Pat Bond Biography

In 1978, Pat was interviewed for the landmark documentary about gay people, Word is Out. Pat's performance in this film, in which she spoke humorously and poignantly about her experiences in the Army, stole the show and her career as an actress and storyteller was launched. In the 1970s and 1980s, she performed her four one-woman shows in small theaters, colleges and universities across the country. She was the first lesbian performer that many young gay people saw.

In Gerty Gerty Stein is Back Back Back, Pat impersonated the great writer and told tales of her life in Paris. Conversations with Pat Bond focused on her childhood, and Murder in the WAC dealt with the terrible army witch hunt. In Lorena Hickock and Eleanor Roosevelt: A Love Story, Pat vicariously fulfilled her lifelong passion for the fabulous Eleanor by playing the butch journalist who had been her lover.

Patricia Childers was born on February 7, 1925 in Chicago. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Davenport, Iowa, and   attended a Catholic women's college, an experience Bond described as "a  finishing school where they finished me." She enlisted in the U.S. Women's   Army Corps in 1945 in an attempt to forget an unrequited love and to meet other women. In 1947, in occupied Japan, a lesbian "witch-hunt" began in the Army.

Pat died in 1990 on Christmas Eve, when she always had a party, as her friends sang carols around her bed.

Ultimately, 500 women were dishonorably discharged; many had nervous breakdowns and some committed  suicide. Pat escaped harassment because she had married a gay man, Paul Bond,  in San Francisco.

She left the Army and moved to San Francisco and became part of the thriving gay scene in North Beach. She studied theater at San Francisco State College, and for the next several decades she acted in various small theater groups, did some bartending, and for a short time even owned her own bar. Home       Herstory           Next Ceremony          Nomination         Donation         Sponsors      Volunteer           Calendar           Events