Laura Bock

Laura Bock is a 71 year old lesbian, but that’s not all. She is also Jewish, a red diaper baby, native San Franciscan, disabled (eyes and ears), and ran her own business, a bed and breakfast, for 23 years in her historic family home on Willard Street. She was a founding member of and performer with Fat Lip Readers Theater for eighteen years and active in movements dear to her heart: fat politics, peace and justice, and disability rights. She is grateful to her grandparents and parents for their values and politics and commitment to activism she still holds dear. Besides her friends, her family includes her partner, Suzanne, and their dog, Frankie (also a senior).

Laura attended the University of Oregon for her BA in English where she was active in the Civil Rights movement of the mid 60’s and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Upon graduation she lived in Berkeley working as a substitute teacher in children’s centers and a clerk typist for the University of California. In 1970 she attended graduate school at the University of Massachusetts working towards a MA in American Cultural and Intellectual History. She returned to San Francisco in 73, living in her family home and helping her aging parents. Upon their deaths, she opened Bock’s Bed and Breakfast in 1980, one of the first such establishments in San Francisco.

She is a proud member of the second wave of the women’s liberation movement and holds her feminist analysis close to her heart. She joined her first consciousness raising group in 1975, and in subsequent years facilitated groups, took classes in women’s studies at various venues, and with other women gave presentations around the Bay Area. She is very proud of the work she has done with the GLBT Historical Society on preserving and cataloguing the massive collection from the SF Women’s Building and Women’s Centers. She was co-chair of 2010, the year honoring bay area lesbians with disabilities. Her oral history has been taken by FABLEDASP (Fabulous Activist Bay Area Lesbians with Disabilities, A Storytelling Project) as well as by the Old Lesbian Herstory Project and by the University of Oregon, where she has an archive in its library’s special collections. Story Corps interviewed her and her friend Sally Goldin and broadcast a part of that interview on National Public Radio.

In the fall of 2013 she sold her family home of 58 years, and she and Suzanne moved into a senior community called The Redwoods, in Mill Valley, California.

Retirement has been anything but putting her feet up and just relaxing! She has focused on keeping her body moving with swimming, walking and Feldenkrais classes. In 2009 she co-founded an Old Lesbian memoir writing group, and continued to share facilitation of it for 4 ½ years.

She dedicated the year 2014 to processing her collection at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society. 2015 and 2016 she devoted to writing and publishing her memoir, “Red Diaper Daughter, Three Generations of Rebels and Revolutionaries”. She spends her “down time” rooting for the San Francisco Giants baseball team and, as always, reading up a storm-with newly discovered authors as well as old familiars and filling in the gaps in the classics.

Check out http://www.marinij.com/social-affairs/20170618/mill-valley-red-diaper-daughter-documents-her-radical-roots for a recent article about the book and the author.

You can contact Laura Bock at: reddiaperdaughter@gmail.com