Dykonography 101: Nancy
Nancy Sutley
L.A.’s Deputy Mayor for Energy and Environment, Nancy Sutley, was today named head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, as appointed by President-elect Barack Obama. She is is the first prominent member of the glbt community to earn a senior role in the new administration.
Dykonography 101: Me’shell
Me'shell Ndegéocello
Singer, songwriter, and bassist Me’shell Ndegéocello is a notably eclectic artist whose music frequently confronts social and sexual issues, including racial identity, same-sex attraction, and homophobia. Throughout her career, Ndegéocello has been open about her bisexuality. In interviews, she has spoken about her relationships with choreographer Winifred R. Harris and writer and activist Rebecca Walker, and she sports a “Rebecca” tattoo on her neck. However, while she continues to sing and write about sexual identity and sexuality, since the break-up of her relationship with Walker, Ndegéocello has become more reticent with interviewers about details of her private relationships with lovers, friends, and family members.
She is also known by the name Me’shell Suhaila Bashir-Shakur, which she adopted several years ago after converting to Islam.
-excerpted from Krista L. May‘s glbtq entry (read the rest)
Dykonography 101: Annie
Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz is among the most famous of contemporary American photographers. Best known for her celebrity portraits and work in advertising, she has in recent years photographed a wider range of subjects. Her work has been shown at major exhibitions in the United States and abroad. She has also published a number of books of her photographs.
For over a decade Leibovitz was the close companion of writer Susan Sontag, who was present at the birth of the former’s baby, but the two did not publicly discuss the nature of their relationship.
-excerpted from Linda Rapp‘s glbtq entry (read the rest)
Dykonography 101: Annie
Annie Lennox
The Scottish-born ’80s icon discovered the ‘play-gay’ card by accident. Interested in the way gender was presented, Lennox began to experiment with androgyny in the ’80s. Not only did she sport a shaved head and flat-chested look but she would often dress in a suit. When The Eurythmics released the gay anthem “Sisters are Doing it for Themselves”, her lesbian following began to swell and fans eagerly awaited her ‘coming out’. However, it never came. “Unfortunately, I am terribly heterosexual” she said in a recent interview. She went on to claim that her life would have been ‘much easier’ if she had been gay.
-excerpted from “Play Gays” article in Fyne Times Gay and Lesbian Magazine, UK (read the rest)
Dykonography 101: Gertrude
Gertrude Stein
In addition to becoming—with Alice B. Toklas—half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.
Her difficulties in medical school paralleled her growing awareness of her lesbianism. Her sexuality placed her in conflict not only with the bourgeois morality she espoused but also with the views of feminist theorists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who argued in Women and Economics (1898) that the unfettered expression of sexuality would jeopardize women’s capacity to succeed in the professions and gain economic independence from men.
While in Baltimore, Stein became involved in a group of college women led by Mabel Haynes and Grace Lounsbury, who were, unlike Stein, experts at disguising the reality of lesbian passion behind the respectable cover of female romantic friendship.
Stein had little idea of these social dynamics when Mabel Haynes suddenly dropped her “friendship” with Lounsbury and began an affair with another student, May Bookstaver. In the meantime, Stein herself, despite her professed horror of “passion in its many disguised forms”, fell precipitously in love with Bookstaver.
Confronted by an experienced and formidable rival, as well as by her own moral crises and sexual naïveté, Stein found herself excluded from the Bookstaver-Haynes romance.
When Stein died from cancer on July 27, 1946, the news made front-page headlines around the world. However, at the time her work was largely out of print and unread, and she was known principally as a personality. Only with the advent of the second wave of the women’s movement, as well as the development of post-structuralist, feminist, and lesbian and gay literary criticism, has the full extent of Stein’s importance as an innovator and transformer of the English language become apparent.
