Elsa was born "in Hull, Yorkshire, England on December 29, 1898." She sailed with her family to Montreal, Quebec at a Young Age. S he was first employed by a contact of her father's in Montreal, a factory doctor as assistant editor to Factory Facts, an in-house magazine. She moved to New York in 1920 at the age of 21. There she was employed by Frank Harris of Pearson's, a magazine supportive of poets and unsympathetic to the war and England.
Later, in 1927, she moved to San Francisco, and continued to live, write and love in the San Francisco Bay Area for the rest of her life. Her autobiography, Elsa, I Come With My Songs: The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow gives a personal and detailed account of her life seeking, finding and creating a life with other lesbians at a time when little was recorded on the topic.
Elsa Gidlow was a prominent Bay Area poet who became an important mentor to many lesbian feminists during the 1970s. Born in 1898 in Hull,England, she emigrated with her family to Montreal while she was still a small child. Then at 19 she moved to New York City. By 1921 , Elsa published On A Grey Thread , the first openly lesbian book of poetry in the United States. Elsa was one of the lesbians featured in "Word Is Out". In addition to several books of poetry and numerous articles, Gidlow published her autobiography, Elsa: I Come with My Songs, in 1986. Her papers are now part of the collections of The Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California.
Her manuscripts and writings detail her relationships with other women and her many friendships with people like June Singer, Alan Watts, Lou Harrison, Frank Harris, Robbinson Jeffers, Clarkston Crane and Ella Young. The collection documents Gidlow's personal life, public activity, and literary accomplishments from 1920 until her death in 1986.
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Lesbian pioneer Elsa Gidlow has been in the news recently, in spite of the fact that she died in 1986. A few weeks ago the State of California released records of hearings conducted throughout the state in the 1950s and '60s by the federal government's very own witch-hunting organization, better known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC investigated Hollywood writers suspected of scripting subversive movie plots, hounded University of California professors who refused to sign loyalty oaths, harassed labor leaders, and generally made life miserable for anybody who'd had a thought that strayed somewhere to the left of reactionary Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover.
Gidlow was called in for questioning by HUAC mostly because she was a white woman living in Marin County in an openly lesbian relationship with a woman of color from the Carribean. She had nothing but nasty things to say to the Feds about communists, the recently released records revealed, since her own political sympathies lay with the anarchists who considered Marxism just another ideology of state-sponsored oppression.
Gidlow, pictured here with her lover Isabelle Quallo on a trip through the American Southwest in the 1950s, had been born in England in 1898. She moved with her family to Canada in 1904 and spent her young adult years in Montreal. A freelance journalist who wrote the first volume of explicitly lesbian love poetry published in North America, Gidlow moved to San Francisco in 1926 after spending a few years in New York.
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