Elsa Gidlow



Elsa Gidlow (29 December 1898 – 8 June 1986) was an English-born, Canadian-American poet, freelance journalist, and philosopher. She is best known for writing On A Grey Thread (1923), possibly the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America, and for helping to establish Druid Heights, a bohemian community in Marin County, California.

Quotes

 * If there was a problem connected with my being a lesbian, even after I became aware of it, it was the loneliness, the fact that I didn't know anybody else like me.
 * Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), as cited in Palmer, Chris, October 6, 1978, "'Word is Out' an important film on gays", Bangor Daily News.


 * We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.
 * As cited in West, Celeste, 1986, "In Memoriam: Elsa Gidlow", Feminist Studies, 12 (3), 614.


 * We are returned to mystery and the power of cooperating with life—rather than, as so often now, working against it.
 * On organic farming, in Belasco, Warren James, 2007, "The Organic Paradigm", Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, Cornell University Press, ISBN	0801473292, p. 69.

Quotes about Elsa Gidlow

 * the memoirs of poet Elsa Gidlow and civil rights and peace activist Barbara Deming evidenced the struggle with which so many have engaged for a lesbian identity rooted in self-esteem and dignity. In publicly affirming who they were, each encouraged the sense of continuity and tradition central to the formation of lesbian archives.
 * Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)


 * Superficially, she suggested that she was a very respectable and demure maiden lady, but someone had put raven's blood in her mother's milk.
 * Watts, Alan, 1972, In My Own Way, as cited in her obituary, June 10, 1986, San Francisco Chronicle.