The Sewing Circle

The Sewing Circle, referring to the group of lesbian, bisexual, or bi-curious Hollywood ladies. Actresses like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Claudette Colbert, and Katharine Hepburn will be focused on. Also, old Hollywood films that portrayed lesbian characters or had lesbian moments will be included.

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Lilyan Tashman, Edmund Lowe, Kay Francis and Kenneth MacKenna photographed at Lilyan Tashman's Beach House in Malibu, 1931 | Photos by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair, publised February 1932.

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Claudette Colbert (born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin; September 13, 1903 – July 30, 1996) was an American actress most known for It Happened One Night (1934). Despite both her marriages being seemingly legitimate and loving, rumors of Claudette’s affairs with other actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich followed her for her entire career. Most notably, Claudette had a very public intimate relationship with the "out" lesbian artist Verna Hull in the 1950s. Although Claudette denied the rumors that she was bisexual or a lesbian, she and Verna rented a home together in New York City and even had neighboring vacation homes in Barbados. The relationship ended abruptly and on bad terms in the early 1960s after the death of Claudette’s husband. When Claudette passed away on July 30, 1996, she left her entire estate to another woman named Helen O’Hagan, whom she instructed in her will to be treated “as her spouse.” "She certainly moved with great ease in gay circles," said a friend. "I used to see her at George Cukor's, and there would be quite the carrying-on. She was never shocked. It was a world she was comfortable in. It was taken for granted that she was gay, or at least not conventionally straight." "We used to call her "Uncle Claude"," said Don Bachardy, the lover of the writer Christopher Isherwood. "Actually, I think she's really a good example of a very closeted situation. Only well within her own circle did they know the truth."

-Source

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"Charlotte Cushman was an icon of 19th century theatre, competing on equal footing with the greatest male actors of the age and winning a loyal following across the United States and Europe. While Cushman played both male and female roles, she was best known for her male roles including Romeo, Hamlet, and Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. On stage and off, Cushman challenged conventions of gender and sexuality. In her adult life, she lived in a community of what she called 'jolly female bachelors' or 'emancipated women,' known for producing art, wearing men's clothing, and lobbying for working women."

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Dame Judith Anderson, born 10 Feb 1897, with her Dachshund.

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“The Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Ladies They Talk About (1933) seemed, on the surface, to be in the vein of tough Warner exposés and crime dramas, with Stanwyck as a bank robber doing time at the women’s wing of San Quentin. However, after an opening sequence so realistically recreating a robbery that censors feared it could be a how-to-primer, the movie lapsed into Midnight Romance fantasy. Instead of grim prison conditions, Stanwyck’s jail time resembled a stay at a health spa, with glamorous inmates, beauty treatments on demand, and a laid-back air. The only grittier touches (besides Stanwyck’s ingrained Brooklyn moxie) were incidental, such as the inmates yelling ‘New fish!’ when Stanwyck first arrives, and a black inmate talking back ferociously to an imperious white prisoner. Another jailbird in this glossy clink is a muscular woman with close-cropped hair and a cigar clamped in her mouth. ’She likes to wrestle!’ Like the other inmates, this one is spared the dreariness of prison grooming, being permitted instead to wear the standard Hollywood Dyke getup of a tailored outfit and little bowtie. ‘Mmmmm . . . . hmmmm!’ air. Later, less expectedly, we see this butch prisoner’s femme other half. The camera pans across the cells to take in after-hours vignettes that never occurred in any real-life jail, including a slumber party in lingerie, an inmate cuddling a Pekingese, and the butch woman doing an exhibition round of calisthenics. Wearing a pair of man’s pajamas and with the cigar still in her mouth, she goes through her paces to the delight of a frilly girlfriend sitting in the bed next to her. ‘You’re just always exercising!’ the femme marvels. Ladies They Talk About received numerous complaints through the Studio Relations Committee about the robbery scene, about the violence and discussion of prostitution. Only in strict Ohio, however, did the lesbianism cause any problem; Roth’s ‘wrestle’ line was cut. So it remained over the succeeding decades, when women’s prison movies were one of the few places onscreen where lesbians were allowed to exist openly. This one is one of the first."

-From Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall by Richard Barrios

[grotesque-girlesque]

…A slender body, hands soft and white, for the service of my delight, two sprouting breasts round and sweet, invite my hungry mouth to eat, from whence two nipples firm and pink, persuade my thirsty soul to drink, and lower still a secret place where I’d fain hide my loving face….

Isadora Duncan in a letter to Mercedes De Acosta [1927] (via grotesque-girlesque)

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"Joan Crawford's interest in Bette Davis was more than professional, Charles Higham believed. 'This greatest of suffering female stars admired this greatest of actresses sexually as well as professionally,' he said, stating that Crawford was a repressed lesbian.

'He's full of shit,' said Crawford's friend and foremost fan, Dore Freeman.

'It is doubtful,' said another Crawford friend, publicist Harry Mines, who frequently arranged dates for Joan.

