Jeanne Cordova (18 July 1948-10 January 2016) was an American gay rights and feminist activist.
Biography[]
Jeanne Cordova was born in Bremerhaven, West Germany in 1948, the daughter of a Mexican father and an Irish-American mother. Raised in La Puente, California, she briefly became a nun from 1966 to 1968 before attending college in Los Angeles and becoming a gay rights activist as president of the Daughters of Bilitis. She opened the first lesbian center in Los Angeles in 1971, and she edited the highly-rated The Lesbian Tide newsletter. She served as a delegate to the National Women's Conference in 1977, helped defeat the anti-gay Briggs Initiative in 1978, served as president of the Stonewall Democratic Club from 1979 to 1981, founded the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the Democratic Party, served as one of thirty openly lesbian delegates to the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York City, helped stop Lyndon LaRouche's effort to enact an "AIDS quarantine" in California in 1986, and later published an LGBT business directory. She lived in Mexico for eight years before returning to Los Angeles, where she published her memoir in 2012 before her death from brain cancer in 2016.