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Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile. Caregiving is hard unpredictable work, so I’ve decided to make myself an escape place. To that end, I began work on my camping shelter. After 2 weeks of scouting spots, I’ve finally found my summer home! This is after about 2 days work, about 6 hours (Yeah, I know I’m slow, but I’m a perfectionist.) It’s set up to accommodate my camping hammock, but I plan to also have a raised bed. The wheel well was a great find for a small fire pit. Check back for the progress!

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MARCH 1: Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968)

Poet, playwright, and novelist Mercedes de Acosta, otherwise known by legendary epithets such as “the dyke at the top of the stairs” and “the greatest starfucker ever,” would have been 124 years old today.

Born in 1893, Mercedes was a true trust fund baby. Her Cuban father was a member of the New York elite and her Spanish mother was the subject of a wild rumor that said she was related to the Duke of Alba. Growing up, Mercedes was surrounded by a whirlpool of eclectic artists, writers, and actors whose larger than life reputations would later influence her own work. Despite writing collections of poetry, plays, and novels such as Streets and Shadows and Archways of Life, it is not Mercedes’ creative works that earned her fame, but rather the careful cultivation of her daring lesbian persona and her various affairs with women celebrities such as Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo.

Greta Garbo (left) and Mercedes de Acosta (right). (x)

Mercedes’s attention to the #aesthetic was undoubtedly ahead of its time, and she was known for strolling around the streets of New York with slicked back hair and “mannish” clothing. A friend of Mercedes’s once wrote in his diary about attending the movie theater with her and feeling that people were staring at him, wondering, “why do you associate with that furious lesbian!” Her sexuality was no secret and she also openly blurred the lines of her gender identity. She once reportedly said, “I am not a boy and I am not a girl, or maybe I am both — I don’t know. And because I don’t know, I will never fit in anywhere and I will be lonely all my life.” While she expressed loneliness privately, publicly, Mercedes was known as a female Lothario and once boasted, “I can get any woman from any man.” One of the most intense relationships Mercedes had was with stage actress Eva Le Gallienne, who she first met just three days before her wedding to the well-known portrait painter Abram Poole. Despite going through with the marriage, Mercedes continued to have a relationship with Eva for the next five years. Legend has it that Mercedes mailed Eva at least two to three letters a day.

Perhaps one of the most infamous affairs in Hollywood history was Mercedes’s relationship with the actress Greta Garbo. The two met in 1931 and would have a wild on again/off again relationship for the next twelve years. They were inseparable at times and even lived together for a while in 1932. Mercedes was head over heels for Greta, showering her with flowers and gifts and even pasting photos of Greta into her Bible. However, one of the first rifts in their relationship began to appear when a screenplay Mercedes had been drafting for Greta was shot down by MGM executive Irving Thalberg. Thalberg did not take too kindly to Mercedes’s idea of having glamorous starlet Greta Garbo spend an entire film “dressed as a boy.” After several rifts and repairs, Greta ended the affair in 1946 for reasons unknown.

One of Mercedes’s notebooks with photos of Greta Garbo pasted inside.(x) 

In 1960, Mercedes released a controversial autobiography titled Here Lies the Heart. Although Mercedes never candidly discusses her lesbian relationships in the book, several of her old flames – Le Gallienne and Garbo included – felt they had been outed by the mentions of their “friendships” with Mercedes and permanently severed ties with her as a result. Mercedes died in 1968, but not in shame. Although she was in poor health and virtually blacklisted from Hollywood, she became close friends with Andy Warhol and remained in the center of the New York gay scene up until her death.

-LC

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The Kiss by Joseph Granie, 1900

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“In order to run away with her new love, she stole the body of a dead nun, placed it in the bed of her lover, and set the room on fire to cover their escape”

PETITION TO MAKE A MOVIE/TV SERIES ABOUT JULIE D'AUBIGNY.

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I became a lesbian because of women, because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate.

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“Of pleasures, those which occur most rarely give the most delight.”

