How did you score? These stellar lesbians / bi's made their mark in history. I hope these slick lesbians, bi's, ladies who had a "best girl friend" and those who... have roused you.
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Famous Lesbians In History Answers
1. A staggering $28.3 million! Eileen Gray's "Dragons" / "Fauteuil aux Dragons" armchair was sold at auction in February 2009, in Paris for €21.9 million (US $28.3 million)! Eileen Gray (1878 - 1976) was bisexual and mixed in lesbian circles / salons which included Romaine Brooks, Loie Fuller, Marie-Louise Damien (a singer with the stage name Damia), and Natalie Barney. She had relationships with Marie-Louise Damien aka Damia, a French singer and actress. Discover more inspiring lesbians through history.
$34.9 million - was the November 2021 auction price for Frida Kahlo's 1949 self-portrait Diego y yo, (Diego and I), which broke records by becoming the most expensive work by a Latin American artist ever sold at auction. Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) is an iconic Mexican painter who is "one of the most instantly recognisable artists" in history. Though she was married to the painter and muralist Diego Rivera, both had several extramarital affairs. Frida had affrairs with both men and women including with movie stars Dolores del Rio, Paulette Goddard and Maria Felix and rumoured affairs with Americans Josephine Baker and painter Georgia O'Keeffe among others. Wow she had a fair few! Discover more lesbian and bi visual artists
2. Wohooo - a Lesbian! The First Woman Nobel Prize for Literature Winner was Selma Lagerlöf, a Swedish author, who recieved the Nobel Prize in on 10 December 1909. Though in private social circles Selma was an out lesbian she married twice and in both, she never...consummated the marriage!
The Nobel Prizes are five separate prizes (in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace) that, were founded by Alfred Nobel's will of 1895. Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who is most famously known for the invention of dynamite. Since 1901 the Nobel Prizes are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." To-date, there are two other lesbian Nobel laureates. American Jane Addams (1860 – 1935) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and was the second woman to receive the Peace Prize. Jane donated her share of the prize money to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. American Carolyn Bertozzi was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, jointly with Morten P. Meldal and Karl Barry Sharpless, "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry".
Discover more inspiring lesbians through history and other female Nobel laureates.
3. Gotcha? Clemence Dane wrote the first English-language novel titled Regiment of Women containing "veiled" lesbianism which was published in 1917. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was published in 1928 while Orlando by Virginia Woolf was published in 1928. Regiment of Women was the debut novel of Clemence (a boy's name) Dane, the pseudonym of Winifred Ashton (1888 - 1965) a London-born novelist, playwright, and early feminist. The novel revolves around two female teachers at a private girls' boarding school... Discover more Sapphic novels.
4. Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey is known as "The Mother of Blues". Some of 'Ma' Rainey's lyrics contain risky references to lesbianism/bisexuality. The Prove It on Me lyrics are purported to refer to an incident in 1925 in which Ma Rainey was "arrested for taking part in an orgy with women from her chorus". Wow! Bessie Smith is known as the "Empress of the Blues" and became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day. Billie Holiday won four Grammy Awards for Best Historical Album and eight of her songs have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame including Strange Fruit, a powerful song by Abel Meropol (a.k.a Lewis Allen) about the lynching of Black men in the South. Discover more Sapphic Singers through history.
5. French - one of the first women to direct a movie was Alice Guy-Blaché (1873 –1968) who was... French. Her 1896 silent movie, La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage-Patch Fairy) was lost but her second adaption of the film 1900 La Fée aux Choux features a fairy and cabbages which appear to give birth to human babies! Alice also founded her own her own film company, Solax in 1910. Between 1936 - 1953, Tazuko Sakane (1904 - 1975) became the first and only woman director in Japan. Esther Eng (1914 – 1970) was the first female director to direct Chinese-language films in America. So rubbish - it's still so hard to be a female film director. Discover more Sapphic Filmmakers through history.
6. Invisible Glass - Katharine Burr Blodgett (1898 – 1979) was the inventor of... Invisible Glass. In 1938, her new discovery of measuring transparent objects led to her invention of non-reflecting glass. This "invisible glass" became a very effective device for physicists, chemists, and metallurgists. It was put to use in many consumer products from picture frames to camera lenses and has also been exceptionally helpful in optics. Amongst her various achievements, during the Second World War Katherine made another outstanding breakthrough: "smoke screens". The smoke screens saved many allied troops lives by covering the troops thereby protecting them from the exposure of toxic smoke. Katharine never married and lived in a Boston marriage for many years with Gertrude Brown.