'If anything, she loved men too much. ''It's possible; anything with Joan was possible,' said director George Cukor

'How the f**k do I know if Joan was a dyke?' said Bette Davis. 'I never let her get that close to me.'"

-From Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud by Shaun Considine

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Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert, c.1930s

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“The atmosphere in the Hollywood lesbian community began to change in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This change was a reflection of three important developments: (1) the increased adoption by the general public of the morbidification of sexual relations between women promoted by some sexologists; (2) the rise of the studio system in Hollywood; and (3) the onset of economic problems connected with the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The effect of the heterosexual backlash and the rise of the companionate marriage in the mid- to late 1920s was to push women who loved women further into the closet. The rise of the studio system meant that, were these women ever to venture from that closet and be caught in an embarrassing situation in public, the news media would not print the story. Hard economic times made these women vulnerable to the demands of the studio bosses who protected them—vulnerable enough, for example, to agree to date or even marry a man in order to appear heterosexual when they actually were not. Hollywood had become, in effect, a company town.

Many lesbians and bisexual women in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, especially those from Europe, gathered at the home of Berthold (1885-1953) and Salka Viertel (1889-1978). The Viertels were German émigrés who had come to Hollywood in 1928 to work in the film industry. Like Salka, most of the women who gathered at her home were “Gillette Blades”—that is, their sexuality ‘cut both ways.’ Some American-born actresses also fit into this category of actual or apparent bisexuality, while others were lesbians who adhered to the older model of the Boston marriage and lived with their lovers in what was purportedly a platonic relationship.

Following World War II, and with the rise of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the situation of Hollywood lesbians once again underwent a paradigm shift. After Communists, homosexuals were the favorite targets of witch-hunting politicians and bureaucrats, especially those of the House Un-American Activities (HUAC). At this same time, scandal magazines began to print articles that openly identified homosexual stars as such. The tabloid Confidential was directly responsible for the end of Lizabeth Scott’s (1922-2015) career in motion pictures when it accused her in print of ‘unnatural’ sexual activity. Many of the lesbians and bisexual women who were married began spending more time with their spouses, and many who were unmarried rushed to the alter. Some of the homosexuals in Hollywood reacted to this climate of fear by becoming reactionary in their politics and cooperating with those carrying out the persecutions. Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) and her ‘beard’ husband (a spouse who is taken by a women who engages in homosexual behavior primarily to help disguise her lesbian activities) Robert Taylor (1911-1969) became archconservatives after World War II. Taylor, who was also gay, was the only actor to ‘name names’ in front of HUAC. Salka Viertel was blacklisted and left the country. The climate of fear and paranoia among Hollywood homosexuals was to last well into the early 1960s."

-Excerpt from Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures by Bonnie Zimmerman and George Haggerty

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"Anita Berber was born into a middle-class family with artistic leanings. Her father, Felix, was First Violinist of the Municipal Orchestra, and her mother Lucie was a dancer and aspiring actress. After her parents’ divorce, Berber lived with her grandmother. In 1913, she attended a modern dance school where she learned rhythmic gymnastics. She later studied traditional ballet in Berlin.

Germany from the end of World War I until the rise of the Nazi party in 1933 was a time of both economic instability as well as artistic creativity. The art world embraced Expressionism, and the cabaret scene exploded with risque performances thanks to a loosening of censorship laws. By the age of 20, Berber was performing nude in many of these cabarets.

In 1919, Berber married the wealthy screenwriter Eberhard von Nathusius. They divorced after she fell in love with a lesbian bar owner, Susi Wanowski, who became her manager as well as her lover.

Besides dancing in cabarets, Berber also made more than a dozen appearances in film, including a role in the 1919 silent film Different From the Others. This film is often considered the first sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality on screen. The movie was a direct challenge to Germany’s laws against homosexuality, and the Nazis later banned it.

Berber’s bisexuality and her overall defiance of traditional gender norms were often the subject of the tabloids. Berber reportedly had a brief liaison with a young Marlene Dietrich, the Hollywood star known for her sexy androgynous style.

In 1922, Berber married the dancer Sebastian Droste and the two of them created a book of poetry and photography titled Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy, which they also performed in various nightclubs. They both struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, most notably cocaine, and their performances and poetry often included references to drugs.

Berber and Droste’s performances continued to shock and outrage the public. She was jailed for several weeks after personally offending the king of Yugoslavia with a nude dance performance. As a result they were both banned from performing in European venues for several years. Reports of scandalous behavior followed Berber wherever she went. She was often seen around town with her pet monkey draped around her neck. There were reports that she visited restaurants naked but for a sable coat. After Droste was jailed for fraud (he also stole Berber’s furs and jewelry), Berber met and married American dancer Henri Chatin-Hoffman in 1924, two weeks after they met.

