Editor’s Note: This “Open Letter” started as a lengthy letter to the editor, but it was too long for that format and warranted more prominent placement. The author was so kind as to adapt the letter to this format.
MoreThe G&LR talks with an eminent LGBT psychiatrist, Jack Drescher
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BERLIN CABARETS between the wars had their fair share of homosexual headliners (“homosexual” being the period term). Wilhelm Bendow, affectionately known as Lieschen, portrayed a scatterbrained, giggling “nance” whose naïve questions and double entendres provoked hilarity. Claire Waldoff, a regular at the lesbian clubs with her henna-dyed Prince Valiant hairdo and husky voice, sang of “Kicking the Men Out of Parliament.” They were both wildly popular with all ranks of society.
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The Institute was Europe’s gathering place for sexual minorities, especially trans people. Some of the first to undergo gender reassignment surgery stayed at the Institute.
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John Randolph was first elected to the House in 1798. His androgynous appearance bewildered his contemporaries.
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Capote was sui generis, way ahead of his time as far as being openly gay, and the women he called his swans were right out of an Edith Wharton novel.
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I know a good deal more about Stettheimer now thanks to Barbara Bloemink’s new biography of the artist. Bloemink revises the previous profile of Stettheimer as a “cloistered spinster” or an “eccentric maiden aunt.”
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When this writer traveled to Boulder, Portland, Dallas, and St. Louis in the 1970s, gay men in those towns recognized that what I was doing before meeting them was “cruising,” even though few in their space and time knew how to do so.
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While still in college, F. O. Matthiessen met Russell Cheney on a ship coming back from Europe. It was love at first sight—on Matthiessen’s part at least.
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Since 1990, the term Two-Spirit has come to mean many things: “LGBT Native Americans”; or those who blend male and female spirits.
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