Prologue.
The film ended with a sigh. I slipped out of the theater of the Women Makes Waves Film Festival, Taipei, pondering why I expected the movie to tell a (western) stereotypical feminist story, and digesting a sophisticated emotion when I realized it wasn’t that kind, if not the opposite, of story.
Historiography.
Sally Miller Ghearhart was a lesbian-feminist activist, professor, and novelist. She had her PhD when she was 23, and lectured in Taxes Lutheran University where she publicly hid her sexuality as a lesbian. Until the conservative university administrators start to doubt her sexuality and rumors circled around the campus, she gave up her professorship and moved to San Francisco, where she started to advocate for the human rights of primarily lesbians and guys, and latter, the whole LGBTQ+ community. In San Fransisco State University, Sally initiated the first women and gender studies program in the States. Meanwhile, she worked together with Harvey Milk, a gay politician in California, to fight back “California Proposition 6” (Briggs initiative) in which intended to prohibit homosexual lecturers teaching in public-funded schools and universities. After months of struggles, they defeated the Briggs Initiative by a margin of 58.4% to 41.6% in the ballot, and strengthen the power of LGBTQ community in the Bay Area (GLBT Historical Society, n.d.).
This wins marked in LGBTQ activist history and inspired the other queer people who came out and struggle for their legal rights in other states and across the globe. On the next day, the history shed light on the reality. When I was crowded with the army of the Taipei Pride Parade in front of the city hall where people demonstrated their solidarity with sexual minorities. the Department of Civil Affair, which had legalized the gay marriage just a few years ago, also triumphed in the parade with a booth promoting gender equality. Would Sally and her contemporaries ever expect such a day would come when they had to deny their sexual identities to secure their jobs in the school? In an Asian city they might never heard of?
Glories aside, the relations between different social movements were not always tension-free. In the class of “Women and Politics in Asia”, we discussed that Chinese female suffragist leaders were allied with male nationalist ones, while different activists bearing the same ideal that a decolonized republic must be built before universal suffrage among genders was possible. No women would get votes unless everyone (including men) did so. However, once the republic was established the male nationalist leaders started to push back the feminist agenda for universal suffrage, not to mentioned the narrative against “westernized” feminisms. Not only did nationalism and feminism conflict in the above-mentioned case, feminism and LGBTQ activism also fell into similar contradictions showcased in the documentary.
Sally’s contemporaries was so irritated by another documentary called The Time of Harvey Milk produced in 1984, just a few years after Harvey Milk was assassinated by a fanatic far-rights. In the most scenes of The Time of Harvey Milk, Sally was almost eliminated, while she de facto played a crucial role in debating, protesting, advocating in public spaces and television shows. Sally’s original speeches was dubbed into Harvey’s lines, and she herself was portrayed as merely a speech teacher of him in the film, obviously without of significance. The fruits of gay struggles by women gays were taken away by men gays through constantly bending and distorting of history.
Erasure of Women’s Voices.
Why did women were erased throughout human history? I have two theories. First, the mechanism of historiography lies behind the fact that humans tell story, interpreting and re-interpreting what has happened in the past to serve current interests. Thus, storytellers built up a world and dictated its rules, with a power to eliminate one discourse and shed light on another. Indeed, the perspective of storytellers were more important than what had really happened in the history, while this role was historically dominated by men. That is how male storytellers cancel the contribution of women in activism. What matters is not what is said, but who said it and who they are speaking for.
Second, the obsession in excitement overwhelmingly favors assassinations, murders, suicides, and alike. These dramatic events trigger intense emotions, so do the mounting sells of the stories and (irrational) votes for politicians. Sally ended up living in solitudes on the Women’s Land, a lesbian utopian “village” she co-built in her young age based on her sci-fiction of Wanderground. The fact that Harvey himself was assassinated hit the box office more than Sally’s documentary did, in which her comrades and her girlfriends emphasized on the power of community instead of certain heroic individuals within. “Without us, Sally could barely do anything,” they said. All changes are, as a matter of fact, contributed by the entire community, but the people obsessed with hollywoods-like discourses that one person does 90% of work and the all rest do just trivial one tenth. However, feminists did not manipulate their nationalist narratives by excluding their male allies, and lesbians their Pride narratives excluding their gays. Feminine historiography, therefore I believe, is the different one from, if not superior than, the male-dominated historiography, in terms of illuminating the panorama of things and penetrating it with historiographical justice and responsibility.
The film, of course, was not full of dullness. Sally was a fantastic preacher, for example. She once famously said that “[f]eminism has done more to save the lives of women in the last 20 years than Jesus Christ did in 2,000 years of Christianity,” when she interpreted Gospel in the church and people laughed. We laugh. Probably, we can still conclude that great leaders of activism requires a strong charisma.
Lessons Being Learned.
What lessons do I learn here? Instead of being just a passive listener, I should be proactively engaging in narrative construction, which is a powerful weapon that can either struggling for equality and manipulating reality, or simultaneously doing either. Therefore, listening with with a pair of critical ears is more important than blindly building up narratives that stops the continuous dialogues and harms the relationship which it requires. Dialectical understanding should be taken here. May hesitation not trap our spirit to initiate changes, and fanaticism not lure us to do it without heart.
Reference
Craig, D. (Director). (2024). Sally! [Film]. Baytree Productions LLC. https://www.sallygearhartfilm.com/
GLBT Historical Society. (n.d.). Primary Source Set: Briggs Initiative.(retrieved on 16 December). https://www.glbthistory.org/primary-source-set-briggs-initiative
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