Ann Valliant departed this world on August 4, 2022, at the age of 76, due to the progression of ALS, and benefited by the availability of California’s “End of Life Option.”
Ann was an Arkansas farm girl, an accomplished carpenter in 1970s Massachusetts, a business operations consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in the 1980s, and throughout her life was an eloquent and outspoken political activist.
Ann registered Black voters in Birmingham, marched in Montgomery, raised funds to rebuild a burned Black church in Mississippi, and taught Spanish to Black elementary school students in Fayetteville, “so they would have some knowledge in middle school that the white students had not yet learned.”
During the Vietnam War years, Ann became a draft counselor, helping men to avoid the draft.
After graduating college in 1967 with a political science degree from Oklahoma State University, Ann and her then husband relocated to Indiana University in Bloomington, where Ann discovered women’s liberation meetings in 1968. Ann became central in Bloomington’s women’s liberation movement. She and her husband soon separated. Ann met her first woman lover there in Bloomington, Cynthia Hales, who later became a well-respected San Francisco karate instructor for many years.
Other lesbian activists Ann met in those years and who became lifelong friends include Cathy Cade, a then-beginning photographer whose photos are now archived at the University of California at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library; and Ruth Mahaney, who eventually would be associated with San Francisco’s Modern Times Bookstore that opened in 1971 and survived until 2016. Modern Times was a legacy business, worker owned, and renowned for its radical politics.
In the late 1970s while partnered with Bobbi LaNoue, Ann, as she explained in her own words, “inexplicably began childproofing the house and having never-before-considered visions of having a child.” Their son Loren was born in 1981. Soon after, Bobbi and Ann separated as partners but committed to continuing to co-parent.
Much of the 1980s were spent focusing on parenting, facing her own addiction issues, and growing spiritually. Ann discovered Oakland’s Siddha Yoga Ashram, met Gurumayi, and was a committed devotee of Gurumayi from that time on.
In mid 1980, Ann began to develop her business operations consultant career that gave her great satisfaction and continued until her retirement in 2020. In her words, “I helped businesses, large and small, established and start-up, to use whatever computer programs they might need to optimize success of their enterprises. What a gift that gave me! And I hope it was helpful to them as well!”
The past two years were deeply challenging for her, given the ALS diagnosis and its progression. Ann’s beloved companion mariKo, co-parent Bobbi, and son Loren were major supports to her, along with a wide community of close friends.
Ann departed this world with a peaceful spirit.
Published on August 25, 2022
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