While you're here, you may want to see
my picasa photo album.

More historic family pictures can be seen here

Joani Blank, Interviewed by Herself:

So, Joani, tell us all the places you've lived.

Since my birth in 1937, I lived in a Boston suburb through high school, then Oberlin
(Ohio), Honolulu , Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Detroit , Concord (New Hampshire), Morgantown (West Virginia) and, since 1971, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area is the best place I've ever lived--and no, I'm not frightened by earthquakes.

Where did you go to school?

I matriculated (love that word) at Winn Brook School , Belmont (MA) Junior High and High Schools, Oberlin College (B.A.), the University of Hawaii (M.A.), and the University of North Carolina (M.P.H). I'm very fond of college towns, and though I've never had any association with University of California there, I enjoy living a few miles from the lively city of Berkeley .

Didn't you used to live on the San Francisco Peninsula?

From 1971 to 1991 I lived in a wonderful cedar-shingle house built in 1906, one of the first houses on Burlingame Ave. in Burlingame . Most likely the house originally belonged to a family escaping San Francisco after the great quake and fire. Mark, my ex-husband, and I raised our daughter Amika there. Neither of us owns that home any more, but we all carry fond memories of it.

Tell us about your daughter Amika.

Amika (pronounced AH-mi-ka), born in 1977. She's married to Ivan Sergejev and they have three sensational children Milo (b. 1994), and his sisters Soleil (b. 1997), and Blossom, aka B (b. 2002). Milo and Soleil started their formal education in a Waldorf school in Portland , Oregon , then attended public school very close to the cohousing community in Portland where the family lived for a year and a half. Blossom was born in a tub of water in Amika and Ivan's home. Amika and her family moved to Tehachapi , CA (east of Bakersfield ) in 2005. Check out snapshots of them all, and other family photos, in my picasa photo album .

What are Amika and Ivan up to?

Ivan completed his undergraduate degree in Archeology in the summer of 2005, and the family moved to California the end of that year. Ivan has a job he really loves, doing archeological work with the hundreds of dig sites scattered throughout the 300,000 acres of nearby Edwards Air Force Base.

Amika is a direct-entry (lay) midwife and one of the founders of the Andaluz Waterbirth Center in Portland . She's attended and assisted at close to 350 births between the ages of 19 and 26. .Although her midwifery practice ceased when she moved to California, Amika has taught me a tremendous amount about pregnancy and birth, things I didn't know because I've never been pregnant.My mother lived to be ninety. And my father lived to see the new millennium.

You say you've never been pregnant, but you're Amika's mom, aren't you....?

My daughter was adopted at birth by Mark Wandro and me. Ours was an open adoption; we were in the hospital when Amika was born and took her home when she was two-and-a-half days old. Amika and my grandchildren have had the good fortune to know Amika's birthmother all their lives, although since she moved out of state a few years ago they have had very little contact with her.

What about the rest of your family? 

My mother lived to be ninety. And my father lived to see the new millennium; he died at 98 in 2000. My sister, Barbara (Bobbie Blank) Hauser, lives in Brookline, MA. Her husand, Dr. Stuard Hauser, passed away in 2008. Bobbie and Stuart's son Joshua, a physician specializing in end-of-life care, lives in Chicago with his wife Juliet and their children Jonathan and Emily. My other nephew, Ethan is a writer who has published fiction in Playboy, Esquire and several literary magazine and who writes frequently for the New York Times. Ethan lives with his wife, photographer Megan Crump in Brooklyn, New York . (A photo of many of my family at Joshua and Juliet's wedding in 1998 and portraits of my parents and grandparents can be found in
my historic photo album.)

Tell us about your connections with Oberlin

I graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio at the end of the 'fifties. I majored in sociology/anthropology and acquired my first serious appreciation for cultural relativism. In the spring of 1999, I attended my 40th reunion and participated in a panel where I spoke on "the sexual mores of the fifties.” In 2004, I was back on campus for an Alumni Folk Music reunion. Alums from the fifties through the nineties sang all the “old songs” along with current students. In March of 2006, I was the keynote speaker for a small student-run sexuality conference. My topic was “A fifty-year retrospective on sexuality: America 's, my peers' and my own.” 

And after college?

In 1962, after being deselected from the Peace Corps before going abroad,
I headed west—and didn't stop until I got to Honolulu . Might as well go to grad school,
I thought, and did so at the University of Hawaii , majoring in Asian Studies with a concentration in Public Health. I received my MA in 1964 with a 42-page thesis on Health Program Planning in Indonesia . I loved living in the Islands , and were it
not for "rock fever" (the feeling of being stuck out in the middle of the ocean), I
might never have left. While in school at UH, I learned to speak and read a
little bahasa Indonesia ; I took music classes in koto and jamisen
(the Okinwawan shamisen, and classes in Japanese, Korean and Pilipino dance.
Then I headed back east where I enrolled in the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and got my MPH in Public Health
Education in the summer of 1965. My special interest was family
planning. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that was the beginning of
my slide into the field of sexuality.

Did you end up working in family planning?

Yup, in Detroit , New Hampshire , West Virginia , and eventually
California , arriving here in 1971.

How did you find yourself professionally involved in sexuality?

Through lucky chance. Within weeks of moving to California in 1971,
I met Maggi Rubenstein, and eagerly joined the women's consciousness-raising
group she was starting. An R.N., Maggi was one of the three courageous women
who started San Francisco Sex Information, and I had the privilege of being in the
very first group of volunteers. After that, I trained and worked in the Sex Counseling Program at University of California at San Francisco for several years.
The rest, as they say, is history. 

