BCE to The Suffragettes
04-26-1886 – 12-22-1939 “Ma” Rainey (born Gertrude Pridgett) – Born in Columbus, Georgia. She was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first blues singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues. Rainey was in trouble with the police several times for her lesbian behavior.
In 1925, she was arrested for taking part in an orgy at her home involving women in the chorus. Bessie Smith bailed her out of jail. Her album Prove it on Me Blues, a monologue about women who love women, showed Rainey in a hat, tie, and jacket talking to some flappers with a policeman behind her. The copy reads “What’s all this? Scandal? “ Take a look at the words, the song goes: “Went out last night a crowd of my friends. They must’ve been women, cause I don’t like no men… They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me, They sure got to prove it to me…”
More on Ma:
Natural Women’s History Museum
Blogger Nina Notes: The biopic Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, she was not even the main character, and reduced to a plot context
04-26-1892 – 06-19-1955 Adrienne Monnier – Born in Paris, France. She was a French bookseller, writer, and publisher, and an influential figure in the modernist writing scene in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1915 when she opened her bookshop called “La Maison des Amis des Livres”, Monnier was one of the first women in France to found her own bookstore. Monnier offered advice and encouragement to Sylvia Beach when Beach founded an English language bookstore called Shakespeare and Company in 1919. She was lovers with Sylvia Beach for 36 years.
1940s The Friends of Dorothy Era and The Hayes Code
1950s The Decade the public learned heterosexual women wanted sex
The Civil Rights 60s: When the Boomers were under 30
April 26, 1966
Dusty Springfield was at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’, the singers only UK No.1. When recording the track, Springfield was not satisfied with her vocal until she had recorded forty-seven takes.
1967
16 year old Janis Ian sings “Society Child” on the CBS-TV show, Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution. A year before, the song was banned by many radio stations because of its interracial love affair theme. Following her television appearance, the record shot into the US Top Twenty.
Mama Cass Elliot gives birth to a daughter she names Owen Vanessa. She never told anyone who the father is, but many years later Michelle Phillips helped Owen locate her biological dad. Owen grew up to become a singer as well and toured with Beach Boys member Al Jardine.
1970s: Feminist, Gay Liberation and Lesbian Separatists: Civil Rights
1970
The original Broadway production of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Company,” starring Elaine Stritch, Barbara Barrie, Dean Jones, Donna McKechnie, Charles Kimbrough, and Beth Howland, opened at New York’s Alvin Theatre for 705 performances.
Gladys Knight & the Pips’ “The Way We Were” charted, becoming their thirty-third of forty-two Top 100 singles.
In New York City, the disco boom really got rolling with the opening of Steve Rubell’s new ultra-exclusive club, Studio 54. Among the guests invited to opening night: Mick Jagger and wife Bianca, Cher, Donald and Ivana Trump, Debbie Harry, Halston, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Liza Minnelli, Salvador Dali, Martha Graham, Brooke Shields, Margaux Hemingway, Jerry Hall, and Robin Leach.
1980s The Genderfuck Apathetics vs Yuppies : Aids the new STD on the list
1980
Blondie were at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Call Me’, the group’s fourth UK No.1, featured in the Richard Gere movie ‘American Gigolo’, the track was also a No.1 in the US where it became the band’s biggest selling single. Producer Giorgio Moroder originally asked Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac to help compose and perform a song for the soundtrack, but she declined.
The Carpenters’ fifth television special “Music Music Music,” with guest stars Ella Fitzgerald and John Davidson, aired on ABC.
1980: CBS broadcasts an hour-long documentary entitled “Gay Power, Gay Politics” that alleges to be about the emergence of gay political clout in San Francisco, but instead focuses obsessively on more lascivious aspects of gay sexuality, making them seem like the focus of the entire gay rights movement. In one segment, close-ups track the arrival of drag queens at the city’s Beaux Arts Ball while voice-over narration compares modern-day San Francisco to the decadence of 1930s Berlin. The program outrages the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which sends an angry letter of protest to CBS. Later, reacting to a complaint from the National Gay Task Force, the National News Council rules that CBS did indeed unfairly “exaggerate political concessions to gays and make those concessions appear as threats to public morals and decency…. Justification cannot be found for the degree of attention given to sadomasochism or the treatment of the Beaux Arts Ball and the Halloween sequences.” The network is also faulted for doctoring the show’s soundtrack in such a way as to bolster its conclusions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Power,_Gay_Politics
Blogger Nina Notes that in the current era, it is all about drag queens….
