‘Sex Variants’ Were Everywhere
While “sex variant” was Henry’s term, the idea for the book came from Jan Gay, who had conducted 300 interviews with lesbians and gay men.
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Drs. Eliot and Dunham to the Rescue
Eliot and Dunham met in 1910 and would remain together “until death did them part” in 1969. It’s impossible to separate their 59-year relationship from the careers they built, even though they decided early on to guard against allowing their scientific careers to interfere with their personal relationship.
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Chile Wakes Up to the Real Gabriela Mistral
Few of Mistral’s poems have been translated, and she is not as well-known as her fellow Chilean and Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda. But her letters to Doris are now available in English, edited and translated by Velma García-Gorena in 2018, so perhaps her reputation is growing in the English-speaking world.
MorePBS Suffragist Series Left One Thing Out
THE VOTE is a four-part PBS docuseries chronicling the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. and their demands for national voting rights. The series’ premier broadcast this past July was timed as a prelude to August’s 100th anniversary celebration of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
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Two Outings in One
THE SLYLY TITLED My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a joyful combination of biography and memoir, mixing author Jenn Shapland’s discovery of author Carson McCullers (1917–1967) with her own journey toward embracing her sexuality.
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The Struggles of Barbara Deming
Along with unilateral nuclear disarmament, [Deming] soon added racial equality to her agenda and, by the end of the 1960s, radical feminism and lesbian rights.
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Two Women, a Ford, and a Rolleiflex
Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s work is widely available in its original German and translated into French and Italian. Two of Schwarzenbach’s books, in English translations by Lucy Renner Jones and Isobel Fargo Cole, have been published by Seagull. Her photographs are in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern and in the public domain.
MoreStop Straightwashing Susan B. Anthony
THE LEGENDARY FEMINIST Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) is too often the silenced queer elephant in the room of U.S. history. As we observe the 200th anniversary of her birth, which was on February 15th, it’s important to ask ourselves whether we as a society are finally willing to see her not only as a heroic fighter for women’s suffrage but also as a lesbian.
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An Interpretation of Susan Sontag
Moser is the most damning of Sontag with respect to her insistent avoidance or denial of her sexual orientation. As the author of Notes on Camp (1964), she displayed an intimate knowledge of gay life that no heterosexual at this time is likely to have had. Later on, although her lesbian affairs were an open secret, …
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A 19th-century ‘Oddity’ Who Kept a Diary
ANYONE who watches a regular diet of HBO knows that the show Gentleman Jack refers to a real-life English lesbian and landowner of the early 1800s, who is now the charismatic central character in this new series. Anne Lister, born into the scientifically-minded family that produced Joseph Lister and eventually lent its name to Listerine mouthwash, was also one of the great English diarists.
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