In 1928, Berber collapsed during a performance at a Beirut nightclub. A few months later she died from tuberculosis, most likely the result of years of drug abuse. Following her death, an unflattering and largely fabricated biography emerged, which shaped Berber’s legacy for decades. More recently she’s been seen in a new light, thanks to LGBTQ+ and feminist studies. Berber was an early performance artist at a time when that label didn’t even exist.

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lesbian film director dorothy arzner, in the 20s and 30s:

with clara bow with joan crawford with rosalind russell on set of craig’s wife with her long-term partner, choreographer marion morgan

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Love Sarah Paulson, but I am pretty sure she’s bisexual, not a lesbian. I know she has thrown the word “gay” around in an interview, but she was engaged to Tracy Letts, has joked about “sucking dick” and has outright said "Guys don't ask me out because they think I like women. [Women] don't ask me out because they don't know what I am. Do I have to write a sign that says equal-opportunity employer?” Unless, of course, she has come out and said she was struggling with compulsory heterosexuality, in which case, I apologize and applaud the self discovery.

I really appreciate you bringing this information to my knowledge. Thank you for conveying your opinions the way you did. You presented the information, that you know about her, in a neutral manner and without any biases. I am wondering if you know around what year these quotations were from? Like you said, she may have, in the past, struggled with compulsory heterosexuality which caused her to respond differently.

I am aware that she has been with both men and women and that she prefers not to define herself. So, I suppose you're right that she shouldn't be on that list. I'll take her off. But with what I said previously, she wouldn't want us labeling her as anything. She has said “All I can say is, I’ve done both, and I don’t let either experience define me… So, for me, I’m not looking to define myself, and I’m sorry if that is something that is seen as a rejection of or an unwillingness to embrace (my sexuality) in a public way, but it’s simply not. It’s simply what’s true for me, and that’s all I can speak to.”

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are any of today's actresses lesbians?

Similarly, such as during the 20th century and even before then, some actresses nowadays continue to choose whether or not to be public about their sexualities. Of course, earlier in history, there were more reasons (such as conservative mindsets) that impacted their decisions to (usually) keep their secret behind locked doors. But with an ever growing acceptance, many lgbtq+ people thankfully have felt it was something they wanted to reveal. 

Here’s just some of the most notable women/non-binaries/gender-fluid people that identify as lesbian/gay/dyke. There are indeed many that also identify as queer, pansexual, bisexual, fluid, etc. but I aim to only list those that are lesbian/gay/dyke. To all, please let me know if I have incorrectly listed someone on here. Sexuality is very complex and can fluctuate throughout ones’ lifetime. So, these individuals may or may not still identify with the sexual orientation that they initially associated themselves as being. Some of these may prefer no label but have been open about their same-sex relationships. But let me know if I should correct or add to something I’ve said. I really don’t want to make any mistakes. The utmost respect to all :)

Jodie Foster 

Kate McKinnon

Adèle Haenel

Portia de Rossi

Ellen DeGeneres (prefers “gay”)

Lily Tomlin

Jane Lynch

Wanda Sykes

Ruby Rose (gender-fluid but identifies as a lesbian)

Amandla Stenberg

Lea DeLaria (prefers “dyke”)

Sara Gilbert

Clea DuVall

Fiona Shaw

Holland Taylor

Kristen Stewart

Samira Wiley

Heather Matarazzo

Rosie O’Donnell

Miriam Margolyes

Raven-Symoné

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you are doing gods work this blog is literally changing my life. thank you🥺❤️🥵

Thankkkkk you!!!! Sorry for the late response but this is so appreciated 😌

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"Of all the people Barbara Stanwyck was close to, her most consistent relationship was with her very loyal, sometimes live-in girl Friday, the prototypical actress-turned-publicist Helen Ferguson. The two never defined their relationship, but if Stanwyck’s marriages to men were described as lavender, the Stanwyck/Ferguson’s union may very well have been of the Boston variety. Ferguson was by Stanwyck’s side for the bulk of her career, from the Hollywood heyday to the 1960s, when Stanwyck started portraying a series of pioneering women on television shows like Wagon Train and The Big Valley.

In the book, Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture, Luca Prono states that in the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, Stanwyck was seen as a cultural and personal template for lesbians. 'Stanwyck acquired the status of icon within lesbian communities,' Prono writes. 'Stanwyck was a woman whose screen persona challenged respectability because of the strong and independent women she embodied in the 1940s.'"

[sangfroidwoolf]

#girlfriends

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"Stereotypical images, like all aspects of culture, change and evolve over the years. Queer women in classical Hollywood films often appeared as spinster aunts or prison matrons, but by the 1970s, they were often being represented as vampires, a trope that turned same-sex love and affection into something cruel and monstrous. By the twenty-first century, a wide variety of openly queer people and queer "looks" has made it more difficult for the mass media to create new stereotypes, but traces of the old ones can still be discerned."

-From Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America by Griffin Benshoff

*Images are from Arsenic and Old Lace (1943), Caged (1950), The Vampire Lovers (1970), and Vampire Killers (2009)