1990s: The Queer Slur Reclaimed: Act Up! Lesbian Avengers and Queer Nation
1994:
The United States Coast Guard makes public a memo issued by Commandant Thomas Fisher barring anti-gay discrimination against the service’s civilian employees. Uniformed personnel are still subject to discharge under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
Grace Slick pleaded guilty to pointing a shotgun at police in her California home. She claimed she was under stress because her home had burned down the previous year. She was later sentenced to 200 hours of community service and told to attend four Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a week for three months.
1995
Courtney Love reportedly turned down an offer of $1m from Playboy to pose nude for the magazine.
1999
Sinead O’Connor was ordained as the first woman priest in the Latin Tridentine Church.
2000s – “gay and lesbian” to “lesbigay” to “Lgbt/Lgbtq/Lgbtq2”
2000: Vermont becomes the first state in the U.S. to legalize civil unions and registered partnerships between same-sex couples.
2001
Destiny’s Child were at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Survivor’, Janet Jackson was at No.1 on the US chart with ‘All For You’
2005: Civil unions begin in New Zealand.
2007: The legislature of New Hampshire passes legislation for civil unions, which give same-sex couples many state rights of marriage.
2008
Amy Winehouse spent the night in custody after being arrested on suspicion of assault. Police said Winehouse had been “in no fit state” to be questioned when she arrived at the London station and she was kept in the cells. The 24-year-old was to be questioned about an incident said to have occurred 3 days earlier after a 38-year-old man claimed he was assaulted.
2010s Avocado Toast is the new Latte cheaper made at home, tastes better out
2011
Dionne Warwick and the surviving members of The Shirelles launched a lawsuit against the producers of a new Broadway musical called Baby It’s You, accusing them of cashing in on the plaintiffs’ stories and successes while using plaintiffs’ names, likenesses and biographical information without their consent.
Phoebe Snow, the velvet voiced singer / songwriter who reached #5 in the US in 1975 with “Poetry Man”, died of complications from a stroke at the age of 60.
2020s: Unnamed Common Oppressor/Religion VS: Sex/Gender Ideas vs Global Reality
2023
and this is why men can never be accepted as lesbians https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12015137/Incredible-story-forbidden-lesbian-romance-concentration-camp-leaves-viewers-tears.html
Mail Online
Incredible story of forbidden lesbian romance in a concentration camp
Viewers on Twitter praised the Storyville production Nelly and Nadine: Ravensbruck 1944 as it retold the love story between a Belgian opera singer and a Chinese diplomat’s daughter.
the only socially deemed negative aspect of lesbian is the not centering men
and that should only be a problem for men
it should be a relief to lesbians
Calling Myself a Lesbian Has Been a Lesson in Self Acceptance
The other words were the ones I was trying on to see if they fit.
2024
New York Post
Bisexual and lesbian women die younger: study
Bisexual and lesbian women die sooner than heterosexual women, according to researchers.
Study: Lesbian and bisexual women at higher mortality risk due to `toxic` social stigma
A large study investigating mortality differences based on sexual orientation reveals that bisexual women face a 37 per cent higher risk of…
The Big Issue
There’s ‘enormous power’ in being a lesbian – but stigma and shame persist
There is “enormous power, joy, and connection” in being a lesbian, campaigners have urged this Lesbian Visibility Week.
This creator’s grand theory of all things lesbian is spot on
cited sources
Today in LGBT History by Ronni Sanlo
LGBT History Month
EqualDex
https://lgbtdailyspotlight.com/ (site)
events link for the day post
~~~~
music and movie information from my previous blog
other discontinued blogs:
the As I peaked blog (2019 – 2022)
Gen X Mid Life changes: December 2012 – August 2020
My Original Blog to December 2, 2012
for which there were spin off blogs:
- Confessions of a teenaged poet
- Lez Flirt
- Living Well
- NatGeo Gallery
- The Shut-in Stand-Up Comedic look at life from the POV of a virtual shut-in
- Wayback Machine
- Youtube Channel
Dykes and Lesbians 
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