Portal:LGBT/Selected biography
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Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer. Known for his barbed wit, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years of hard labour after being convicted of the offence of "gross indecency". The lawyer H. Montgomery Hyde suggests this term implies homosexual acts not amounting to buggery in British legislation of the time.
Wilde was born into an Anglo-Irish family, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, to Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Elgee. Jane was a successful writer and an Irish nationalist, known also as 'Speranza', while Sir William was Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, and wrote books on archaeology and folklore. He was a renowned philanthropist, and his dispensary for the care of the city's poor, in Lincoln Place at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road. (MORE...)Romaine Brooks (May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970), born Beatrice Romaine Goddard, was an American painter who specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray. She ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing instead on the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements of the 19th Century, especially the works of James McNeill Whistler. Her subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats, but she is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work.
Brooks had an unhappy childhood with an emotionally abusive mother and mentally ill brother, which by her own account cast a shadow over her whole life. She spent several years in Italy and France as an impoverished art student, then inherited a large fortune upon her mother's death. Wealth gave her the freedom to choose her own subjects, and she often painted people close to her, such as the Italian writer and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney. (MORE...)
Natalie Clifford Barney (31 October 1876 – 2 February 1972) was an American expatriate who lived, wrote, and hosted a literary salon in Paris. She was a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist, but believed her life was her true work of art.
Her salon, held at her home on Paris's Left Bank for more than 60 years, brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many of the leading figures in French literature as well as the American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation. She worked to promote writing by women, forming a "Women's Academy" in response to the all-male French Academy, while also providing support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont to Truman Capote. She was openly lesbian and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900, considering scandal "the best way of getting rid of nuisances". (MORE...)
Jenna Jameson (born Jenna Marie Massoli on April 9, 1974) is an American pornographic actress and entrepreneur who has been called the world's most famous porn star, and "The Queen of Porn". She started acting in erotic films in 1993 after having worked as a stripper and glamour model. By 1996, she had won the three top newcomer awards from pornographic film industry organizations. She has since won more than 20 adult film awards, and has been inducted into both the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) and Adult Video News (AVN) Halls of Fame.
Jameson has stated that she is bisexual, and that she had slept with 100 women and 30 men off-screen in her life. She has stated the best relationship she ever had was her lesbian love affair with porn actress Nikki Tyler, which she documents in her autobiography. They lived together at the start of her porn career and again before her second marriage. Famous male boyfriends discussed in her autobiography include Marilyn Manson and Tommy Lee. (MORE...)
Larry Kramer (born June 25, 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut), is an American playwright, author, public health advocate and gay rights activist. He was nominated for an Academy Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was twice a recipient of an Obie Award. In response to the AIDS crisis he founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, which became the largest organization of its kind in the world. He wrote The Normal Heart, the first serious artistic examination of the AIDS crisis. He later founded ACT UP, a protest organization widely credited with having changed public health policy and the public's awareness of HIV and AIDS. He lives in New York City and Connecticut.
Kramer was a second child that his parents did not want. He enrolled in Yale where, in 1953, he tried to kill himself by overdosing on aspirin. The attempt was because he thought he was the "only gay student on campus," and the experience left him determined to explore his sexuality and set him on the path to fighting for gay people's worth. (MORE...)
Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher. Foucault's influence extends across the humanities and social sciences and into applied and professional areas of study. He was known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, parameters of educational timeframes, and the prison system, and also for his work on the history of sexuality.
Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most referenced volume, The Will to Knowledge was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality (scientia sexualis) and the emergence of biopower in the West. In this volume he attacks the "repressive hypothesis," the widespread belief that we have, particularly since the nineteenth century, "repressed" our natural sexual drives. He shows that what we think of as "repression" of sexuality actually constituted sexuality as a core feature of our identities, and produced a proliferation of discourse on the subject. (MORE...)Alan Mathison Turing, OBE (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer. He is often considered to be the father of modern computer science and Turing machines are to this day the central object of study in theory of computation.
During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
In 1945, Turing was awarded the OBE for his wartime services, but his work remained secret for many years.
In 1952, Turing was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo hormone therapy. Turing died after eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954. His death was ruled as suicide. (MORE...)Sir Ian Murray McKellen CBE, (born May 25, 1939) is a veteran English stage and screen actor, and the recipient of a Tony Award and two Oscar nominations. McKellen is perhaps best known to moviegoers in recent years for his roles as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and as Magneto in the X-Men trilogy. He was made a CBE in 1979 and knighted in 1991 for his outstanding work and contributions to the theatre.
While McKellen had made his sexuality known to his fellow actors early on in his stage career, it was not until 1988 that he came out to the general public, in a programme on BBC Radio 3. The context that prompted McKellen's decision was that the controversial amendment known popularly as "Section 28" was under consideration in the United Kingdom Parliament. McKellen has stated that he was also influenced in his decision by the advice and support of his friends, among them noted gay author Armistead Maupin.
