November 15th

11-15-1887 – 03-06-1986 Georgia O’Keeffe – Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She was an American artist. She has been recognized as the Mother of American Modernism. O’Keeffe is best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. She married Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. They both had relationships with others, she with both men and women. At least once they were lovers with the same woman, Rebecca Strand, wife of the famous photographer Paul Strand. Rebecca Strand was an artist in her own right and was friends and lovers with O’Keeffe for many years.

11-15-1962 Judy Gold – Born in Newark, New Jersey. She is an American stand-up comedienne and actress. She won two Daytime Emmy Awards for her work as writer and producer on The Rosie O’Donnell Show. She is openly gay and is very active in both LGBT and Jewish communities. Her one-woman show 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother is based on a series of interviews with more than 50 Jewish mothers in the U.S. Their stories are interspersed with anecdotes about her own mother and her life as a lesbian mom of two sons.

11-15-1869 – 03-24-1928 Charlotte Mew – Born in Bloomsbury, London, England. She was an English poet. She was one of seven children, three of whom died in early childhood and two that suffered from mental illness and were committed to institutions. She and her sister made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children. Charlotte is known to have been infatuated with her schools’ headmistress, Lucy Harrison. She is thought to have been a lesbian throughout her adult life, she wore masculine attire and kept her hair short, looking like a dandy. She often wrote from the view of a male person. Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer’s Bride, was published in 1916 in England and in 1921 in the United States. Virginia Woolf, who said she was “very good and interesting and quite unlike anyone else.” After her sister’s death in 1927, Mew fell into a deep depression and eventually committed suicide by drinking Lysol.

11-15-1840 – 08-29-1893 Aleksey Apukhtin – Born in Bolkhov, Russia. He was a Russian poet, writer, and critic. He was a classmate of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who became a lifelong friend. Like Tchaikovsky, Apukhtin was gay and liked younger men. But unlike Tchaikovsky, who never acknowledged his sexual interests in other men, Apukhtin lived openly with his male lovers.

11-15-1960 Dawn Airey – Born in Lancashire, United Kingdom She was a British commercial television executive. She was also senior vice president of Yahoo’s business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, responsible for advertising. As of September 2015, she became the Getty Images CEO. An out lesbian, she lives with her civil partner Jacqueline Lawrence (a former television producer, now Chair of The Elam Trust) and their two children in West London and Oxford.