A People’s History of the Inland Empire Digital Archive

Chani Beeman Oral History

2024.005.001

Oral History

Chani Beeman discusses the overlaps between and intersectionality of the LGBTQ community, women’s rights, and the empowerment of people of color. She discusses her family life, and that by the time she started college, she had two young children and had gotten remarried. She describes her exposure to the LGBTQ community during the 1980s AIDS crisis, and coming out when she was 28 years old. She mentions pressure from her family to conform to a more heteronormative lifestyle. While Chani Beeman was at Cal State San Bernardino, she became politically active and was openly gay. She describes her involvement in the socialist organization Solidarity, which emphasized the intersectionality of women’s rights, socialism, and anti-war movements. Chani Beeman also discusses her involvement in the Inland AIDS Project and Women Enraged! She shares details about her many collaborations and community organizing with other regional groups, commonly around social justice. She describes her involvement after the brutal murder of Nancy Willem in actions led by Women Enraged, including the Clothesline Project which brought attention to violence against women. Beeman also describes Women Enraged’s guerrilla theater, which included street demonstrations; other examples she offers include how WE wrote statistics about violence against women on dollar bills and distributed them in public. One of the slogans on the bills was “Stop sucking, start biting”. She is an active community organizer and member.

Coming out

Gay bars

LGBTQ Community

LGBTQ

LGBTQ History

AIDS epidemic

Religion

Policing

Gay pride

Political organizing

Activism

Riverside (Calif.)

San Bernardino (Calif.)

1971-2012

Chani Beeman

Catherine Gudis

Jill Surdzial

March 24, 2023

A People's History of the I.E.

Audio

Video

English

01:59:45