Partner Joan Corbin,
Helen Sandoz
Queer Places:
University of California, 110 Sproul Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
3000 Coolidge Ave, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
5692 Vallecito Ave, Westminster, CA 92683
Stella
E. Rush (April 30, 1925 – July 25, 2015),[1] also known by her pen name Sten Russell, was an American journalist and LGBT rights activist. She was a regular reporter for the gay rights magazine ONE (1954–1961) and the lesbian rights magazine The Ladder (1957–1968).
In 1957 Joan Corbin moved in with Stella, who did verse and excellent reporting for ONE and for The Ladder, the magazine of The Daughters of Bilitis.
Later Rush was in a relationship with
Helen Sandoz for thirty years; they met in 1957 and lived together in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, until Sandoz's death in 1987.[2][3]
Rush was born on April 30, 1925, in Los Angeles. Her father died when she was two years old, and she spent her childhood moving repeatedly between Los Angeles and Kentucky with her mother.[2]
She graduated from Dorsey High School in 1943.
Rush attended the University of California, Berkeley for two years and transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles for her third year; she left without graduating and took up a job at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.[3]
She worked as an aircraft draftsman for North American Aviation until 1945.
Rush's career as a gay rights activist began as a writer for ONE magazine, joining the organization in 1953.[4] She wrote her first article, a first-person account of the Los Angeles gay scene, in 1954 under the pseudonym "Sten Russell". She was a regular reporter for ONE until 1961.[3] She became involved with the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a lesbian rights organization, in 1957, and was a co-founder and treasurer of the organization's Los Angeles chapter.[5]
A copy of ONE magazine featuring a drawing of her as Sten Russell. Credit: Photo by Morgan Gwenwald © Lesbian Herstory Archives DOB Video Project, LHEF, Inc.
Stella Rush at her typewriter at home in Los Angeles, about 1953. Credit: Photo courtesy of Marcia Gallo.
University of California, Berkeley, CA
She served as the Los Angeles reporter for its official publication, The Ladder. She mainly reported on conferences, seminars, and new research into homosexuality, and also published poems in the magazine. She ceased working with the DOB in 1968, following the organization's merger with the National Organization for Women, because she disagreed with the rhetoric of the feminist movement and felt that the campaign for women's rights victimized men.[2]
Stella Rush soon found her psychic twin in Helen Sandoz, or “Sandy,” the first president of the Daughters of Bilitis, who with other Gays had produced a small civic booster magazine in Portland. She also helped encourage fellow Sears employee
Troy Perry in 1968 to start a church that would minister to gays.
Rail-thin Stella and Sandy both seemed butch, but they called themselves
“ki-ki” meaning, among other things, they’d found an equal butch/femme
relationship. “Sometimes I need a shoulder to cry on, and when she needs one,
my shoulder’s there,” explained one. Stella and Sandy served as ONE Trustees
until mid-1960. Later they became active in the Council on Religion and the
Homophile and in Prosperos, a metaphysical group long allied with our
movement. They edited The Ladder in 1967.
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