In April 2013, Sara Boesser and her mother, Mildred Boesser, were interviewed by reporter Melissa Griffiths for the Juneau Empire’s front-page series, “LGBTQ in the Capital.” This photo ran in the paper’s April 26, 2013, edition. She released the rights to the patent to the public domain so anyone could use it without cost.īoesser’s story was featured in the original edition of the Making Gay History book in a chapter titled “The Brave Alaskan.” For more stories about lesbians who, like Boesser, got involved in AIDS activism, explore TheBody ’s collection of interviews “ Lesbians on the Front Lines ” and have a look at this brief PBS video about fierce pussy, a collective of queer women artists and activists who got their start in ACT UP. In 1993 she received a patent for a system she’d developed to make small boat harbors with significant tidal swings accessible to wheelchairs. Until she retired in 2007, Boesser worked for the city of Juneau as a building inspector and an ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) specialist. SEAGLA honors her decades of advocacy through its yearly Mildred Boesser Equal Rights Award. A religious woman, she defiantly told legislators that she believed homosexuality was a “gift of God” (see page 9 here ). Her mother, Mildred Boesser, spoke on panels and testified repeatedly to government officials in support of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. In 1990, Boesser’s parents moved to Juneau and together they helped start a local chapter of PFLAG. In it, she reflects on the hardships of LGBTQ repression and provides a roadmap for communities to communicate openly. ” In 2004, Boesser’s book, Silent Lives: How High a Price?, was published. īoesser also started the Juneau Pride Chorus, and for many years she gathered LGBTQ-related news items for the blog Bent Alaska in a section called “ Sara’s News. To learn more about Alaska’s LGBTQ civil rights history, have a look at this article and timeline. After decades of work as a tireless champion of LGBTQ rights, Boesser was present for the passage of Juneau’s equal rights ordinance in 2016. And she became president of the Committee for Equality, a state-wide board that worked to safeguard domestic partnerships and advocated for same-sex marriage. īoesser was also a founding member of the Southeast Alaska Gay and Lesbian Alliance (SEAGLA). Watch AIDS activist Sarah Schulman talk about the unification in the movement in this short clip from Rosa von Praunheim’s 1990 documentary, Positive. But far from deepening rifts within the LGBTQ movement between lesbians and gay men, fighting AIDS brought these communities significantly closer, and the lesbian community became a pillar of strength for people with AIDS early on. You can read one woman’s perspective from 1983 here. The episode touches on the resentment that some lesbians expressed during the early years of the AIDS crisis at having to take care of their male counterparts. In the episode, Boesser describes delivering a Shanti AIDS education talk to the Soroptimists, a volunteer service organization for women you can learn more about their history here. Inspired to act, she became a founding member of Shanti of Juneau, a community-based organization patterned after Shanti in San Francisco that sought to educate the public and give support to people infected with HIV. You can also read about the Dorian Group in the oral history of Charles Brydon, the organization’s founder, in the two editions of Eric Marcus’s Making Gay History book.Īfter she’d moved back to in Alaska in 1982, Boesser began reading about a mysterious disease that was killing gay men. To learn more about the Dorian Group, read this short history of Seattle’s LGBTQ movement, have a look at one of their newsletters from 1976, and watch this excerpt of an oral history interview with one-time Dorian Group president Roger Winters. That’s where she became a member of the Dorian Group, a local organization founded in 1975. Sara Boesser first got involved in LGBTQ organizing in the latter part of the 1970s, while she was living in Seattle. She became an activist and got to organizing. The soft-spoken building inspector decided there was no time to waste. Episode Notesįrom her home in Juneau, Alaska, Sara Boesser watched with alarm as the AIDS epidemic rolled across the lower 48 states, threatening lives and hard-won gay rights. Sara Boesser at the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Washington, D.C., October 11, 1987.
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