Karen Anna
a remembrance by Lance D. Collins:
Karen Anna, together with others, started a weekly meeting group called the Maui Gay Rap Group at the Kahului Library in December of 1976. Originally envisioned to serve as an alternative socializing forum to bars, the meetings would bring together up to a hundred LGBT folks in Maui, local and newcomer, native and settler. However, as the meetings continued, the group began to turn into both a support group and a community organizing group, subsequently renamed the Maui Gay/Bisexual Rap Group.
Eventually, the group incorporated as Both Sides Now, Inc., a tax-exempt nonprofit, to handle the broadening work of community organizing. Karen started its newspaper and served as its editor. In 1990, the newspaper changed its name to Out in Maui and was the primary source of local LGBT news in Maui. The paper eventually circulated on different islands. Karen retired from editor duties in the early 1990s.
In 1984, Karen was part of the group of Maui community organizers that held an archipelago-wide retreat of over 150 LGBT community organizers in Hawai'i Island that offered workshops on a wide-range of topics from art to organizing to the law to spirituality.
Karen helped start a youth support group called Bridges in 1992 and served as one of its facilitators until her death in 2000. She also served as a volunteer counselor for Women Helping Women, the Maui AIDS Foundation and Hospice Maui, among other nonprofits.
Karen was a photographer with her work shown across the islands and beyond. She also worked for the independent weekly paper, the Maui Sun, until it closed in 1981. She also held regular lesbian poetry reading meetings at her house in Ha'iku and coordinated the Lesbians Over 40 group in the late 1980s.
Although of the second-wave feminist generation, her ideas, and practical lived-expression of those ideas, shared much in common with the third-wave feminist ideas involving sex-positivity, performativity and intersectionality.
Karen struggled with cancer for the last decade of her life and died 21 years after her 10-year-old daughter Kehau succumbed to the same disease.
Hawaiʻi Tribune-Herald 11/27/86
The interview clips of Karen Anna below appeared in Out In Paradise, a groundbreaking 1993 documentary produced by Sara Banks and Kate Sample. The film explores the lives of over 30 brave women as they discuss coming out, family, work and culture. With humor and candor, these women share the perplexity of living authentically in an island culture that for the most part preferred they stay in the closet.