Sally Miller Gearhart, Lesbian Separatist and Activist, Dies at 90 – The New York Times

“The Wanderground” is about a utopian community of women who communicate psychically with one another. It explored themes of women’s inherent connections to the Earth and to one another. Remaining in print for over two decades, the book was one of the first major instances of lesbian representation in science fiction, a traditionally male genre.

Dr. Gearhart created her own Wanderground later in life: a community she called Women’s Land in Willits, a city in redwood forest country about 140 miles north of San Francisco. She considered it the culmination of her lesbian separatist philosophy.

“I keep saying that feminism as I understand it is an ideology of possibility, not probability,” she said in an interview in 1980. She lived there with her “land partner,” Jane Gurko, her dog, Bodhi, and an eclectic group of women, many of them lesbians, who wanted to experience life closer to nature and, in many cases, farther from men.

Members of the community, which fluctuated in size, lived in cabins in the woods, outside of patriarchal confines, in Dr. Gearhart’s view.

Sally Miller Gearhart was born April 15, 1931, in the Appalachian town of Pearisburg, Va., and raised in a conservative Protestant family. Her father, Kyle Montague Gearhart, was a dentist; her mother, Sarah (Miller) Gearhart, was a secretary.

“Mine was the childhood of the penny postcard and the ten-cent movie,” Dr. Gearhart wrote in an autobiographical sketch on her website, adding, “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.”

Her parents divorced when Sally was young, and she spent much of her childhood with her maternal grandmother, who ran a women’s boardinghouse. It was her first taste of a female-only community and one that stuck with her throughout her life.