5 More LGBTQ Women Who Kicked History’s Ass
by Rori Porter
Thankfully, we now live in a world that has finally begun celebrating the incredible accomplishments of people in the LGBTQ community. Unfortunately, the focus is most often on the men, like Freddie Mercury or Andy Warhol or Alan Turing, despite the fact that there are plenty of women whose stories absolutely need to be told.
We've shared some of them before, but because there's no shortage of examples, we felt compelled to bring you more. Which we'll be doing right now.
Alla Nazimova: Silent Movie Actress Ousted From Hollywood For Being A Lesbian
Alla Nazimova was a silent movie actress known for her brash and fiery personality, peculiar method acting style, and reportedly jewel-toned violet eyes. A precocious child, she took to music and acting at a young age, and in her teens would study with renowned theater practitioner, Konstantin Stanislavski. That is, of course, until her Jewish ancestry was discovered, since Jewish folks were barred from participation in Moscow Theatre Arts.
In 1906, at the age of 26, Nazimova moved to New York City and soon led the casts of Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House on Broadway. During a life punctuated by war, she took on a role in War Brides in 1916 during World War I, commanding $13,000 per week on contract (that's $300,000 in today's dollars, kids). She moved to Hollywood in 1917 where she secured her career while also earning the rather metal recognition of “the most notorious Hollywood lesbian actress of all.”
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Sidenote: The Notorious LSBN is a pretty great name for a rapper.
She married twice, first to an actor named Sergei Golovin, and later to one Charles Bryant in a marriage that was very much described as “fake.” As it turns out, both marriages were at least partly to cover up the fact that Alla Nazimova was a lesbian. And while she used these relationships to sort of hide in plain sight, her relationship with Oscar Wilde’s niece, Dolly Wilde, among others, did not occur without at least a cursory run through the gossip mill.
Nazimova formed private lesbian women's clubs in Hollywood, and even coined the term “sewing circle,” which would become slang for lesbian and bisexual actresses. When her fame dwindled, Nazimova became more forthright with her lesbianism, daring to create edgier, more political films. She would go on to write and star in Salomé, a movie that is known as one of America's very first art films. Nazimova allegedly required an all-gay cast for the flick which, while unconfirmed, is pretty freaking remarkable even as a possibility given it was 1923 and almost half a goddamn century before the Stonewall Riots changed the face of the LGBTQ rights movement.
Cultural acceptance of LGBTQ folks dwindled in the following years, going from overlooked to anathema, falling roughly in line with McCarthyism when non-straight people were considered a national security threat, and Nazimova became irreparably linked with the lesbian movement of the early 20th century. Her brazenness, while once earning her acclaim, came to get her blacklisted in Hollywood, and she died impoverished, languishing as a tenant in the Garden of Allah Hotel which she had once owned.
The phrase “standing on the backs of giants” seems applicable here, given Alla Nazimova charted the course for other lesbian actresses to traverse through Hollywood, and she sacrificed pretty much everything for it.
Billie Holiday: Legendary Jazz Singer Who Had Multiple Bisexual Affairs
Renowned jazz singer Billie Holiday serves as a pretty rare example of early mainstream bisexual representation, having had multiple relationships with women throughout her life, most notably with actress Tallulah Bankhead. Holiday had some fairly tragic relationships with men throughout her life as well. As is common with the history of bisexual folks, narratives tend to push Holiday in one direction or another, focusing on her lesbian relationships or her straight ones, insisting that one or the other were flukes. It isn’t so easy to drop Holiday into a category, though, because while she cannot be easily defined as straight or lesbian, she never strictly identified as bisexual, either.
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“Label schmabel … I do what I want.”
Holiday lived a less-than-ideal life, and many details of her early childhood are somewhat speculative. Born Eleanora Fagan to a teenage mother, Holiday briefly experienced some stability when her mom got married, but that fell apart a few years later and they found themselves thrown back into poverty. Her father, believed to be Clarence Holiday, was only a fleeting presence in her life, and Holiday and her mother struggled just to get by. She even was sent to the House of the Good Shepherd at one point, a facility for troubled African American girls, after being charged with truancy.
It was during these troubled times that Holiday took strongly to music, and she and her mom would eventually move to New York City in the late 1920s where her mother worked as a prostitute. There Holiday found a home in the club scene, renaming herself after Billie Dove, a prominent movie actor of the time. Eventually she was discovered by producer John Hammond who had her do some recording with Benny Goodman and a legend was born.
Billie Holiday's obvious legacy is her music, but even though she was quite open about her bisexuality, it remains a little-known part of her life. And with very little representation out there, Holiday serves as a historical figure for others to identify with when bisexual icons are still scarce, closeted, or consistently mislabeled as straight or gay.
