#30 days of pride

outswanqueen:

️‍ HAPPY PRIDE MONTH, EVERYONE!! • 2018 ️‍

️‍ HAPPY PRIDE MONTH, EVERYONE!! • 2021 ️‍

30 Days of Pride Day 16- Alice Dunbar Nelson

Alice Dunbar Nelson was an American poet, journalist, teacher, and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to playing a role in the Women’s Suffrage Movement of 1910, she also became a voice for Black people on the subjects of lynchings, healthcare, education, and the Jim Crow Laws. 

Nelson’s writings touched upon her experiences in a white, male dominated industry as a writer, and of growing up as a biracial woman in Louisiana. In addition to her published work, Alice also kept diaries, which detailed her love affairs with women during her marriages to men. Her diary was published in 1984 and remains one of the few diaries of a 19th-century African-American woman. 

30 Days of Pride Day 15- Tallulah Bankhead

Tallulah Bankhead was an American actress and activist, perhaps best known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). Despite growing up in the American South as a member of a prominent political family, she spoke out against her southern contemporaries on their support of white supremacy and racial segregation. Bankhead also adopted foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. I

n her private life, she enjoyed relationships with both men and women, never publicly using the term “bisexual” to describe herself, preferring to use the term “ambisextrous” instead.

30 Days of Pride Day 14- Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich was a German-born American actress and singer, whose career spanned over 60 years, and was considered on of the highest paid actresses of her time. Dietrich, who was bisexual, enjoyed the thriving gay bars and drag balls of 1920s Berlin. The term “sewing circle,” coined by Dietrich was used to describe the underground, closeted lesbian and bisexual film actresses and their relationships in Hollywood. 

She was known for her humanitarian efforts during World War II fighting against Nazism, and for housing German and French exiles, providing financial support and even advocating their American citizenship. She died in Paris at age 90, and over 1,500 mourners flocked to the church of her funeral service.

30 Days of Pride Day 14- Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist who was one of the first outspoken medical advocates for sexual minorities, founding the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He maintained that sexual orientation was innate and not a deliberate choice, and he believed that scientific understanding of sexuality would promote tolerance of LGBTQ people. In addition to publishing works on sexology and sexual reforms, Hirschfeld also wrote about racism, politics, and the history of morals.

Hirschfeld was targeted by Nazis for being Jewish and gay; he was beaten by völkisch activists in 1920, and in 1933 his institute was sacked and had its books burned. He was forced into exile in France, where he died in 1935.

30 Days of Pride Day 13- Sara Josephine Baker

Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician notable for making contributions to public health, especially in the immigrant communities of New York City. Her fight against the damage that widespread urban poverty and ignorance caused to children, especially newborns, is perhaps her most lasting legacy. 

Baker spent much of the later part of her life with Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, a novelist, essayist, and Hollywood scriptwriter from Australia who identified as a “woman-oriented woman”. She became the first woman to receive a doctorate in public health, and to be a professional representative to the League of Nations when she served on the Health Committee for the United States from 1922 to 1924.

30 Days of Pride Day 12- Alberta Hunter

Alberta Hunter was an American jazz and blues singer and songwriter from the early 1920s to the late 1950s. Hunter was a lesbian and mixed in the famously liberal and accepting circles of LGBTQ jazz singers during what became known as the “Harlem Renaissance.” In the 1920s, Hunter met Lottie Tyler, niece of comedian Bert Williams, in Chicago in the late 1910s and the two were in an on-again, off-again relationship for many years until Tyler’s death. 

During World War II, Hunter took charge of a U.S.O. singing troupe, whom she took to Casablanca and entertained troops both during and after the war. They also performed for President Eisenhower, who invited them to a reception for British senior officer Bernard Montgomery. Her mother’s death soon after sparked a change in career choice, and she became a nurse.

Hunter resumed her singing career 20 years later in 1977, at the age of 82, and continued to perform until her death seven years later.

30 Days of Pride Day 11- Alan Turing

Alan Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist, considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. He was influential in the invention of the Bombe, which worked to decipher Enigma Machine-encrypted messages from the Germans during World War Two. His work gave the Allies the edge they needed to win the war in Europe, and provided the foundations for the eventual creation of the computer.

Turing died in 1954, aged just 41, two years after being outed as gay. Homosexuality was still a crime in Great Britain at the time, and Turing was convicted of “indecency,” required to undergo chemical castration. 

Following a public campaign in 2009, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for “the appalling way [Turing] was treated”. Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous pardon in 2013. The term “Alan Turing law” is now used informally to refer to a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.

