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Australian-American writer, director, and producer Colin Higgins (1941-1988) is best known for his screenplay of the cult classic Harold and Maude and for directing the more mainstream comedies Foul Play and 9 to 5.
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Lesbian and Bisexual Female Poetry before Stonewall |
| Even though no canonical list of pre-Stonewall Lesbian Poetry exists, a significant number of women wrote and read a wide range of poems that expressed their sensibilities as woman-loving women. | ||
Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), an American expatriate known as the Amazon, was the muse and inspiration of other writers and a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist in her own right.
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American poet, literary scholar, and educator, Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) is best known for her poem "America the Beautiful" and for her relationship with Wellesley College colleague Katharine Coman.
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Aphra Behn (ca 1640-1689), an English writer known to her contemporaries as a "scandal" for her writings and her flamboyant personal life, was one of the most influential dramatists of the late seventeenth century. Today, she is better known as a poet and novelist with a fascinating biography.
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| Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), who is widely acknowledged as one of the finest twentieth-century American poets, encoded a lesbian identity in her poems. | ||
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a reclusive American poet more appreciated after her death than before, wrote poems and letters to her sister-in-law Susan that are both passionate and elusive in their homoeroticism.
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Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), a bisexual poet and novelist who published under the initials H. D., wrote poems and autobiographical prose works that celebrate women's romantic relationships with each other.
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| Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913), writing as Michael Field, collaborated on a number of plays and eight volumes of verse, many of which had lesbian contents. | ||
| Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986), known to many as the "poet-warrior," was unabashedly visible as an independent woman, a lesbian, a writer, and a bohemian-anarchist at a time when such visibility was both unusual and potentially dangerous. | ||
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958) was the first African American to have a play staged. In addition to that historic achievement, her poetry regularly appeared in journals, newspapers, and anthologies during the era now known as the Harlem Renaissance, though she faded into near obscurity after the 1920s.
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| Although Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) is best known as the author of The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, she also wrote five volumes of poetry. | ||
Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a poet, translator, essayist, literary biographer, and public speaker. Her poetry is extremely frank, forthrightly sensual, and often overtly lesbian.
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Charlotte Mew (1869-1928), an English poet, does not explicitly mention her lesbianism but encodes the emotional pain of hiding her sexuality in complex dramatic monologues on themes of loss and isolation.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), an American poet and playwright, expressed her bisexuality in both her life and her work. She achieved fame early on in life as the pretty, petite "It Girl" of poetry, but was criticized for turning to social politics and activism starting in the 1930s.
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Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was a Chilean educator, journalist, feminist, diplomat, and Nobel laureate who celebrated women and motherhood in poems and essays that are frequently homoerotic.
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Sophia Parnok (1885-1933) was Russia's only openly lesbian poet during her lifetime. The lyrics in her first book of verse, Poems (1916), presented the first, revolutionarily nondecadent, lesbian desiring subject ever to be heard in a book of Russian poetry.
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| Geneviève Pastre (b. 1924), one of France's leading lesbian theorists and political activists, was a respected French poet and academic in her fifties when she came out as a lesbian and made radical lesbian feminism the root of her political and literary work. | ||
Katherine Philips (1632-1664) was called "The Matchless Orinda" and considered "The English Sappho" of her day. Two-thirds of her poems concern erotic relationships among women.
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Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) has aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics and is America's most widely read lesbian poet. Her work has won both fans and many critical accolades including the National Book Award.
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Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was such a devout Anglo-Catholic that one doctor diagnosed her with "religious mania." Though her piety repressed her sexuality, she wrote poetry that included vividly erotic female-to-female affection.
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| Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) wrote poetry that broke the silence of many aspects of female experience such as sex, menstruation, breast-feeding, mother-daughter relationships, and female aging. Her work has been enormously important to many feminist and lesbian readers. | ||
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) was a prolific author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, though she is best known for her relationship with Virginia Woolf and for her scandalous love affairs.
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Sappho (ca 630? B.C.E.), an ancient Greek poet born on the Isle of Lesbos, has been admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets. Today, she is esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.
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May Sarton (1912-1996), the author of more than forty books, gradually revealed her lesbianism in her writing. Sarton worked successfully in poetry, the novel, essays, and the journal.
