About the Author

Mine was the childhood of the penny postcard and the ten-cent movie, for I was born in the middle of southwestern Virginia's Appalachian Mountains just before Franklin D. Roosevelt became president. My Protestant Anglo-German family brought me up there in a town that had been given its latitude and longitude by a young surveyor named George Washington. We were salt-of-the-earth people, believing in the Threefold God and in the everlasting virtues of hard work, a clean house, and strong drink.
Until 1970 I spent my life in academia, either as a student or teaching speech and drama at Christian colleges and state universities in the midwest and in Texas. Then, when San Francisco State University tenured me as an open lesbian, I spent the next two decades not only in the classroom but in the streets, fighting for progressive causes and writing articles and stories that reflected only a few – but, to be fair, certainly some – of the values that had been such a formidable part of my upbringing and early professional years.
My life continutes to be exceedingly rich, and I daily grow more appreciative of every turn it is taking. I've been particulaly grateful over the years to my students and colleagues for all they have taught me, and to my good friends, both animal and human, who have kept me close to their hearts -- and to my own. I'm proud of helping to design and implement one of the four radical Women Studies Programs in the country at San Francisco State University, and of the political work I've done on behalf of non-human animals. I'm proud of helping to plant seven thousand trees on a bare hill in Nicaragua for the Sandinista Revolution. I'm proud to have been a part of the movement that secured greater visibility for society's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. More and more frequently I bless the people that others have called my "enemy" or “unacceptable” or “crazy,” for it is the presence of such people in my life that has whetted my hunger for diversity and led me to the knowledge that, in the end as in the beginning, Love is the universal truth lying at the heart of all creation.

--- Sally Miller Gearhart


		Small Town Girl Gets Bigger
	Mine was the childhood of the penny postcard and the ten-cent movie, for I was born in the middle of southwestern Virginia's Appalachian Mountains just before Franklin D. Roosevelt became president. My Protestant Anglo-German family brought me up there in a town that had been given its latitude and longitude by a young surveyor named George Washington. We were salt-of-the-earth people, believing in the Threefold God and in the everlasting virtues of hard work, a clean house, and strong drink. Until 1970 I spent my life in academia, either as a student or teaching speech and drama at Christian colleges and state universities in the midwest and in Texas. Then, when San Francisco State University tenured me as an open lesbian, I spent the next two decades not only in the classroom but in the streets, fighting for progressive causes and writing articles and stories that reflected only a few – but, to be fair, certainly some – of the values that had been such a formidable part of my upbringing and early professional years. My life continutes to be exceedingly rich, and I daily grow more appreciative of every turn it is taking. I've been particulaly grateful over the years to my students and colleagues for all they have taught me, and to my good friends, both animal and human, who have kept me close to their hearts -- and to my own. I'm proud of helping to design and implement one of the four radical Women Studies Programs in the country at San Francisco State University, and of the political work I've done on behalf of non-human animals. I'm proud of helping to plant seven thousand trees on a bare hill in Nicaragua for the Sandinista Revolution. I'm proud to have been a part of the movement that secured greater visibility for society's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. More and more frequently I bless the people that others have called my "enemy" or “unacceptable” or “crazy,” for it is the presence of such people in my life that has whetted my hunger for diversity and led me to the knowledge that, in the end as in the beginning, Love is the universal truth lying at the heart of all creation. --- Sally Miller Gearhart
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