After meeting Hollywood icon Greta Garbo in 1931, she knew exactly what woman that was. Mercedes de Acosta, a successful poet, playwright, and screenwriter, was an out and proud lesbian who bragged that she could have any woman she wanted. Through his later life he was in and out of treatment facilities, unable to live up to his creative glory. Suddenly none of the wounds of the past mattered Williams returned to nurse his lover until cancer took his life.Ĭonsumed by the loss of his true love, the Tony winner became plagued by theatrical failure, drug abuse, and depression.
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Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. The two split after 14 years of harmony, unable to work through infidelity and drug abuse on both sides. Merlo became Williams's personal secretary, creating order in his life and helping him deal with his constant struggle with depression. A year later, they were madly in love.Īfter the success of Streetcar, the two traveled the world in the late 1940s and 1950s, summering in Europe as Williams sought inspiration in Rome, Barcelona, and London. When he was 36 years old, he met Frank Merlo, a Sicilian-American actor 11 years his junior, in New Orleans. No one knew raw sexuality better than Tennessee Williams, author of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, and one of the most consequential playwrights in history.
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Having undergone several operations before the age of antibiotics, Elbe died of an infection in 1931. As Elbe's procedure gained press, Danish courts invalidated her marriage to Gottlieb, who remarried and moved to Italy. The procedure was highly experimental at the time - Lili is one of the first identifiable subjects - and took four operations over two years. In 1930, Elbe's body dysmorphia drove her to seek out gender-confirmation surgery in Germany. Gottlieb rose to success as a painter using Lili dressed as a femme fatale as her muse. The couple moved to Paris to live openly. Gottlieb saw herself as a lesbian and even created famous lesbian erotica paintings. After filling in for Gottlieb's absentee model and putting on stockings and heels, it became clear that Elbe identified as a woman. Elbe specialized in painted landscapes while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. Lili, born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener, met Gerda at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and married in 1904.
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If you've seen The Danish Girl, you know about the romance between these two early-20th-century artists - but the movie omits that both Elbe and Gottlieb identified as LGBT. She was the first woman to receive the honor. In 1957 the American Pediatric Society awarded Dunham its highest honor, the John Howland Award.
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She became one of the first female professors at Yale's School of Medicine, while her partner was the first female member of the American Pediatric Society and the first woman to become president of the American Public Health Association. Dunham focused on caring for premature babies and newborns, establishing the national standards for how hospitals care for babies. During the Great Depression, Eliot was an architect of the New Deal's programs regarding maternal and child health, and later she was named chief of the Children's Bureau, a federal health agency, by President Truman. Though they were both active in fighting for women's right to vote, their ambitions to medicine separated them until they were both invited to the brand-new pediatrics department at Yale.īoth pioneers in their own right, they changed the role of women in children's medicine forever. They decided to attend medical school together in 1914 and forever stay by each other's side. Martha May Eliot and Ethel Collins Dunham, two doctors who got their medical degrees together from Johns Hopkins, met while they were students at Bryn Mawr College.