Pam David was born in 1952 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in nearby Highland Park, historically one of two villages on Chicago’s north shore that allowed Jews to buy homes. From her earliest days, Pam believed that one’s actions could change or at least influence the world for the better. At 14, she organized a successful campaign to abolish the skirts-only rule for girls at her school, and put together its first Black history course. 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. There, she witnessed the ravages of Black Lung disease first hand. She got crash courses in race relations and environmental justice. She hung out with people for whom social justice was a way of life. After college, Pam headed to San Francisco to study education at Stanford. She fell in with a bunch of women softball players, slept with one of them, and never looked back. Soon after she got a job teaching in the new women’s studies program at San Francisco State University. She helped fight the infamous 1978 Briggs Initiatives while hanging with her friends at Amelia’s, Maud’s, and other 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.
In 1986 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 Rev. Jackson’s historic 1988 presidential campaign. Back in San Francisco after the election, Pam joined Mayor Art Agnos’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 the next 15 years, Pam not only distributed millions of dollars in grants to organizations serving low-income people, but also tackled fundamental issues in the ways that philanthropy 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.
For 34 years, Pam shared her life and perpetual activism with Cheryl Lazar. While people sometimes labeled Pam as “too intense”, Cheryl found her just right. For Cheryl’s 70th birthday, she, Pam and 50 close friends gathered in Venice, Italy. Shortly after, Cheryl was diagnosed with cancer. When she died during the Covid pandemic, hundreds of people sat shiva online for Cheryl, invariably starting their tributes by saying, “She was my best friend.”
Pam let her tears flow for Cheryl during her OUTWORDS interview, and our tears flowed, too, while we celebrated a remarkable love story, and the life and accomplishments of a fierce social justice visionary whose activism spanned a continent and continues to this day.
