By Jan Wahl—
I am so lucky that my love for the LGBTQ+ community started with my earliest childhood memories. My mother was raised in Waukegan, Illinois, birthplace of Ray Bradbury, Jack Benny, and Jerry Orbach. My mother’s family rented out their top floor to two men who worked at the local church. Somehow, it being a small town, word got out that they were a couple. Eventually, they were forced out of town for being gay. My mother used that childhood trauma, since they were like uncles to her, to inform the way she felt about the rights of the gay community.
Mom made sure I had gay people in my life. She would drop me off at the Cherokee Book Shop in Hollywood while she went shopping, and I would hang out with the screenwriters, costume designers, and makeup artists. They would all take care of this little girl, and we would read old movie magazines while they told me stories about the stars.
Fast forward to my move to the Bay Area, where I spent about a month as a bad waitress at the old Castro Café when I was in college. The area was going from bland to beautiful at that time around 1970. I was a pretty young thing and straight guys and the owner would hit on me. My only refuge was found with the kind folks next door at Toad Hall. Once again, the LGBTQ+ community had my back.
I started thinking, how could I give back? I became determined to get as much of the community on television and radio with me. Anytime we needed to promote an LGBTQ+ event, from Trannyshack to Dykes on Bikes® to the great TV series Gentleman Jack to the film The Celluloid Closet, I got the info on the air. My bosses didn’t know how to stop me.
The LGBTQ+ community has continued to enrich my life in a hundred ways: the sheer exhilaration of riding as the celebrity Grand Marshal in the San Francisco Pride Parade one year, performing with Donna Sachet at The Castro Theatre in her wonderful Christmas show, and interviewing classic, aging Hollywood queens in front of a sold-out crowd of gays and lesbians, knowing that they love classic Hollywood as much as I do! Those productions put on by impresario Marc Huestis at the Castro were unforgettable.
As the years have gone on, the community has still had my back. For example, I once got into an on-camera disagreement with director Quentin Tarantino. It seemed to serve as a call to his fans to send me hate mail filled with homophobic threats. There was a lot of publicity about this, but I had committed to appear at an LGBTQ+ event a couple of weeks later. Donna Sachet set me up with Lenny Broberg, who worked for the San Francisco Police Department in the anti-hate division. He put together a team of bodyguards for me, and I have never felt so secure in my life.
There have been numerous comical times, too. The marvelous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence found out that, as a Jewish girl, I had missed out on the experience of the confessional. While I was doing a fundraiser with these remarkable nuns, they surprised me with a functional confessional. I had a blast making up for lost time!
There are a million other examples, but all I can say now is: Happy Pride, from my heart to yours.
Jan Wahl is a Hollywood historian and film critic on various broadcast outlets. She has two Emmys and many awards for her longtime work on behalf of film buffs and the LGBTQ community.
Off the Wahl
Published on June 25, 2026
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