Debra Chasnoff
Week of March 5, 2001

In 1992 Academy Award winning filmmaker Debra Chasnoff described visits to Boston as "very emotional" because her politics were shaped in Boston; "my heroes are people who live here and who do the kind of activist political work I believe in."

Chasnoff grew up in Maryland, the daughter of Joel Chasnoff and Sue Prosen. She does not recall exactly why she became an activist but says, "I came of age during the civil rights and anti-war era," she said. "There was a feeling that it was important to have a social conscience."

An economics major at Wellesley College, Chasnoff helped organize a boycott of Nestle, objecting to the way the company was marketing infant formula in Third World countries. This was her first real foray into political activism, and the project that introduced her to INFACT, a Boston based organization that focuses attention on corporate irresponsibility. The eventual success of the Nestle boycott taught Chasnoff that if people work together, they can make a difference.

After graduating from Wellesley in 1978, Chasnoff landed a job working for a large consulting firm in downtown Boston. But she soon found that the work she did during the day for her clients -- mostly large telecommunications firms involved in promoting nuclear power -- conflicted with her ideals. A member of the Clamshell Alliance, a group that organized against the Seabrook nuclear power plant being built in New Hampshire, Chasnoff found that "the same corporations I was working for during the day, were the ones that I was organizing against at night." So she made a shift to earning a living by piecing together several jobs that were more consistent with her ideals.

These jobs also taught Chasnoff a variety of skills. At Dollars and Sense, a Boston-based journal of popular economics, she learned about publishing and editing. At 9 to 5, the national organization of working women, she learned about organizing large political events. She also produced a weekly radio public affairs program, "Undercurrents," which aired on WBUR.

Chasnoff's partner at the time, Kim Klausner, was involved with Angry Arts, a group that organized regular screenings of independent political films. In 1983 Klausner suggested that they make a documentary film about lesbians becoming parents. In explaining why she warmed to the idea, Chasnoff said, "I felt very left out of discussions of balancing family and career we used to have at Wellesley. I was like everyone else in our culture. I thought being gay meant that you couldn't have kids, that it went with the territory, and that haunted me."

Margaret Lazarus of Cambridge Documentary Films Inc. taught Chasnoff and Klausner the essentials of documentary filmmaking. Money for the film came from fund raisers and a national direct mail. Part of the challenge in producing Choosing Children was to find women to tell their stories. In the early 1980s, there were very few lesbians who were having children after coming out. "We deliberately constructed Choosing Children without a narrator because we didn't want a disembodied voice speaking for people. We wanted lesbians to speak for themselves."

After a national tour promoting Choosing Children, Chasnoff and Klausner moved to San Francisco. Chasnoff worked for the "Daily Cal" in Berkeley, and served as associate producer for Acting Our Age, a documentary about women's experiences of growing old. Chasnoff worked as press secretary for Roberta Achtenberg, a progressive lesbian attorney and director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights who ran for the California State Assembly. Chasnoff and Klausner also were founders of the national gay and lesbian quarterly, Out/Look.

The success of Choosing Children prompted INFACT to ask Chasnoff to do a documentary to help in their campaign against corporate production and promotion of nuclear weapons. Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons, and Our Environment was the result. In addition to showing the ecological devastation caused by the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state and GE'S facilities in upstate New York, the film contrasted GE's commercial image with the harmful results of nuclear production on employee's and others lives and health. Deadly Deception won first prize at the Earth Peace International Film Festival in Vermont. It also was awarded the C.I.N.E. "Golden Eagle" and the Gold Hugo of the Chicago International Film Festival.

In 1992 Deadly Deception won an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary. Chasnoff used the awards ceremony as an opportunity to publicly thank her life partner and her son, and to encourage people to support INFACT's boycott of GE. Chasnoff said, "I knew those would both be political acts: endorsing the boycott and coming out, quite a lot for 45 seconds" — the time allowed by the Academy.

Chasnoff's next documentary, It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School, also has sparked controversy. It's Elementary makes a strong case that schools can help prevent anti-gay prejudice and violence by finding age-appropriate ways to talk about family diversity, name-calling and stereotypes with young students. It shows teachers in six different elementary and middle schools leading these kinds of lessons and demonstrates how thoughtfully children respond. It's Elementary is now used in thousands of communities to help show teachers and counselors how to create a safer learning environment for their students. Members of some religious groups objected to the documentary being used in schools or in teacher training, contending it fostered homosexuality and taught children to hate Christians. They also objected to PBS's decision to air the documentary in 1999.

Chasnoff's new film That's a Family! teaches young audiences about family diversity. It is narrated by children raised in a wide range of family structures including those who have been adopted or are being raised by a guardian or those whose parents are different races, gay or lesbian, single or divorced. That's A Family! recently screened at the White House for leaders of over 100 national children's, family, education, and civil rights organizations. It is being distributed on video by Women's Educational Media, a nonprofit film production company run by Chasnoff. Chasnoff also directed the award winning Homes & Hands—Community Land Trusts In Action" (1998) focusing on a progressive model of permanently affordable housing and community empowerment; and Wired For What? (1999), part of the PBS series, "Digital Divide" which takes a critical look at the push to computerize the schools.

Chasnoff is the recent recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Film and Video Arts Fellowship under whose auspices she is producing Respect For All, a video series for children designed to integrate awareness of gay people into elementary school anti-bias curricula. She lives in San Francisco with her most prized "productions," her two sons.

Written by Wilma Slaight