Meet Your Tour Guide: Heather Cassell
Heather Cassell is a third wave feminist born and raised in the San Francisco and Monterey/Santa Cruz Bay Areas. The feminist bug bit her before she knew there was a word that she could call herself and a movement she could join. At the ripe age of five when her mother told her that she would grow up, marry a rich man, have lots of children, and never have to work she rebelled, “No.”
“I’m going to grow up and have a career, travel the world, and know interesting people,” she told her mother.
From that moment on, she reminded her parents often what her path in life would be.
Her second awakening came when she was 10 years old watching Sally Ride, the first American woman (now we know she was a lesbian after her death in 2012) astronaut to go into outer space. Until that moment, she believed the women marching in the streets on TV were already free to be who they wanted to be. Watching the rocket launch with Sally aboard, the news anchor said, “With that Sally Ride becomes the first American woman to go into outer space.”
Heather turned to her dad and screamed at him that he lied to her. He told her she could be anything she wanted to be, but only now women were going to outer space. She started to realize the women marching on the streets were fighting for their rights. In her own way, she was too by not letting the neighborhood boys tell her what she could and couldn’t do.
Fast forward to her early 20s in the 1990s, Heather joined the third wave feminist and LGBTQ movements. She interned at the first glossy lesbian magazine, Curve (formerly Deneuve). She volunteered and launched the West Coast chapter of the Third Wave Foundation, a member-driven foundation and direct action organization; at the same time she volunteered at Outright International (formerly the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission) and the Human Rights Campaign. She wrote for HUES, a young feminist of color magazine, and other queer and feminist publications, and assisted with research for “The F-Word: Feminism in Jeopardy – Women, Politics, and the Future,” and wrote entries about women and economics, other third wave feminists and the movement for “The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism”; and worked at Down There Press, the publishing arm of Good Vibrations, and at City College of San Francisco’s Queer Studies (formerly GLBT Studies) department.
In the 2000s, Heather became a journalist covering queer women, BIPOC queer people (2006), travel (2009), and international news (2011) for the Bay Area Reporter and other LGBTQ publications.
For nearly 15 years, Heather traveled to five continents and all over the United States writing about destinations and the people who inhabit unique corners of the world. She’s also interviewed activists on the ground telling their stories as some countries crack down on LGBTQ rights and others decriminalize homosexuality, pass same-sex marriage, and win rights. No matter what stage a country is at regarding LGBTQ and women’s rights, she’s found queer and women-owned businesses to tell their stories, and taken tours led by local tour guides learning about queer and women’s history, art, culture, and people.
Now Heather is bringing what she’s learned on those tours to her own experiences at Go Roam Tours highlighting women past and present in San Francisco.