Tracey Norman: African American Transgender Model Who's Still Killing It Today
Tracey “Africa” Norman entered the modeling world in stealth mode, by which we mean she was keeping her transgender identity to herself out of personal safety. As a black girl from Newark, New Jersey, Norman being picked out of a lineup in a casting call for Vogue Italia was already an extraordinary story by itself, even without adding the fact that she’s transgender. And after that fortuitous bit of history, she was signed to a modeling agency and was photographed for the pages of Essence.
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“Listen, just point that camera in my direction and I’ll take care of the rest.”
In a meteoric rise through the industry, and without her identity being known, Tracey appeared on a Clairol box in the 1970s and would go on to sign a contract with Avon in addition to her appearances in magazines. But when her identity was discovered, she was blacklisted from the modeling industry in the U.S., eventually moving to Paris on a contract with Balenciaga. Yet despite moving halfway across the world, her secret was still out and modeling work became scarce, so she instead became a mainstay in the French burlesque and drag ball communities.
But her story doesn't end there, given that Norman is unique on this list in that she is alive and well and still making her mark on the beauty industry today. An absolutely stunning individual now well into her sixties, Tracey Norman is as much of a head-turner today as she was when she first got into the business. In 2016, Clairol even brought her back and featured her on their “Color As Real As You Are” line of hair color products. And because she is apparently still not done claiming firsts, Norman became one of two openly trans women to be featured on the cover of Harper's Bazaar.
Sally Ride: First American Woman (And Known LGBTQ Person) In Space
Sally Ride was a woman of firsts. You may know her as the very first woman in space, but she actually wasn't that. She was, however, the first American woman in space, on one mission spent some 343 hours up there, and was the only person to serve on the investigation boards for both the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters. Oh, and she is the first known LGBTQ individual to cross Earth's exosphere into orbit.
Of course, Ride faced elevated scrutiny compared to her male colleagues, being forced to field questions like “Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?” and “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?” Her response, classy and collected, was a simple: “How come nobody ever asks Rick those questions?”
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“I don’t, no. Do you get worried about zipping up your junk in your fly while in zero gravity? No? Just checking.”
An inspiration to girls everywhere, Sally Ride’s legacy is a great one. She has a spot on the moon named after her where two gravity mapping probes crashed. The U.S. Navy also named a research vessel after Ride, and President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Her hard work, bravery, and fierce intelligence give young queer people a role model to look up to, someone to point to and say, "Well, if she can become an astronaut, so can I!" And while she didn’t advertise her sexuality, for many, knowing about it now means a lot to many women.
Roberta Cowell: WWII Pilot And POW Who Publicly Underwent Gender Confirmation Surgery
Roberta Cowell isn’t exactly a household name, despite being one of the first people, and the very first person in Britain, to undergo gender confirmation surgery, following Danish trans woman Lili Elbe who had died from a similar procedure in 1931.
By basically being a guinea pig for a very untested and risky surgery, Cowell paved the way for transgender women to pursue life-saving procedures. Posthumously identified as Britain’s "first transsexual person," Cowell was brave as hell, even if she wasn't actually the first since, you know, trans people don't just pop into existence after surgery.
That bravery was definitely apparent in her life before transition, as she served as a Spitfire pilot in World War II, and was held as a prisoner by Nazis twice in her life -- once as a teenager while motoring across Europe when she was arrested and held for filming a Nazi drill, then again during the war, when she crashed her plane in Germany and was imprisoned for five months at Stalag Luft I, a POW camp.
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Her accommodations during wartime were less than ideal, is what we’re saying.
After the war, dealing with crushing trauma and gender dysphoria, Cowell left her family and came to befriend Michael Dillon, who is known as the world’s first openly trans, AFAB (assigned female at birth) physician. Dillon performed an orchiectomy (testicle removal) on Cowell, which allowed her to be medically labeled as intersex. This was important, since intersex folks were able to seek surgeries and transition, whereas it was a much more difficult and legally intensive process for trans folks.
Cowell used that intersex label to explain the validity of her transition, and her situation drew the intense and voyeuristic attention of the public. In 1954, she sold her story to Picture Post, and effectively became the poster girl for transgender women worldwide. And while we may not fully understand her motives or actions, particularly disowning her children to claim she was intersex and attain legal gender confirmation surgeries, it is hard to imagine the intense burden she was under as a trans woman seeking transition during the 1940s and ’50s.
Her bravery did set a trajectory for other trans women to also live their truths, and by opening herself up to public scrutiny, she brought the transgender struggle to the forefront of society.