Tell us about your travels.

Upon leaving Oberlin, I took a very long trip--around the world--staying in India for six months and visiting several other Asian countries, for a total of more than 11 months abroad. At the time it seemed like no big deal (except that traveling by myself was pretty darned lonely), but as I look back, it seems like a huge adventure. I learned a whole lot--about the world and about myself. I've been an Indiophile ever since then but didn't return to South Asia until January of 2005, when I went to Mumbai ( Bombay ) on a Reality Tour with a Global Exchange group attending the World Social Forum there. On that tour we also went out to some rural villages to visit small economic development projects, and spent one unforgettable day in Dharavi, the largest urban slum in the world with more than a million residents. My first trip into the southern hemisphere, took me to Australia in April of 2007 to attend the World Congress of Sexual Health, and to experience a five day desert safari in the Northern Territories .

Word is that you're a singer of sorts.

Well, I'd sung in one choir or another since high school, and I did lots of folk music in my years at Oberlin. Within weeks of moving to California in 1971 I joined the chorus at the College of San Mateo , later known as Masterworks Chorale. We had fewer than 50 singers in the group then, but we always performed with professional soloists and, starting a few years after I joined, with a professional orchestra. At its largest, Masterworks Chorale grew to 180 singers and we performed all the well-known and several lesser-known major choral works in both San Mateo and San Francisco . I stayed with Masterworks, under the inspiring leadership of Maestro Galen Marshall, for 25 years; during that time I attended well over a thousand rehearsals. I had the thrilling experience of singing with Masterworks at Lincoln Center and in Carnegie Hall, and traveled with that choir on three concert tours as well: to China (and Hong Kong), Spain, and Central/Eastern Europe. After a short break from singing with Masterworks, I joined the chancel choir in my church, a strong choir with a sterling director, and I derive a lot of satisfaction from singing there.

And now what do you do with music?

Quite a bit. I played taiko drums for a while and sometimes wish I was still doing it.
I'd like to take up international--especially Balkan--dance again (although I'm not sure my aging left knee will allow it); it was a great love of mine through the sixties. In 2004
I started playing English hand-bells also at the Unitarian Church in Oakland .
That's a new musical challenge for me. Each bell ringer has to find his or
her two to four notes in a sometimes big fat chord, or in the middle of a fast run.
I've been a recorder player since high school. In 2001 I joined the East Bay Recorder Society and enjoy the monthly sessions a great deal. Fortunately, I'm quite a good sight reader so I don't have to practice between playing sessions.

Did you say "church" choir? I thought you were Jewish.

I am Jewish--a Jewish Unitarian-Universalist. I was drawn to First Unitarian Church of Oakland in 1992 when I moved to the east side of San Francisco Bay . I value the congregation's commitment to social justice, especially in the downtown neighborhood just blocks from my home. I treasured the co-ministers, Janne and Rob Eller-Isaacs, who moved to a church in St. Paul , MN in 2001, and the strength of the church community. Our current minister Kathy Huff is taking our congregation to new heights in many ways. Being active in the life of this congregation--a part of this beloved community--continually reminds me of what is important in life.

Any important pieces of your life you haven't told us about?

One especially. In 1992, I converted Good Vibrations and Down There Press into a worker cooperative. At the time, there were fourteen owners (including me in my new status as an equal owner). While I'm no longer an employee or owner, the company continued as a cooperative growing to 100 worker-owners until early in 2006. At that time the current owners, more than 70 of them, voted to abandon the cooperative ownership structure in favor of a more conventional corporate structure so that Good Vibrations could attract outside investors. Yes, I was sad to see the coop dissolve, but I heartily approve one of the goals of the transition which is to expand retail operations into cities around the U.S. that do not currently have a sex positive sex-toy store.

You've become very involved in socially responsible investing.

Yes, and I have a deliberately broad notion of what socially responsible investing encompasses. It starts with philanthropy and progresses through personal lending to friends in business, lending to cohousing groups and to local and national community loan funds, and purchasing shares in (or making loans to) small privately held companies that are doing environment-saving work. It ends where socially responsible investing usually both starts and ends; that is, I own mutual funds that invest only in companies that pass the funds' social screens.

Rumor has it you received some public honors in 2008

Yes,I received two recognitions that I'm both proud of and humbled by. Early in 2008, the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality granted me an honorary Doctor of Arts degree for my more than 30 years of work in the sex field. And in the Spring, I was designated "Champion of the Movement" by the Cohousing Association of the United States, who recognized me for "fifteen years of vision and leadership."

What will you be up to over the coming years?

I have a couple of books up my sleeve relating to sexuality, but I'm more
likely to cajole someone else into writing or editing them, than I am to write or
edit them myself. (Curious? See details on other pages). From time to time, I still
enjoy presenting sexuality workshops around the US and Canada . Since Down There Press has been sold to another publisher who will not be reissuing any of the nine
titles that I've written or edited, I hope to find an alternative way to make those
books available to meet continuing demand.

I hope to spend more time with my grandchildren before they get too
much more grownup. And I'm still deeply involved with the cohousing movement. Having completed eight years on the board of the Cohousing Association of the United States (formerly The Cohousing Network), I agreed to coordinate the Association's national conference, held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (one of my alma maters)
in July of 2006.The end of 2008 marks the formal end of my six or seven
years as Tours Coordinator for Coho/US, but I expect that I will continue
to have my fingers in several pies within the organization.

Check Out Joani's New Blog at SF Gate!