Angela (Angie) Margaret Romagnoli
October 19, 1949 - July 5, 20127
Angela (Angie) Margaret Romagnoli passed away on July 5th, 2017 at 67 years, from cancer. She leaves behind her beloved partner of 39 years, Megan Adams and their treasured son, Reese Adams-Romagnoli, as well as a large family of siblings, nieces, and nephews, and many, many friends.
Angie combined charm with bluntness. She was a true butch maverick. Her honesty was exceptionally winning and often transformative.
Her university years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, were the beginnings of a life of activism. She was a member of Students for a Democratic Society. Angie was actively involved in the Black Action Movement strike against discrimination at the University of Michigan in 1970. She was passionate about the cause and exhilarated by the group fervor. The protests and strike led to a settlement with the University pledging several million dollars for increased black enrollment and other related programs.
With Gayle Rubin and others, she founded Radical Lesbians in 1971, one of the first and largest chapters in the world. She was a leader in the Lesbian community Ann Arbor, Michigan, throughout the 1970’s, working on gay and lesbian issues in the early days of gay activism and also as a brilliant softball player on the first Michigan lesbian softball team thru the Parks and Rec. Her throws were impossibly long. She was the alpha butch of the outfield.
In 1976 two Filipino nurses from the VA hospital in Ann Arbor were charged with murdering 10 patients and poisoning others. Angie was involved in many protests against their arrests as many strongly believed that the nurses were made scapegoats as they were immigrant Filipinos. Their protests were successful and the charges were overturned.
After the police broke down the door of the radical Lesbian collective house she lived in, she and her roommates sued for police brutality and won.
In 1980, she moved to San Francisco where she became a psychiatric Social Worker and activist on issues related to women and sexual abuse. Along with Deborah Cooper at The Women’s Institute for Mental Health, she formed the first therapy groups for women survivors of incest in the Bay Area, if not all of California. Angie wrote a grant which resulted in the creation of a program called the Incest Project for women survivors at the Women’s Institute. She continued to work with survivors at Kaiser, where she initiated a program of therapy groups. She spent nineteen years at Kaiser in the psychiatry department.
Angie was a maverick who loved many and healed many. With great sadness, we mourn her passing but we celebrate her life and values with determination and gratitude. There will be a memorial to celebrate her memory and her love in the world at the Verdi Club in San Francisco on August 20th, 2017 at 4 pm.