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Anna Seward (1742-1809) was one of the best known English women poets of her time. She had several romantic friendships with women and celebrated the Ladies of Llangollen in verse.
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Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) was a poet and novelist who surrounded herself with gay men, some of whom became her artistic collaborators. Although it is not clear that she ever experienced a sustained sexual relationship with anyone of either sex, her closest emotional bond was with another woman.
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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), in addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.
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| May Swenson (1913-1989), one of America's most inventive and incisive poets, wrote many love poems celebrating lesbian sexuality. | ||
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) reflected in her poetry the reality that the strongest emotional relationships in her life were with women.
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Maria Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is widely considered one of the four greatest twentieth-century Russian poets. She described herself as bisexual, but the lesbian theme found throughout her poetry, prose, letters, and journals has been ignored or minimized by Western biographers and concealed by Russian scholars.
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| Renée Vivien (1877-1909), who had many affairs with women, openly celebrated lesboerotic love in her poetry and dreamed of women-controlled spaces in an era when most women were still domestically confined. | ||
| Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978), a poet, novelist, and short story writer, is an important lesbian voice of the earlier twentieth century. | ||
Frida KahloBISEXUAL MEXICAN ARTIST AND INTERNATIONAL ICON, 1907
Harold NorsePOET AND MEMOIRIST OFTEN CATEGORIZED AS A BEAT WRITER, 1916
SINGER, TALK-SHOW HOST, AND PRODUCER OF TELEVISION GAME SHOWS, 1925
AMERICAN SERVICEMEMBER WHO BECAME ONE OF THE MOST VISIBLE GLBT ACTIVISTS OF THE 1970s, 1943
COMPOSER OF INNOVATIVE AND EMOTIONALLY RESONANT FILM SCORES, 1964
George CukorPREEMINENT "WOMAN'S DIRECTOR" AND GAY AUTEUR, 1899
Gian Carlo MenottiPROLIFIC AND INDEFATIGABLE CLASSICAL COMPOSER, 1911
Philip JohnsonCONTROVERSIAL AND PROVOCATIVE FORCE IN AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE, 1906
CREATOR OF THE MONK, ONE OF THE GREAT WORKS IN THE GLBTQ LITERARY TRADITION, 1775
Nikola TeslaSCIENTIST AND PROLIFIC INVENTOR, 1856
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH-CENTURY, 1908
ONE OF THE LEADING AMERICAN COMPOSERS OF CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE 20TH CENTURY, 1915
POET AND ESSAYIST WHO CALLED FOR THE REJECTION OF STEREOTYPES OF BISEXUALS, 1936
David HockneyONE OF THE LIVELIEST ARTISTS OF THE 1960s, 1937
ACTIVIST AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION, 1965
Marcel ProustAUTHOR OF REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, AN IMPORTANT, MULTI-VOLUME GAY NOVEL, 1871
COMPOSER, LYRICIST, AND PROPONENT OF THE "DIVA MUSICAL", 1931
Neil Francis TennantA MEMBER OF THE PET SHOP BOYS ROCK GROUP, 1954
ACTOR, STAND-UP COMEDIAN, AND ACTIVIST, 1965
Tab HunterHANDSOME MOVIE IDOL WHOSE ROMANTIC HETEROSEXUAL ROLES CONCEALED HIS HOMOSEXUALITY, 1931
SPECTACULARLY SUCCESSFUL DESIGNER KNOWN FOR ELEGANT, SOPHISTICATED FASHIONS, 1934
PIONEER OF CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES IN ART, 1946
Henry David ThoreauAMERICAN WRITER AND RECORDER OF THE BEAUTY AND THE AGONY OF LOVE BETWEEN MEN, 1817
George Washington CarverAGRONOMIST AND EDUCATOR, 1864
Stefan GeorgeONE OF GERMANY'S FOREMOST POETS AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH-CENTURY, 1868
WRITER WHO TREATS HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS MATTER-OF-FACTLY IN HER NOVELS, 1918
AMERICAN PIANIST WHO WON SUDDEN FAME IN THE 1950s, 1934
TELEVISION NEWS CORRESPONDENT, 1975
FIRST OPENLY BISEXUAL MEMBER OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 1976
This feature lists people about whom glbtq.com has both entries and complete birth dates. Each person listed has made a significant contribution to or had a significant impact on glbtq culture or history. Most are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, though some are either heterosexual or cannot be adequately characterized using any of these labels.
