LGBTQIA+ LEGACY VIDEOS

Pam David was born in 1952 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in nearby Highland Park. Pam feels fortunate to have grown up in a time of great social movements, and came to believe that one’s actions could change or at least influence the world for the better. From her very first campaign to allow girls to wear pants at school to organizing her public high school’s first Black History course, Pam’s activism took root. Before long, she was organizing her classmates to protest the Vietnam War, then expanding her anti-war efforts throughout Chicagoland high schools.
In 1972, 20-year-old Pam left her progressive, but privileged, California college campus to spend a semester in Appalachia. While living in Harlan County, KY she witnessed the ravages of Black Lung disease first hand, and got crash courses in race relations and environmental justice. There, and at the Highlander Center in Tennessee, she was inspired by the elders she met, for whom social justice was a way of life.
After college, Pam headed to San Francisco to study education at Stanford, and came out, stereotypically, after meeting and beginning to play with a lesbian softball team. Soon after she got a job teaching in the new women’s studies program at San Francisco State University, and moved into San Francisco. She helped fight the infamous 1978 Briggs Initiatives while hanging with her friends at many of the City’s legendary lesbian watering holes. On the night San Francisco erupted in riots after Dan White got a token seven-year sentence for assassinating Harvey Milk and George Moscone, Pam and her friend Annie used Annie’s truck to rescue protesters getting beat up by cops and ferry them to safety.
Pam continued to prioritize activism and community organizing, working on a range of issues from apartheid in South Africa, infant mortality in Oakland, solidarity with women in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemela, and, of course, AIDS and LGBTQ rights.
In 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Pam was one of the first two people hired to produce the monumental 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. She secured the critically important endorsement of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and later became a key policy advisor on his historic 1988 presidential campaign. Back in San Francisco after the election, Pam joined the Mayor’s Office of Community Development – the first out lesbian ever appointed to a San Francisco mayor’s staff – and went on to hold similar jobs under two more SF mayors. In 2002, she took the job of executive director for the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Over a career spanning 27 years in local government and philanthropy, Pam distributed millions of dollars in grants to organizations serving low-income people, while also tackling fundamental issues in the ways that philanthropy and government worked with nonprofits, bringing greater trust and accountability to the equation. And, always, Pam sought to find common ground between people, organizations and movements to advance the greater good. Now retired, Pam continues to provide pro bono assistance to a range of movement leaders and organizations
For 34 years, Pam shared her life and perpetual activism with Cheryl Lazar. From the very beginning, Cheryl made Pam laugh and not take herself so seriously. But, during Cheryl’s 70th birthday celebrated with 50 friends in Venice, Italy, Cheryl began to have symptoms which were later diagnosed as a rare and aggressive form of cancer. When she died during the Covid pandemic, hundreds of people sat shiva online for Cheryl. Pam’s favorite memories are still the millions of times Cheryl made her laugh!