DIVA caught up with the co-director of the powerful documentary telling the story of trailblazer Sally Gearhart
BY ELLA GAUCI, IMAGE BY BAYTREE PRODUCTIONS
Sally! (2024) is a documentary that spotlights Sally Gearhart, a trailblazer of the 1970s and ’80s lesbian feminist movement. Despite her significant impact on LGBTQIA equality and women’s rights, her story remains largely untold – until now.
DIVA spoke to co-director Deborah Craig ahead of its screening at BFI Flare 2025.
Was there a specific moment or reference point which inspired your film?
The film Sally! was born out of a coincidence. I was directing a documentary about lesbians and aging and someone told me about an octogenarian living on women’s land in Northern California, still cutting her own firewood with a chainsaw. Of course, I hightailed it up there as soon as I could with a film crew to meet this iconoclastic character. Only gradually did I realise that, many decades ago, she played a key role in women’s rights and gay rights movements. I realised that she deserved a feature-length film focused on her life and legacy, which I launched immediately after finishing my previous short documentary A Great Ride.
If you had to describe your film in three words, what would they be?
Dynamic, quirky, bittersweet.
What was the most unexpected lesson you learned while making this film?
I learned so many lessons – to wait, to listen, not to judge, to persist – that it’s hard to pick out just one of them. Maybe the key lesson was to embrace the complexity and even contradictoriness of human beings, especially Sally! She was a separatist who loved many men and always had men in her life, an animal rights activist who enjoyed bacon, a back-to-the-land lesbian who consumed mostly junk food and Pepsi, a brilliant rhetorician who decried rhetoric as violence, a lapsed Christian who was deeply formed by her Southern upbringing and Christian beliefs, and more. In fact, Sally recognised and relished her contradictions, adding this blurb to one of her later fantasy novels: “Sally Gearhart lives in Northern California on a mountain of contradictions.”
How does it feel to have your film showcased at BFI Flare?
Very gratifying! It took six years to make Sally!, and it was 10 years from when I met Sally herself to when the film came out: It was one of the most exciting and exhausting experiences of my life. But to have the film out in the world, and reaching audiences beyond San Francisco, California, and the US is so rewarding. I had suspected all along that Sally herself, and our film about her, could have broader appeal, but what a happy result to have those thoughts confirmed.
BFI Flare is a celebration of LGBTQIA storytelling. What do you hope LGBTQIA audiences at BFI Flare take away after watching your film?
I hope people are charmed, laugh and maybe even cry. Sally was such a warm and quirky character – full of “joie de vivre” and humour. But there’s a deeper and sometimes darker side to the story too. We too easily forget the trauma and bravery of being queer “back in the day”. Sally was born in 1931. She had her first lover in college, but didn’t feel safe to come out until 1970. So for almost half of her life she was deep in the closet hiding and protecting her true self. (She was threatened with blackmail when she was teaching in Texas in the 1960s.) Despite the current anti-gay and anti-trans backlash, so many of us still can thankfully come out, get married, keep our jobs, retain our connections with friends and family, but that wasn’t always so and in part the change is due to Sally and people like her. I hope people come away with a renewed appreciation for the brave souls like Sally who led the way.
Why do you think LGBTQIA filmmaking is so important in 2025?
When my team and I started making Sally! we hoped to convey the story of a powerhouse woman who made key contributions to gay rights and women’s rights back in the 1970s and 80s. But the more we forged ahead, the more we realized that Sally’s story is relevant right now. With the pushback against gay rights and trans rights propelling Trump into the White House again, not to mention a rightward lurch around the globe, Sally’s brand of activism – radical, rowdy, yet non-acrimonious and even loving – can hopefully inspire us to fight the next round of battles for our rights. And all LGBTQIA filmmaking is crucial to queer visibility, which is so key to gay life and liberation.
This year’s Flare is split into the themes of Hearts, Bodies, and Minds. Do you have an LGBTQIA film which affected your heart, body, or mind?
Most recently, Emilia Perez was an unusual and thought-provoking piece of cinema that demonstrated how gay and trans people are no longer just “pegged” in stories about gay tragedy or even gay activism. So, I’d say that’s more on the side of affecting my mind. Several years ago, I saw the film For They Know Not What They Do about parents of queer kids. That was touching, and at times heartbreaking: Parents who loved their kids but nevertheless didn’t always understand or see them – sometimes to the point of tragedy.
What was the best piece of advice you received while working on this film, and what advice would you give to emerging queer filmmakers?
Get help! Reach higher! Persist! I tell people all the time that if I knew what was involved in making a feature-length documentary rich with archival material, I probably wouldn’t have done it. The whole process took many more years and much more money than anticipated. But I had several pipedreams (go to Texas where Sally taught but was in the closet, film in Virginia where Sally grew up) that we somehow made happen. We got a few decent grants after applying two, three, or four times. And I learned to reach out to everybody under the sun to ask for help. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that they say “no” or don’t respond.
What’s the one question you wish more people would ask about your film?
“What happened to Sally’s car?” And on a more serious note: “How can we help spread the word and get Sally! out into the world?” And “What can we do to make sure that gay women’s stories get funded and told?”
SALLY! screens as part of the 39th BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival on Sunday 23 March and Monday 24 March. For more details / tickets here
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