Top:Activist and pioneering women’s studies professor Eva Kollisch (b. 1925) and her life partner of nearly thirty years, poet Naomi Replansky (b. 1918), at the Sixth Annual Clara Lemlich Awards (2016).
Middle: Eva Kollisch in 1940 (left, reprinted from A Woman Like That, Larkin, 1999) and Naomi Replansky in 1941 (right).
Bottom: Kollisch and Replansky in their home (Bengiveno, 2015) and at the Poetry Society of America Awards (2013).
“I met Naomi at a reading of Grace Paley … I noticed this very, to my mind, beautiful and interesting-looking woman who was sitting there reading a book … We talked and very quickly she realized my accent and she could see that I was a German Jew, I mean, Austrian Jewish refugee, and she told me that she had done a lot of work translating poetry from the German and from the French. I told her I was teaching German and she said, ‘Oh, perhaps you know somebody who could help me. I need to brush up on my German. Do you have an assistant or a student who would work with me?’ She asked this very sincerely. And I said, 'Maybe I can work with you’ … We did give each other certain literary — we had a little literary exchange of reading poetry together, talking German and French literature, and I had a country house at that time, a shared country house, and I invited her up. I could see this is a woman who was really deeply wonderful and beautiful and I was nervous that she might be with somebody but it turned out she was not …"
—Eva Kollisch, interviewed by Kate Weigand for the Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project (2004).
“I grew up during the Depression. I was in the Young Communist League in the mid to late 1930s … To think that if Eva and I had met each other back then we would have considered each other mortal enemies! Yet we had the same motivation, to make the world a better and more just place.”
Charlotte Cushman, the brilliant and renowned 19th-century lesbian actress.
“As a woman who loved other women, Charlotte’s erotic relationships were certainly not conventional, but neither were they the sum total of her existence. And so I cannot read Charlotte Cushman as a lesbian merely in terms of her lovers but, rather, in relation to her sense of self, of possibility, of ambition. Her story is as irreducibly tied up in her autonomy as it is in her attraction and identification with other women.“ – Lisa Merrill, in When Romeo Was a Woman(1999).
“Miss Cushman possessed in a remarkable degree the power of attaching women to her. They loved her with utter devotion, and she repaid them with the wealth of her great warm heart.” – From her obituary in the Boston Advertiser (1876), as quoted by Lisa Merrill.
Top photo:Charlotte Cushman (Gutekunst, 1874).
Center Left:Charlotte and her lover, the writer Matilda Hays(1858).
Center Right:Charlotte and her longtime lover (and later biographer), the sculptor Emma Stebbins(1859).
Bottom Left:Charlotte and her lover, Emma Crow(undated).
Bottom Right: An engraving of Charlotte in the role of Romeo, opposite her sister, Susan Cushman, as Juliet (1858). Charlotte deliberately sought her sister for the role so as to provide social cover for the potentially scandalous blatant ardor she intended to portray onstage.
Photos from the collection of Norma and Virginia, featured in the film Lives:Visible.
“While doing background research for my interactive narrative Mixed Greens I met Patrick Gourley. I was looking for old photographs that would help me understand lesbian life in Chicago in the 1950s and early 60s. ‘I have a whole houseful of photos and objects,’ said Patrick. He wasn’t kidding. He had been a friend and caretaker of two elderly lesbians during the last decade of their lives. He showed me a trove of over 2000 snapshots taken by Norma and Virginia from 1939-1975. When I saw the photos I knew I had to make a film about them. Here were images of lovers and friends as they played, posed, worked, partied, drank, and aged. Norma and Virginia had left an amazing historical treasure …
“The photographs haunt me. As a young lesbian I knew women like Norma and Virginia. I was self-righteous and felt contempt for their butch/femme life. They lived in the closet, I proudly didn’t. However, the way Norma and Virginia lived and documented their lives complicates my idea of the closet. Assimilation comes at a price. I live a mainstreamed life in a different world – my partner and I can marry if we choose. We have gained so much, yet I am learning some things were lost. As I came out in the early 70s this community was slipping away, changed forever by second wave Feminism and Stonewall. I won’t let it disappear forever. These lesbian lives and the history they lived are too important.”
