Gloria Steinem showed up for us in 1977 and never left

via Washington Blade and The Advocate

Gloria Steinem died on Wednesday, September 2, at her home in Manhattan. She was 92. Gloria's Foundation announced it on Instagram the following morning, saying she "passed away peacefully at her home, surrounded by some of the many who loved her." No cause was given. The foundation asked for donations in place of flowers.

the outline you know

You know the outline. Born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934. Smith College, 1956. The 1963 undercover piece for Show magazine, "A Bunny's Tale," that turned a Playboy Club uniform into a labor exposé. Co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus and of Ms. magazine, which debuted in 1971 and gave second-wave feminism a newsstand. The Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013. The aviators.

what she did in 1977

Here is the part that belongs on this page. In 1977, when Anita Bryant was campaigning to repeal Dade County's nondiscrimination ordinance and being gay on television was still a career risk for anyone standing next to you, Steinem got on a plane to Miami to stand next to us. That same year she told a convention of the American Association of University Women that lesbians were "the most vulnerable group of women" and that the word lesbian had to become "as honorable as any other." In 1992 she told columnist Sally Quinn she had "disqualified herself" from writing about women after Quinn sneered at feminism for including lesbians. Steinem did not treat us as a wing of her movement. She treated us as the movement.

She also got things wrong and said so, which is rarer. A 1977 essay of hers on transition circulated for decades without its context and read, to many trans people, as opposition. In 2013 she wrote in The Advocate that transgender people "were living authentic lives," that their healthcare decisions "belonged to them alone," apologized for words that had failed to say so, and called trans legal equality "one of the LGBTQ+ movement's most neglected priorities." An apology at 79, in print, with no hedging. Take notes.

GLAAD's Sarah Kate Ellis called her "a trailblazing titan of civil rights whose vision for liberation bridged the movements for gender equality, bodily autonomy, and LGBTQ rights." Steinem herself once wrote the future she wanted, including the line that "lesbians or homosexuals will no longer be denied legally binding marriages, complete with mutual-support agreements and inheritance rights." She lived to see that one land. She spent the rest of the time on the ones that haven't.