The other two ladies never married, so... forgive my rascal presumption they may have played on our team :) German-born British astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750 - 1848) was the first woman to discover and document a comet in 1786 and also discovered several more comets including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet. Moreover, she discovered and cataloged 14 new nebulae (a nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space from which a star is born). She was a lady of many firsts including being the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist, the first woman in England to hold a government position... She never married so... forgive my rascal presumption!
Nor did Edith Clarke (1883 – 1959) marry. Edith invented the Clarke calculator which was an early graphing calculator. The Clarke calculator was a simple graphical device that solved equations involving electric current, voltage and impedance in power transmission lines. The device could solve line equations involving hyperbolic functions ten times faster than previous methods. She too was a lady of many firsts including being the first woman to earn an M.S. in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology circa 1918, the first woman to be professionally employed as an electrical engineer and the first female professor of electrical engineering in the US...
Discover more women of firsts and female inventors who changed the World.
7. In the UK, a blue plaque is a permanent sign (a historical marker) installed in a public place in the UK to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site. The Anne Lister Plaque originally described Anne Lister as "gender non-conforming", prompting an online petition which attracted more than 2,500 signatures to change the wording to... "lesbian". York Civic Trust agreed and apologised, unveiling a new re-worded plaque.
Anne Lister (1791 – 1840) was a rare (English) female landowner who wrote diaries, which contain over four million words! The dairies are written largely in secret code, documenting a lifetime of... lesbian relationships. Learn about interesting milestones in lesbian rights history in the UK.
8. Icelandic Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was the first LGBT woman Prime Minster / head of government in the world and the first openly LGBT person to head a national government. Jóhanna severed as Prime Minster of Iceland between 2009 and 13. Serbian Ana Brnabić is the second female LGBT head of government in the world and has been serving as the prime minister of Serbia since 2017. Gotcha! Australia hasn't had a lesbian prime minister.. yet :)
9. After WWII Suzy Solidor, a renowned French cabaret singer and socialite, was convicted by the Épuration légale (the "legal purge" was a wave of official French trials that followed the Liberation of France and the fall of the Vichy regime) as a collaborator and was exiled from France.
In recognition of her WWII heroics, legendary African-American entertainer Josephine Baker deservedly was awarded the Croix de guerre (Medal of Resistance) by the French military, and eventually she was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. Marlene Dietrich (German-born legendary actress) received the Medal of Freedom in 1947 by the United States government, which is the highest honour that can be bestowed on an American, for her "extraordinary record entertaining troops overseas during the war" and was also awarded the Légion d'Honneur by the French government for her wartime work.
10. 5 gold medals - Irene Wüst has staggeringly won 5 gold medals at consecutive Winter Olympic appearances! Irene is the most successful speed skating Olympian ever by achieving at least 1 gold medal in each of 5 consecutive Winter Olympic appearances (2006 Turin, 2010 Vancouver, 2014 Sochi, 2018 Pyeongchang and 2022 Beijing) and is the only athlete to win an individual gold medal in 5 Olympics, Summer or Winter. She is also both the youngest Dutch Olympic gold medallist (aged 19) and the oldest speed skating gold medallist (aged 35) in the history of the Winter Games. Check out more gutsy lesbian / bi sportswomen.
11. Czech–American Martina Navratilova has won the most Wimbledon Singles Championships = 9 Wimbledon Singles Championships out of 12 finals. Steffi Graf and Serena Williams both tied for second in the ranking with seven Wimbledon Singles Championships each.
The same year Martina became a United States citizen, Martina gave an interview to a New York Daily News sports reporter Steve Goldstein, during which she revealed that she had had a sexual relationship with Rita Mae Brown the author of Rubyfruit Jungle. Martina asked the reporter not to publish the article until she was ready to come out publicly. Trust not a reporter - the New York Daily News published the article that July. To firefight the unjust outing Martina and her girlfriend at the time, Nancy Lieberman (an American pro basketball player known as "Lady Magic"), gave an interview to Dallas Morning News columnist Skip Bayless, where Martina stated that she was bisexual and Lieberman identified herself as straight. Since then Martina has re-identified herself as a lesbian and worked hard for gay rights. Check out more gutsy lesbian sportswomen.