“Very often this year, when people asked me what I was working on, and I answered, ‘A book about Jewish lesbians,’ my answer was met with startled laughter and unmasked surprise bordering on disbelief, 'Are there many?’ — as if the juxtaposition Jewish/lesbian were just too much. To me, these responses had the force of warnings. I got the message. Or rather, it got to me. While I fought against silencing myself completely, I did begin to hesitate before answering, to assess the safety of the terrain. I began to understand the limits that the dominant culture places on 'otherness.’ You could be a Jew and people would recognize that as a religious or ethnic affiliation or you could be a lesbian and some people would recognize that as an 'alternative lifestyle’ or 'sexual preference,’ but if you tried to claim both identities — publicly and politically — you were exceeding the limits of what was permitted to the marginal. You were in danger of being perceived as ridiculous — and threatening …
"Combatting invisibility. At first it seemed an easy task. I would talk to Jewish groups about homophobia. I would talk to lesbian groups about anti-Semitism. I would talk to both groups about the need to affirm and accept difference. I would remind each group that invisibility has a trivializing, disempowering and ultimately debilitating effect on its members. And both groups would remember and understand. But it hasn’t been that simple, for each group has absorbed some of the myths and distortions about the other without any apparent consciousness of irony …
"I was pained but not surprised to feel invisible as a lesbian among Jews. I was terribly disappointed and confused to feel invisible as a Jew among lesbians. While lesbian-feminists have increasingly begun to acknowledge diversity, anti-Semitism is still not taken seriously in the lesbian-feminist movement. Anti-Semitism has not been included by name in the important litany of 'isms’ against which the movement has pledged itself to struggle: sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, ageism, able-bodyism …
"I have been distressed to find that many gentile lesbian-feminists with otherwise highly sensitive political awareness, are reluctant to give attention to anti-Semitism, to understand how it operates, and to consider seriously their participation in it. For it seems unlikely that any individual can altogether avoid internalizing the prejudices of the dominant culture …
"It seems incredibly ironic that the strong presence of Jewish lesbians (many with radical activist backgrounds) in the lesbian-feminist movement goes essentially unrecorded and unnoticed in any positive way by Jews and gentiles alike. Few lesbians have recorded the Jewish lesbian presence to any extent, and they are all Jewish writers: Nancy Toder, Elana Dykewomon (Nachman), Melanie Kaye, Irena Klepfisz, Alice Bloch, Ruth Geller, Harriet Malinowitz, Martha Shelley. The near invisibility of Jewish energy in the lesbian-feminist movement may itself be a result of anti-Semitism, real or feared: a response to the fear that if Jews were more visible as Jews, they would be accused of controlling the movement …
Again the nagging question. Should I make a fuss? … Then I remember. Whenever I 'made a fuss’ (i.e., raised the issue of lesbian invisibility) at a feminist session where the speakers failed to include lesbians in their presentations, I had the support of the lesbian community. It was understood that the discomfort was to be theirs, not ours. Speaking out now, as a Jew, would there be the same lesbian support?”
—Evelyn Torton Beck, from the introduction to Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology(1982).
Selected photos and illustrations from Country Lesbians: The Story of the WomanShare Collective (1976). Drawings by Billie Miracle. Photos by Carol Newhouse, Donna Pollack, Chez Touchatt, & Dian.
A selection of covers from The Lesbian Tide, 1971-1979. “This magazine is a feminist lesbian publication, written by and for the rising tide of women today. It will speak of their numbers, their lives, their ideas and their pride …” (Reverse cover, April 1972).
”Mother nature is my lesbian community, and she is large hearted and true.” CuntGarden, plans for “a cunt shaped salad/herb garden,” by Clove and Susun Weed.From Lesbian Land, edited by Joyce Cheney (1985).
Lesbian, feminist, writer, activist, artisan, and jeweler Kady (Kay) Van Deurs, “Axe Maker to the Queen” (1927-2003).
“Always and everywhere the double axe is a Goddess symbol. She has many names in many places. She is called The Queen of Heaven. So I call myself axe maker to The Queen … There was a time — a period of about 40,000 years — when almost everyone almost everywhere believed in The Goddess. Things must have been better for women then.” — Kady, in an ad for her jewelry (1979).
Top: “Drawing of Kady Wearing Axes Made by Many Women,” by Paula Gottlieb (1981).
