#born:usa

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Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972)

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Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990)

Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress, who performed on stage, film and television for sixty years.

She was orphaned and raised in foster homes. She started her career in 1923 at the age of sixteen as a Ziegfeld girl, and became a Broadway star with her role in the musical Burlesque (1927), after which she transitioned from the stage to the film industry. Some of her iconic roles were in Night Nurse (1931), Baby Face (1933), The Lady Eve (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Walk on the Wild Side (1962).

She was nominated for four Academy Awards and received an Honorary Oscar in 1982. She was ranked as the 11th-greatest female star of classic American cinema by the American Film Institute.

Her status of Hollywood icon and affiliation to Republicans make it quite impossible to openly discuss her sexuality, even today. She bought land, build a ranch and lived on it with her agent's wife, Marion Marx, and most likely had a 40 years relationship with her publicist Helen Ferguson, who allegedly admitted there was no doubt in her mind that Barbara & Joan Crawford, on top of their very well-known friendship, had been intimate on more than one occasion. Find here a thread of all her possible female lovers.

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Elisabeth Marbury (1856 - 1933)

Elisabeth Marbury was one of the first female theatrical and literary agent and Broadway producers. She was born and raised in a wealthy and influential New York family and discovered her career amidst the amateur theatrical performances of late-Victorian New York high society. In 1891, she moved to Paris and became a literary agent, representing the interests of her European clients throughout the English-speaking world. In the United States, she joined several other agents in forming the American Play Company. Her work as a theatrical agent and producer contributed significantly to the development of the characteristically American form of musical comedy. In 1903, along with the American philanthropist Anne Tracy Morgan and the American heiress Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, Elisabeth Marbury helped found the Colony Club, New York's first women's social club. In 1923, she published an autobiography, « My Crystal Ball ». 

For 40 years, Elisabeth Marbury had an openly lesbian relationship with the renowned interior designer and socialite Elsie de Wolfe. They lived together in France, where they purchased and restored the Villa Trianon near Versailles (along with Anne Tracy Morgan), and then in New York City, at Irving House and later at 13 Sutton Place. In both France and the United States, they were renowned hostesses. Their Sunday salons became famous for hosting numerous American and European celebrities connected with the arts, society, and politics.

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Angela Davis (1944-present)

Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, philosopher, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis accepted the Communist Party USA's nomination for vice president in 1980 and in 1984. She left the party in 1991, founding the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. At that time she was also a radical feminist activist and an affiliate of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. She is a major figure in the prison abolition movement. In 1997, she came out as a lesbian in an interview with Out magazine. By 2020, Davis was living with her partner, the academic Gina Dent, a fellow humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz.

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Anne Morgan (1873-1952)

Anne Tracy Morgan was an American philanthropist and union activist. Born into immense wealth, she used it to support and improve women's lives and working conditions. In the early 1900s, Morgan, together with Elsie de Wolfe and Elizabeth Marbury—known collectively as "The Versailles Triumvirate"—hosted a salon in France. Morgan also helped de Wolfe establish herself as an interior decorator. During the First World War, Morgan took residence near the French front where she ran a relief organisation, The American Friends of France (aka American Committee for Devastated France). She was joined and supported by a physician, Anne Murray Dike, and both women were made officers of the French Legion of Honour for their efforts.

In 1903, along with Florence Jaffray Harriman, she founded the Colony Club. It was the first social club in New York established by and for women. Later, the experience of founding the club as well as Morgan's interest in female workers' rights, evolved into the American Woman's Association. It was a place for working women to network and develop leadership skills.

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Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

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Lizabeth Scott (1921-2015)

Lizabeth Scott was an Amercian actress and singer, known as a film noir star during the 1940s and 1950s. She started a career as a model and acted on Broadway before transitioning to films in Hollywood. Of her 22 films, she was the leading lady in all but three.

Some of her most famous roles were in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Dead Reckoning (1947), Desert Fury (1947, see gifs below), and Too Late for Tears (1949).

Although entertaining public affairs with men, Lizabeth Scott never married and apparently lived as a single woman. She was in the midst of a scandal in 1954 when tabloids claimed she was a lesbian whose name had been listed in "the little black books kept by Hollywood prostitutes". She was also said to have frequented famous lesbian nightclubs in Paris and mingled with Frede, a famous lesbian entertainer.

The film All About Eve (1950) starring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter was said to be based on the relationship between Tallulah Bankhead and Lizabeth Scott, which in turn sparked rumours of a romance between them (or was it the other way around?).

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Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979)

During her career, between 1927 and 1943, Dorothy Arzner was the only female film director in Hollywood. She directed nearly twenty films and launched the careers of many famous actresses, including Katharine Hepburn.

She had a 40-year relationship with her partner, the choreographer and motion picture screenwriter Marion Morgan.