Sheila Kuehl
Kuehl was elected to the California State Assembly in 1994, becoming the first openly gay person elected to the California legislature. While running for office Kuehl found she was able to offset some negative stereotypes people had about lesbians thanks to their familiarity with her role as Zelda. She told an interviewer "When people know gay people personally, they tend to feel differently about the whole community. And all of a sudden, here's a person that they knew very well that they found out was lesbian."
Helen Shiller
At the time, Shiller was 30 years old and the editor of "Keep Strong", a leftist magazine. Shiller's first attempt at elected office was to join a multi-way challenge to Axelrod. "I ran for alderman of this [46th] ward in 1978. I was terrified. I was very shy, afraid to speak to more than five people at a time," Shiller recalled in 2003. Shiller picked up much of the support that Young Lords founder and leader Jose Cha Cha Jimenez had in Jimenez' unsuccessful challenge to Cohen in the 1975 elections. He was running primarily as a defence against the FBI's CointelPro repressive program and to expose the displacement of Latino and lower income areas from the lakefront and near downtown by the Richard J. Daley machine. He still received 39% of the vote coming in second in a three-way race. Shiller's base of support was the same geographic center of the ward, an area of high density, low-income families between Broadway and Clark Street. Shiller campaigned pledging to work to keep the disadvantaged of Uptown from being displaced by gentrification.