— Epictetus, Fragments

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No society wants you to become wise, it is against the investment of all societies. If people are wise, they cannot be exploited. If they are intelligent, they cannot be subjugated. They cannot be forced in a mechanical life, to live like robots… They will have the fragrance of rebellion around them. In fact, a wise man is afire, alive, aflame. He would like rather to die than to be enslaved.

Osho (via liberatingreality)

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Mona Oikawa’s “Eating Ramen” from “Outrage” 🌹🍜

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I identify as butch, but as an older lesbian (40) I had not connected it much to gender. I’ve always been proud to be a woman who loves other women. When I was coming out, unless you were trans and struggling with your assigned gender, we took pride in being women. Even the most butch women I knew took offense to being called sir. We wanted to be seen as women, equal to our straight counterparts.

Being butch is more about being comfortable in my skin and less about my gender or sexuality. Though I don’t fit into my assigned gender roles, I think it’s more a product of my generation and time than of my sexuality, as I have straight female friends who can say the same thing. I’m a woman who looks sexy in men’s Levi’s and a button down. I’m a woman who can build things and fix things around the house. I prefer yard work to house work, but do both. I love to cook for my family. I am a caregiver and I have been a provider. I am the woman I was told I could be.

I am a woman. I am butch. I am a lesbian. I love myself.

hey lesbians who identify as femme or butch do you mind reblogging this with your testimony on how your feelings towards gender/sexuality relates to being butch/femme? i’m trying to gather information on how lesbians relate being butch/femme to themselves and how they express their gender non lesbians are encouraged to signal boost but not comment on! (TERFS NOT WELCOME! THIS IS FOR ALL LESBIANS, INCLUDING TRANS LESBIANS!!!)

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This drug changed my life. I hope I can continue to afford it.

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When you’re over 40, this is totally okay!

8* (via TribalSpaceCat)

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FEBRUARY 21: Ellen Page (1987-)

Ellen Page is a Canadian actress usually best known for playing a teen mom in movie Juno, or the Derby Roller skater Bliss, aka Baby Ruthless, in Drew Barrymore’s Whip It. But after she came out on Valentine’s Day three years ago she became an inspiring model and advocate for the LGBT community.

Portrait of Ellen Page, photographed by Marteen de Boer during the Getty Images Portrait Studio hosted by Eddie Bauer at Village at The Lift on January 24, 2016 in Park City, Utah.

Ellen Grace Philpotts-Page was born on February 21, 1987, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She decided to go to a Buddhist school where meditation and yoga were on the curriculum. She began her film career at 10 in Canadian TV then cinema (with roles for which she collected several awards despite her young age), though started to get international recognition with the 2005 movie Hard Candy, and with her appearance in blockbuster franchise X-Men as Kitty Pride, a girl who has the capacity to walk through walls.

Still from 2007 movie Juno 

She got attention from Hollywood with 2007 movie Juno, for which she received her first Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. She portrays a sassy, independent-minded teenager who gets pregnant at 16 – and her performance was praised by the critics and the general public alike. The movie, which reflects the director’s as well as Page’s mindset, is very much ‘pro-choice’ in that if she decides against getting an abortion, it is after visiting an abortion clinic, and examining all the choices given to her (eventually choosing to give the baby up for adoption).

Indeed Ellen Page describes herself as feminist, “and of course I am ’cause it’s about equality, so I hope everyone is. You know you’re working in a patriarchal society when the word feminist has a weird connotation.” She also dedicates herself to environmental causes and LGBT rights.

Still from 2015 movie Freeheld with Julianne Moore as Laurel Hester and Ellen Page as Stacie Andree

After other notable performances in Tracey Berkowitz’s The Tracey Fragments, Drew Barrymore’s Whip It, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love, the project of the film Freeheld came along. The movie is based on 2007 documentary of the same name about the true story of New Jersey police officer Laurel Hester (played by Julianne Moore) who, after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, had to fight against the county’s board of chosen freeholders so that her domestic partner Stacie Andree (Page) could benefit her pension after she passed. With her involvement in the making of the movie (as producer as well as actress) she felt the need and courage to come out of the closet. She explained that it took 6 years to make the movie, and that the process paralleled her own personal journey to come out as gay, as she “felt wildly inappropriate to be playing this character as a closeted person.”