Photos: (1) At the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice (Lynn Marie, 1983; Peace Encampment Herstory Project); (2) At the Seneca Army Depot (Barbara Adams, 1983); (3) At the “Hold Hands” demonstration on the George Washington Bridge (Diana Davies, 1973; NYPL); (4) At a gay pride crafts fair (Diana Davies, 1971; NYPL).
Bottom: Patterns for silver earrings, by Kady Van Deurs (Panhandling Papers, 1989).
(Kady was the author of The Notebooks That Emma Gave Me: The Autobiography of a Lesbian (1978) and Panhandling Papers (1989), a collection of excerpts, essays, letters, and drawings. She, along with her partner Pagan, was featured in and on the cover of JEB’s Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians.)
Born and raised in Springfield, Illinois, Ruth Ellis came out as a lesbian as a teen. From the 1940s until the early 70s Ruth Ellis and her partner of over thirty years, Babe, opened their Detroit home to black lesbians and gay men, providing a much needed private social space and refuge, known as “The Gay Spot.” In her later life Ruth was the subject of the documentary film Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100(excerpt), and was for many years the unofficial grand dame of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. An interview with Ruth may be found in the RedBone Press anthology Does Your Mama Know (2009; 1997).
“There wasn’t very many places you could go when I came to Detroit, unless it’d be somebody’s home. In those days everything was hush hush. If you just knew somebody that had a home would accept you that is where you went. So after we bought our home, we opened it up to the gay people. That is where everyone wanted to come on the weekend. One would tell another, ‘I know where you can go. Go to Babe and Ruth’s.’ And then they would tell them where we lived and they would come.” — Ruth Ellis
Poster for the Mountain Moving Coffeehouse for Womyn and Children, a lesbian-feminist music, poetry, performance arts, and meeting space held in Chicago from 1974 to 2005. Named for the poem “Mountain Moving Day,” by Yosano Akiko. Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective.
“I was born here Second row third seat from the left listening to icon women who had helped create a dynasty for all us young artist wanna be’s and in that moment the spirit of women’s work washed over me and respect for women’s space became my belief I was born into womanry Birthed by three midwives who didn’t smack me into screams but dared me to speak and those three became my surrogates … Cause they were the three that birthed me And this is the house that raised me And you are the women that watched over me And that’s why I’m the woman that I turned out to be.”
—C.C. Carter on the closing of Mountain Moving Coffeehouse, December 10, 2005, as quoted by Sarah Lucia Hoagland in Philosophy in Multiple Voices(2007).
Letters between the artists Beatrice Fenton (1887-1983, top right) and Marjorie Martinet (1886-1981, bottom left), lovers of fifty years.Archives of American Art, Smithsonian.
“… I would pour out to you the tenderest and the most fervent love I know if you were here to-night, Beloved. I wish I could do more than write it, or that I could write poetry …” (undated)
“My love is like the sea; returning – as the tide … Lovingly with embraces pleading, gently then with kisses speaking, unto the lovely shore, your love.” (1915)
Jeanne Cordova and Janie Elvin in 1969, one year before Jeanne would join (and become president of) the Los Angeles chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, and two years before she would take over the L.A. D.O.B. newsletter that would become The Lesbian Tide. (Photo from the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives)
For more than forty years, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver lived on Cape Cod with the love of her life, the remarkable photographer Molly Malone Cook.
When Cook died in 2005 at the age of eighty, Oliver looked for a light, however faint, to shine through the thickness of bereavement. She spent a year making her way through thousands of her spouse’s photographs and unprinted negatives, which Oliver then enveloped in her own reflections to bring to life Our World - part memoir, part deeply moving eulogy to a departed soulmate, part celebration of their love for one another through their individual creative loves. Embraced in Oliver’s poetry and prose, Cook’s photographs reveal the intimate thread that brought these two extraordinary women together — a shared sense of deep aliveness and attention to the world, a devotion to making life’s invisibles visible, and above all a profound kindness to everything that exists, within and without.
Oliver ends Our World with The Whistler, a poem on never fully knowing even those nearest to us — a beautiful testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”
THE WHISTLER
All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden I mean that for more than thirty years she had not whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war- bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.
Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled through the house, whistling.
I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an- kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with for thirty years?
This clear, dark, lovely whistler?