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On July 9, 2014, state district Judge C. Scott Crabtree forcefully declared Colorado's ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional. Finding that the state's voter-approved ban "bears no rational relationship to any conceivable government interest," Judge Crabtree ruled that the ban violates the due process and equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He then issued a stay of the decision pending an appeal to the state Supreme Court by Colorado Attorney General John Suthers.
NGLTF's Rea Carey.
On July 8, a number of leading glbtq advocacy organizations announced that they were withdrawing their support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which passed the U.S. Senate in 2013, but which has been languishing in the House since then. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the nation's oldest glbtq civil rights organization, which has been campaigning for the passage of ENDA for more than two decades, announced that it could no longer support the current version of the bill. Soon after NGLTF's announcement, six other advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, and Pride at Work, also withdrew their support for ENDA.
On June 7, 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that conforms the language of the state's marriage laws to the reality of marriage equality, which returned to California on June 28, 2013, soon after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the proponents of Proposition 8 lacked standing to appeal. That ruling meant that Judge Vaughn Walker's 2010 decision declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional would prevail.
As the United States makes progress toward equal rights for all, the celebration of America's Independence Day is all the sweeter in 2014. In recognition of the Fourth of July, we offer several strikingly different music videos appropriate to the holiday.
YouTube photo.
Nancy Garden, pioneering author of young adult novels, died of a heart attack in her Carlisle, Massachusetts home on June 23, 2014. She is survived by her longtime partner and wife since 2004, Sandra Scott.
On July 1, 2014, U.S. District Judge John Heyburn struck down Kentucky's ban on same-sex marriage. He ruled that the ban violates the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution. In February, in a case known as Bourke v. Beshear, Heyburn ruled that the state must recognize valid same-sex marriages performed in other states. In that decision, he hinted that the ban itself was unconstitutional, but that question was not then before him. After the ruling issued on July 1, in which he declared the ban unconstitutional in a case fittingly entitled Love v. Beshear, Judge Heyburn stayed his decision pending appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The reception hosted by President and First Lady Obama at the White House on June 30, 2014 in honor of Pride Month was not only celebratory but also remarkably personal. The President's remarks featured the long and familiar litany of accomplishments made in the area of equal rights during his tenure in office and the announcement of executive orders prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. But it also included acknowledgment of the early support of gay friends and neighbors from Chicago (including a gay couple who recently married after 51 years together) and a tribute to Dr. Lawrence Goldyn, who was an openly gay college professor at Occidental College during Obama's freshman year there.
Congratulations to Therese M. Stewart, who on June 28, 2014 was nominated by Governor Jerry Brown to serve on California's First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco. Since 2002, Stewart has served as San Francisco's Chief Deputy City Attorney, and has led the city's litigation efforts to secure marriage equality, including in challenges to Proposition 8. If Stewart's appointment is approved by the state's Commission on Judicial Appointments, she will be the state's first openly lesbian appellate judge.
Sen. Jessie Ulibarri and Louis Trujillo.
On June 25, following the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit's ruling declaring Utah's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, Boulder County Colorado began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall said that the Tenth Circuit's declaration that marriage is a fundamental right prompted her action. "Our family, friends and co-workers have been treated as second class citizens for long enough," she said. "Unless a Court in Colorado or the U.S. Supreme Court tells me otherwise, I plan to begin issuing licenses." One of the marriage licenses issued on June 26 was to Colorado state Sen. Jessie Ulibarri and his partner Louis Trujillo.
June 26, 2014, the anniversary of both Lawrence v. Texas and Windsor v. U.S.A., is a time to reflect on how these crucial Supreme Court rulings have altered the legal landscape of glbtq people in the United States.
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Film Actors: Lesbian and Bisexual Female
Film Directors: Lesbian and Bisexual Female
Lesbian Paris (ca 1900-1940)
Women's Activism at the Turn of the 20th Century
Imaging Derek Jarman
Eric Patterson on Brokeback Mountain
Gay Male Art in America: 1900-1969
Nineteenth-Century American Art
The Photography of Laurie Toby Edison
