Diane Sabin
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Diane A. Sabin (b.1952) was born in New York City and raised in a suburb of Chicago before attending the University of Redlands in southern California. She spent some years in Boston, Massachusetts during the blossoming lesbian feminist movement at the time that the oft-quoted Combahee Collective was in formation. It was here that she co-founded the Bessie Smith Memorial Collective which produced women's music concerts, including one of the first public performances of the legendary Black women's acappela group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.
After moving to the Bay Area and before becoming a chiropractor, she produced events in San Francisco including the tour of "Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women" based on the collection of well-known poet and activist, Cheryl Clarke. This production was produced in collaboration with two local lesbians of color, Sharon Page Ritchie and Cara Vaugh. She was also responsible for the production of the early San Francisco Pride Stage in the 1980s.
She maintained a chiropractic practice in the Castro for more than 15 years where she developed a community-based private clinic. Sabin Chiropractic was known for its holistic care and the practice of treating patients regardless of their ability to pay.
She was one of the founders of 100 Lesbians and Our Friends with Andrea M. Gillespie, a philanthropic collective in the mid-1990s. The group held periodic meetings modeled after the legendary lesbian pot luck or CR groups, designed to re-educate women about the power of philanthropic giving. The philosophy was that girls are miseducated about their relationship to money from early youth and needed to rethink how they used their economic power and how they might support each other. The group raised over $200,000 specifically for lesbian organizations and projects in two years before disbanding. This followed becoming the target of disgruntled articles in a local free newspaper,the Bay Area Reporter, expressing the feeling of some transgendered people that they were marginalized.
Sabin is currently the executive director of The Lesbian Health & Research Center <http://www.lesbianhealthinfo.org> at University of California in San Francisco.[1] She directs programs working in collaboration with community organizations that develop information about and educate communities about the health of lesbians, bisexual and transgender women.
She and her partner, Jewelle Gomez, along with 12 other gay couples became part of a law suit against the State of California in 2004.[2] The suit asking for the right to marry. The complainants are being represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union.
About the lawsuit's significance Sabin said in the San Francisco Daily Journal (3.4.08), a legal periodical: "I think we live in a place where a lot of change is initated. I think this is a very elemental place. ..it's simply about ending discrimination."
