Elsa Gidlow
by Susan Stryker, Director, GLBT Historical Society
Lesbian pioneer Elsa Gidlow has been in the news recently, in spite of
the fact that she died in 1986.
A few weeks ago the State of California released records of hearings
conducted throughout the state in the 1950s and '60s by the federal
government's very own witch-hunting organization, better known as the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC investigated Hollywood writers
suspected of scripting subversive movie plots, hounded University of
California professors who refused to sign loyalty oaths, harassed labor
leaders, and generally made
life miserable for anybody who'd had a thought that strayed somewhere to the
left of reactionary Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover.
Gidlow was called in for questioning by HUAC mostly because she was a white
woman living in Marin County in an openly lesbian relationship with a woman
of color from the Carribean. She had nothing but nasty things to say to the
Feds about communists, the recently released records revealed, since her own
political sympathies lay with the anarchists who considered Marxism just
another ideology of state-sponsored oppression.
Gidlow, pictured here with her lover Isabelle Quallo on a trip through the
American Southwest in the 1950s, had been born in England in 1898. She moved
with her family to Canada in 1904 and spent her young adult years in
Montreal. A freelance journalist who wrote the first volume of explicitly
lesbian love poetry published in North America, Gidlow moved to San
Francisco in 1926 after spending a few years in New York.
Gidlow was part of Northern California's bohemian intellectual and artistic
scene for over 50 years. She was friends with Ansel Adams and Kenneth
Rexroth, among many others. Along with Alan and Jano Watts, she co-founded
the Society of Comparative Philosophy and helped popularize Budhism among
non-Asian Americans. She was involved with the early lesbian social and
advocacy organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, during the 1950s, and was
part of the psychedelic counterculture of the '60s. In the '70s she was
recognized as a foremother of the lesbian feminist community, and her
"Druid Heights" estate in rural Marin County became something of a women's retreat,
as well as a secluded sanctuary for artists and cultural activists of all sorts.
Gidlow once said, "We consider the artist to be a special sort of person.
It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist."
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