From Mary’s FB:
To Mary’s beloved readers, we’re very sorry to share this sad news:
Mary Oliver, beloved poet and bard of the natural world, died on January 17 at home in Hobe Sound, Florida. She was 83.
Oliver published her first book, No Voyage, in London in 1963, at the age of twenty-eight. The author of more than 20 collections, she was cherished by readers, and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive, and the 1992 National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, Volume One. She led workshops and held residencies at various colleges and universities, including Bennington College, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching until 2001. It was her work as an educator that encouraged her to write the guide to verse, A Poetry Handbook (1994), and she went on to publish many works of prose, including the New York Times bestselling essay collection, Upstream (2016). For her final work, Oliver created a personal lifetime collection, selecting poems from throughout her more than fifty-year career. Devotions was published by Penguin Press in 2017.
Her poetry developed in close communion with the landscapes she knew best, the rivers and creeks of her native Ohio, and, after 1964, the ponds, beech forests, and coastline of her chosen hometown, Provincetown. She spent her final years in Florida, a relocation that brought with it the appearance of mangroves. “I could not be a poet without the natural world,” she wrote. “Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” In the words of the late Lucille Clifton, “She uses the natural world to illuminate the whole world.”
In her attention to the smallest of creatures, and the most fleeting of moments, Oliver’s work reveals the human experience at its most expansive and eternal. She lived poetry as a faith and her singular, clear-eyed understanding of verse’s vitality of purpose began in childhood, and continued all her life. “For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
did you know that in 1953 eisenhower issued an executive order which banned gay people from being employed in government
and it was specifically to root out lesbians who enjoyed the job security of government work
“To protect their careers, lesbian government workers moderated their behavior to avoid suspicion. They refused to socialize with other lesbians in public, attended social functions with gay men as their ‘dates,’ and carefully chose their wardrobes and makeup to project a feminine persona. Male employees who resented reporting to a female boss could trigger an investigation into her sexuality.” - Robert J Corber “Cold War Femme”
this era was called the lavender scare and was both a direct result of mccarthyism and the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness during ww2. over 10,000 lesbians and gay men lost their jobs and as a result the daughters of bilitis (the first ever lesbian activist group in the u.s.) formed in order to protect themselves and gay men
i remember how she / wd fuck me like a train / inexorably on & on like the cannonball run casey at the throttle / & at bat (but never striking out) john henry slamming home that sledge / whipping that machine / pistons driving driving she wd have me / like that
like stagecoach mary / ambushing my pussy at the pass (& no i wasn’t just along for the ride) all wet & sweaty like the horses our flanks heaving / nostrils flared inhaling that womanfunk her juice waz my oats my sweet hay my clover & sugarlump / all rolled into one all rolling into one hilarious hayride of a fuck/ one breakneck gallop / pony express don’t stop till we bring it to you / of a fuck
the way bill picket dogged that runaway bull/ till he dropped / & nat love rode that bronc/ the way we rode each other till one of us gave in or out & gave a war whoop & feathers flying/ & engine pumping/ & us pumping & she fuckin me/ like the last steam locomotive hellbent for pleasure
— Storme Webber, poem accompanying the article “Battle Stations: The Stations Collective Arms Itself on the Front Lines of Creativity,” OutWeek Magazine No. 6, July 31, 1989, p. 37; originally published in Serious Pleasure: Lesbian Erotic Stories and Poetry, Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1989.
“Since I’ve had to be without your sweetest presence, I have not wished to hear or see any other human being, but as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly till I shall enjoy your trust again. I look about and do not find my lover — she does not comfort me even with a single word.
Indeed when I reflect on the loveliness of your most joyful speech and aspect, I am utterly depressed, for I find nothing now that I could compare with your love, sweet beyond honey and honeycomb, compared with which the brightness of gold and silver is tarnished. What more?”
People of Pride #21 & #22: Phyllis Lyon & Del Martin
In honor of the 3-year anniversary of marriage equality in the United States, I wanted to highlight a passionate lesbian couple who helped make marriage equality a tangible reality! Theirs was the first same-sex wedding to take place in San Francisco in 2004 when Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered city clerks to issue marriage certificates to everyone, but that marriage was voided by the California Supreme Court later that year. Never taking “no” for an answer, Lyon & Martin would become the first same-sex couple to marry in California after marriage equality was legalized there on June 16th, 2008. Read more about them here:
