Pat Bond

Pat Bond (February 27, 1925 – December 24, 1990) was an American actress who starred on stage and on television, as well as in motion pictures. She was openly lesbian and in many cases she was the first gay woman people saw on stage. Her career spanned some forty years.

Born Patricia Childers, she spent her childhood in Chicago. She and her family moved to Davenport, Iowa when she was a teenager. While there she attended a Roman Catholic women's college. She later equated this experience to "a finishing school where they finished me". She joined the Women's Army Corps in 1945. Having accepted her homosexuality by this point, she was interested in meeting other lesbians. She acted as a nurse for soldiers returning from the South Pacific and also served in occupied Japan.

In 1947, in Tokyo, 500 women were dishonorably discharged from the army on the charge of homosexuality. During this period, many lesbians testified against each other in trial but Bond had married in San Francisco to Paul Bond, a gay man, before going to Japan. Her marriage license afforded Bond an honorable discharge from the army on July 3, 1947.

Following her discharge from the army, Pat moved to San Francisco and became involved in the gay culture there. She earned a BA and MA in Theater from San Francisco State College. She also began acting on stage and performed in many plays, but did not become nationally known until footage from an interview with her appeared in a landmark documentary about gay people, titled Word Is Out (1978). Her performance in this film, in which she spoke comically and nostalgically about her experiences in the Army, stole the show, and launched her career as an actress and storyteller. By the late 1970s/80s, she was performing four one woman shows in theaters around the country.

Gerty Gerty Gerty Stein Is Back Back Back, co-written by TV producer Clifford Jarrett (1943-2005) was her most popular performance. She played the legendary Gertrude Stein and recounted humorous stories of Gertrude's life in Paris with her companion, Alice B. Toklas. The show was a huge success and was televised repeatedly on PBS stations across the country. Her other well known stage shows were Conversations With Pat Bond, centering mainly on reminiscences of her youth, Murder in the WAC, focusing on the Army's lesbian purge in the late forties, and Lorena Hickock and Eleanor Roosevelt: A Love Story.

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