-excerpted from Corinne E. Blackmer‘s glbtq’s entry (read the rest)
Dykonography 101: Margaret
Margaret Cho
“Comedy was all I ever wanted,” declares Cho in her memoir, I’m the One That I Want (2001). “When I began, I don’t think anyone believed I would go anywhere”, but the bisexual actress turned stand-up comedian has become one of the most prominent Asian Americans in show business and in glbtq culture.
Born to Korean immigrant parents on December 5, 1968 in San Francisco, California, Moran “Margaret” Cho draws from her “bi-cultural” experience as Korean-American as well as from everyday queer culture to forge her seductive style, which is enticing and amusing and never fails to surprise.
-excerpted from Miguel A. Segovia‘s glbtq entry (read the rest)
Dykonography 101: Janet
Janet Jackson
[In April 2008, Janet Jackson was] honored for her work in the gay community, receiving the Vanguard Award at the 19th Annual GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Award.
The ceremony, held in Los Angeles’ Kodak Theatre, was presented by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.
Upon receiving her award, Janet said: “I love it. I never expected it in a million years so when I heard they wanted to honour me, I was really taken aback. It’s just for the work that I’ve done with AIDS and acknowledging the gay and lesbian community through my music and so on. I’m just very appreciative.”
Janet has always been vocal about gay rights, and even wrote her number one single “Together Again” as a tribute to a close friend who died from AIDS.
She added: “Even when I was younger, when I was growing up, my mother was very religious but there were a lot of kids who were dancers that she brought into the home and now that I think about it, they were gay.
“They all called her ‘Mother’ and she treated every one of them like they were her children. And that’s where it kind of started, I suppose. I’ve been around the community all my life.”
-excerpted from “Janet Jackson receives gay award”, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 29, 2008 (read the rest)
Dykonography 101: Catherine
Catherine Deneuve
For many women (lesbians in particular), the career of the elegant and enigmatic Catherine Deneuve did not take off with Jacques Demy’s 1964 French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Nor did it begin with Roman Polanski’s pathological 1965 Repulsion, nor with Luis Buñuel’s [shocking] Belle Du Jour. It didn’t even begin with her 1980 award-winning performance in Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro. None of these legendary films that so skillfully exploited the icy fire of Deneuve’s inscrutable presence—nor any that came between or after—marked the beginning.
Instead that cataclysmic event, which has now become part of lesbian lore, began when a luminous Deneuve, playing an aristocratic vampire in Tony Scott’s 1983 film The Hunger, swooped down on an innocent and utterly bedazzled Susan Sarandon and, for eight hot minutes, devoured her with explicit sex and unprecedented, everlasting sensual enthusiasm. Then she bit her, and the rest is history.
-excerpted from “Catherine Deneuve: The ultimate lesbian icon breaks her silence.”, The Advocate magazine, July 25, 1995 (read the rest)
Dykonography 101: Angie
Angelina Jolie
[Self-confirmed bisexual] Angelina Jolie is an actress, philanthropist, mom…and now she can add “favorite lesbian role” to her list of credentials.
The top gay women’s site, LesbiaNation, conducted a poll asking [lesbians] from all over the globe, who their favorite characters are in film. Jolie came out on top with her portrayal of ’70s supermodel Gia Carangi in the 1998 movie Gia. The role won her a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award and overall, the movie won 7 awards and 12 nominations.
-from Sassy Smith‘s post “Lesbians Love Angelina Jolie” on FameCrawler (original post)
Dykonography 101: Jodie
Jodie Foster
One of the most accomplished film actresses of her generation, Jodie Foster has been a glbtq icon for decades, though only recently has she obliquely acknowledged her lesbianism.
No other contemporary actress has generated as much interest in her personal life as Foster, an interest intensified by her steadfast refusal to discuss her private life in interviews. For years, with her lesbianism an open secret in the film industry, the gay press demanded—to no avail—that she come out publicly.
Foster’s tomboyish roles as a child and her strong female protagonist roles as an adult fueled speculation as to her sexuality, especially among her numerous lesbian fans.
-excerpted from Victoria Shannon‘s glbtq entry (read the rest)
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