Ellen Page comes out as gay in her speech in Las Vegas at the Human Rights Campaign’s Time to Thrive conference on Valentine’s day in 2014.

“Here I am, an actress, representing at least in some sense an industry that places crushing standards on all of us. (…) Standards of beauty, of good life, of success. Standards that I hate to admit, have affected me. You have ideas planted in your head, thoughts you never had before, that tell you how you have to act, how you have to dress, and who you have to be (i.e. as defined by stereotypes of masculinity and femininity). And I am here today because I am gay. And because maybe I can make a difference.”

In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Page explains that being a closeted person hurt her career more, because she felt sad and uninspired; that she felt guilt for not being out, and felt isolated from the LGBT community. She also revealed in another interview with Elle Magazine that she “would get panic attacks and sense an incredible discomfort because (she) didn’t relate to the conformity that comes with (her) gender.”

Now however she is more excited about life, and experiences a sense of happiness she has not felt before.  Not only does she feel privileged and grateful to be in the position where she can talk about issues and help others less fortunate that she is, but she also is in a relationship with artist and surfer Samantha Thomas. 

Since then, she has been involved in several movies, like Tallulah, projects, but mostly TV Series Gaycation, in which she and Ian Daniel explore LGBTQ cultures around the world by meeting travellers and hearing their stories.

- Lise

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It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

William Blake (1757 - 1827), an English poet, painter, and printmaker (via historical-nonfiction)

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FEBRUARY 10 - Aimée & Jaguar (1999)

On this day in 1999, the film Aimée & Jaguar was first released in its home country of Germany. Set during World War II, the movie tells the true and devastating love story of Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim, one the wife of a respected Nazi soldier and the other a Jewish journalist hiding in plain sight at a Nazi controlled newspaper.

The film begins in Berlin in the 1990s; two old women meet in a nursing home, and when the narrator sweeps back in time to 1943, you know you are in for a decades-long story that will stick with you long after the credits roll. The foundation of Aimée & Jaguar is something we’ve all seen before: bored housewife is swept off her feet by the charismatic and dangerous queer. However, what makes Aimee & Jaguar stand out from the crowd of a dozen other lesbian movies is the lingering knowledge that these were real women who actually lived and loved in the city that was the heart of the Nazi empire; a gang of lesbian friends all sitting around a table joking and playing cards, or a Jewish woman in full suit and top hat waltzing around a ballroom with her lover are the type of images that I never would have associated with 1940s Berlin before I saw this movie. They are the type of lived experiences that have been buried under the mythologizing of WWII-era Europe, and it is through Aimée & Jaguar that you are able to see that, even though it was stifled under the rise of fascism, Germany’s thriving gay culture of the 1920s and 1930s was still there, still dancing and laughing and kissing no matter how many closed doors and curtains it was forced to hide behind. At the beginning of the movie, I wondered why it wasn’t titled Lily & Felice or something more obvious, but by the end I had come to realize just how crucial Lily and Felice’s pet names were to their relationship, and just how important sublimated identity was during this time for lgbtq people, for Jewish people, and for any marginalized person living under Hitler’s rule.

The real Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust as pictured in Erica Fischer’s novel. The text at the bottom reads: (Left) Felice, in a photo taken by Lilly, on the Havel River, August 21, 1944. (Right) Lilly, in a photo taken by Felice, during the summer of 1944 on the balcony of Lilly’s apartment at Friedrichshaller Strasse 23. 

Before the film was released, Lilly and Felice’s story was told in novel form by Erica Fischer in her bestselling book Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943, which you can check out here! Or hear the story told through Lily’s own words in this 2001 interview with The Guardian.

And of course, here’s a link to the full movie on YouTube!

-LC

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Beautiful snow this morning