30 Days of Pride Day 10- Natalie Clifford Barney

Natalie Clifford Barney was an American writer who hosted a literary salon at her home in Paris for more than 60 years, bringing together writers and artists from around the world. Her own works were often thematically tied to her lesbianism and feminism, and attendees of various sexualities expressed themselves and mingled comfortably at the weekly Salon gatherings. Barney later said she knew she was a lesbian by age twelve, and she was determined to “live openly, without hiding anything.”

30 Days of Pride Day 9- Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo was a Swedish-American actress, regarded as one of the greatest actresses and silver screen icons. For most of her career, she was the highest-paid actor or actress at MGM. 

In her private life, Garbo was known to have relationships with both women and men. She called her lesbian love affairs “exciting secrets,” and, along with lover Marlene Dietrich, called a group of Hollywood women her “Sewing Circle,” a discreet code for lesbian or bisexual actresses during Hollywood’s golden age. 

Retiring from film at 35, she became a mysterious, reclusive figure, never married, had no children, and lived alone as an adult. Throughout her life, she was known for taking long, daily walks in New York City, and "Garbo-watching” became a sport for admirers. Garbo also invested wisely during her retirement, leaving her entire estate of $32 million (equivalent to $66,000,000 in 2021) to her niece.

30 Days of Pride Day 8- Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge

Hall was a writer and poet, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in LGBTQ literature. Troubridge was a a British sculptor and translator, who notably introduced the French writer Colette to English readers. The couple lived together for almost 30 years, ending with Hall’s death at 53. They did not pretend to be “companions” or “friends”, but lived openly as a lesbian couple, despite the societal expectations placed on them. Troubridge would wear her late lover’s clothes and had them altered so that she could continue to do so.

30 Days of Pride Day 7- Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday was an American jazz and swing music singer, known for her distinctive phrasing and expressive, sometimes melancholy voice. 

In 1939, after singing her song “Strange Fruit,” about the lynching of African-Americans, Holiday received a warning from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a government agency which lasted from 1930 to 1968, to never sing the song again. Holiday refused and kept singing the song. FBN commissioner Harry J. Anslinger thus pursued her for decades, going as far as to arrest and handcuff her for drug possession to her hospital bed while she was dying.

In her personal life, Holiday was openly bisexual throughout her career and was known to date prominent actresses of the time. Her posthumous awards include being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame, and she is widely regarded as being one of the greatest singers in history.

30 Days of Pride Day 6- The Lady Chablis

The Lady Chablis was an American actress, author, and transgender club performer. Through exposure in the bestselling nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and its 1997 film adaptation, she became one of the first trans performers to be introduced to a wide audience.

In the book, Chablis and her larger-than-life adventures provided a counterbalance to the darker narrative of murder that was central to the book. Transgender actress Laverne Cox stated after her death, “I was captivated seeing an actual black trans woman in a major Hollywood motion picture killing it. She was salty and brash in her stage act and represents a generation of trans women entertainers we must never forget.”

30 Days of Pride Day 5- Sylvester

Sylvester was an American singer-songwriter, known for his falsetto singing voice, and hit disco singles in the 70s and 80s. Sylvester developed a love of singing through the gospel choir of his Pentecostal church. 

Leaving the church after the congregation expressed disapproval of his homosexuality, he found friendship among a group of black cross-dressers and transgender women who called themselves the Disquotays. Sylvester was an activist who campaigned against the spread of HIV/AIDS. Upon his death, he left future royalties from his work to San Francisco-based HIV/AIDS charities.

30 Days of Pride Day 4- Virginia Woolf

Woolf is considered one of the most important modernist writers of the 20th century and one of the most famous members of the Bloomsbury group.

She and her husband had much more liberal ideas about sexuality than general society did at that time. They were not monogamous, nor were Virginia Woolf’s lovers all men. Many of her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando: A Biography have bi characters, with Orlando telling the story of a man who magically becomes a woman at 30. He lives for more than 300 years without ageing and engages in relationships with both genders. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women’s writing and gender and transgender studies.

30 Days of Pride Day 2- Oscar Wilde

Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright, his most beloved works being The Picture of Dorian GrayandThe Importance of Being Earnest. At the height of his fame and success, Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Not long after his release, he died at age 46 from meningitis. Whilst imprisoned, he still wrote voraciously, stating in one letter,

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

In 2017, over 100 years after his death, Wilde was among an estimated 50,000 men who were pardoned for homosexual acts that were no longer considered offences under the Policing and Crime Act 2017 (homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967).