In 2003, during an appearance on Have I Got News For You, McKellen revealed that when he visited Michael Howard, the Tory then-Home Secretary, in 1988 to lobby against Section 28, Howard refused to change his position but did ask him to leave an autograph for his children. McKellen agreed, but wrote "Fuck off, I'm gay." (MORE...).jpg/150px-Julian_Eltinge_(in_drag_and_not).jpg)
Julian Eltinge (born May 14, 1881; died March 7, 1941), born William Julian Dalton, was an American stage and screen actor and female impersonator. After appearing in the Boston Cadets Revue at the age of ten in feminine garb, Eltinge garnered notice from other producers and made his first appearance on Broadway in 1904. As his star began to rise, he appeared in vaudeville and toured Europe and the United States even giving a command performance before King Edward VII. Eltinge appeared in a series of musical comedies written specifically for his talents starting in 1910 with The Fascinating Widow, returning to vaudeville in 1918. His popularity soon earned him the moniker "Mr. Lillian Russell" for the equally popular beauty and musical comedy star.
Aside from the graceful femininity he exhibited onstage, Eltinge used a super-masculine facade in public to combat the rumours of his homosexuality. This facade included the occasional bar-fight, smoking cigars, and drawn out engagements to women (though he never married). He was also known to physically attack stagehands, members of the audience and others who remarked on his sexuality. Indeed, his sexual duality led to the creation of the term "ambisextrous" to describe him. (MORE...)Candy Darling (November 24, 1944 - March 21, 1974) was a pre-op transsexual Warhol superstar who starred in Andy Warhol's films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971). Candy Darling was born James Lawrence Slattery in New York to Theresa Phelan, a bookkeeper at Manhattan's Jockey Club and Jim Slattery, who was described as a violent alcoholic.
Early years - as a male - were spent in Massapequa Park, Long Island, New York where he and his mother had moved after his parents divorced. His step-brother Warren left home for the service, leaving Jimmy as the only child, and later denied his connection to Candy/Jimmy.
Jimmy spent much of his childhood absorbing the influences of US television and old Hollywood movies, from which he learned to impersonate his favorite actresses - his favorite being Kim Novak. He claimed to have "learned about the mysteries of sex from a salesman in a local children's shoe store" and finally revealed his inclination towards transvestism when his mother confronted him about local rumours which described him dressed as a girl frequenting a local gay bar called The Hayloft. In response Jimmy left the room and reappeared in full drag. His mother later said that "I knew then... that I couldn't stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented." (MORE...)Camille Anna Paglia (born April 2, 1947 in Endicott, New York) is an American social critic, intellectual, author and teacher. She is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist", and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."
She came to public attention in 1990, with the publication of her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Her notoriety as the author of this book made it possible for her to write on popular culture and feminism in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Paglia describes herself as a feminist, and as a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton and Ralph Nader. She is a strong critic of much of the feminism that began with Betty Friedan's 1962 The Feminine Mystique, and compared feminists whom she considered to be victim-centered to the Moonies. Her libertarian and Dionysian sexual world view embraces fetishism, pornography, prostitution, and homosexuality. (MORE...)
Angelina Jolie (born June 4, 1975) is an American film actress, a former fashion model and a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency. She is often cited by popular media as one of the world's most beautiful women and her off-screen life is widely reported. She has received three Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and an Academy Award.
Jolie has said in interviews that she is bisexual and has long acknowledged that she had a sexual relationship with her Foxfire co-star Jenny Shimizu, "I would probably have married Jenny if I hadn't married my husband. I fell in love with her the first second I saw her." (MORE...)James Robert Baker (October 18, 1946 - November 5, 1997) was an American author of sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction. A native Californian, his work is set almost entirely in Southern California. After graduating from UCLA, he began his career as a screenwriter, but became discouraged with that work and started writing novels, instead. Though he garnered fame for his books Fuel-Injected Dreams and Boy Wonder, after the controversy surrounding publication of his novel Tim And Pete, he faced increasing difficulty having his work published. This was a contributing factor in his suicide.
Baker's work has achieved cult status in the years since his death, and two additional novels have been posthumously published. First edition copies of his earlier works have become collector's items. In recent years, three of his novels have either been filmed or optioned for the movies.
(MORE...)Joan Chandos Báez (born January 9, 1941) is a bisexual American folk singer and songwriter known for her highly individual vocal style. She is a soprano with a three-octave range and a distinctive throat vibrato. In addition, she is noted for her activism in the areas of nonviolence, civil and human rights and, in more recent years, the environment.
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Quentin Crisp (December 25, 1908 – November 21, 1999), was an English writer, artist's model, actor and raconteur known for his memorable and insightful witticisms. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir The Naked Civil Servant brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and longstanding refusal to conceal his homosexuality. (MORE...)