12. NASA Astronaut Dr Sally Ride has reached the highest by flying to... "outer space"! In 1983, Dr Sally Ride became the first and youngest American woman, the third woman to fly in space (after Russian cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982)). How far did Sally reach? Hmmm... Where, exactly, is the edge of space? No one really knows where "air space" ends and "outer space" begins. And, it depends on who you ask. NASA Mission Control places the line at 76 miles (122 kilometers), because that is "the point at which atmospheric drag becomes noticeable".
Dr Sally Ride is also the first astronaut known to have been LGBT. She waited until after her death in 2012 to reveal to the world that she was G.A.Y. Her obituary on the her company's site, Sally Ride Science (a science education company at UC San Diego she co-founded to promote equity and inclusion for all science students) revealed that for 27 years, she'd been in a loving relationship with another woman, Dr. Tam O'Shaughnessy (a Emeritus Professor of School Psychology at San Diego State University who has written 13 science books for children). (Dr Sally Ride's PhD was in physics and she was awarded her PhD from Stanford University, US). Among the many accolades Sally received, in 2019, the makers of Barbie Dolls, Mattel, revealed its new Barbie Inspiring Women Series: Sally Ride doll, modelled after the late NASA astronaut. Incidentally, Sally was not the first lesbian Barbie doll - that accolade goes to American retired soccer player Abby Wambach Barbie who was is Mattel's first lesbian Barbie which was released in 2016. (BTW, I H.A.T.E.D my Barbie girl so lovingly gifted to me by adorable German grandmother (Mutti) LOL).
Silvia Vasquez-Lavado is a Peruvian-American mountaineer who in June 2018, became the first openly lesbian to complete the Seven Summits (the tallest mountain on each continent) which included summiting Everest Mount Everest (Nepal) - the highest mountain in the world which is 8,849 m (29,030 ft) high. Daniela Iraschko-Stolz is an Austrian ski jumper who since 2003 has held the women's ski flying world record of 200 m (660 ft), and remains the only woman to reach that distance. In 2014, Daniela took home the silver medal at the first-ever women's ski-jump competition at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Moreover, she was the first openly gay athlete to win a medal at the Sochi Games.
13. Miss Universe Burma (Myanmar) - Swe Zin Htet, in 2019, was the first openly gay Miss Universe contestant. Before you get our knickers in a twist - why I have mentioned Miss Universe? The contestants recieve huge global pubilicity which they can use to stand up for various rights e.g. LGBT righhts. Moreover, being openly gay shows huge bravery as some countries have illegalised homosexulaity only recently. In 2019, as the reigning Miss Myanmar, Swe Zin Htet became the first out lesbian to compete in the 67-year-old Miss Universe contest. A week before the Miss Universe competition, Swe came out publicly on the beauty blog "Missology" to capitalise on the publicity surrounding the pageant. She also took to Instagram, posting a photo collage of herself and her girlfriend of three years, Gae Gae (who is a popular Burmese singer) with the word "proud" and a rainbow flag emoji. Beyond its global impact, Swe's coming out was particularly brave, as consensual homosexual conduct remains illegal in Myanmar, carrying a potential prison sentence of 10 years or more.
Tashi Choden represented Bhutan at the Miss Universe 2022 pageant. Homosexuality in Burma was decriminalised in... 2021. The following year, during Pride Month, Tashi came out and became one of the first openly homosexual people in her home country of Bhutan. Julia Lemigova represented the Soviet Union at the Miss Universe 1991 pageant, where she placed 2nd runner-up. She was not out at the time and later had a relationship with French banker Édouard Stern. In 2014, Julia married her long-term partner (legendary tennis player) Martina Navratilova.
Check out:
- this disappointing map of countries that still criminalise LGBT people.
- these slick dramas which reveal different aspects to beauty contests which may make you perhaps, reconsider your view on beauty contests: Señorita 89 (2022) and Misbehaviour (2020)
Where she went, I don't know, I mean to follow everywhere she goes ...