmail attempts. In 1969, she moved to Kansas with a female lover. The following year, she relocated to San Francisco to live openly as a lesbian. She joined the faculty of San Francisco State University in 1973, where she helped establish one of the first women’s studies programmes in the United States, working there until her retirement in 1992. She became a well-known advocate for gay rights causes, working with Harvey Milk to defeat the anti-gay Proposition 6 and publicly debating with conservative politician John Briggs. She became co-chair of the Council On Religion And The Homosexual, a national initiative to foster dialogue between religious leaders and gay rights groups. A key figure in the radical feminist movement, she published two highly influential (and controversial) essays in 1979: The Womanization of Rhetoric, in which she argued for a female-based rhetoric that rejected male ideas of persuasion, domination and violence, and The Future – If There Is One – is Female, advocated for female-controlled communities and the non-violent reduction of the male population. She also wrote a trilogy of feminist science-fiction novels, imagining lesbian utopias where women outnumber men, and several texts on feminist spirituality. Gearhart was in a long-term relationship with fellow academic Jane Gurko until Gurko’s death in 2010. She died in 2021 aged 90. She was portrayed by Carrie Preston in the 2017 TV series When We Rise, portraying the evolution of San Francisco’s LGBT rights movement.