September 12th

09-12-1885- 11-04-1976 Edith Shackleton Heald – Born in Manchester, England. She was a bisexual British journalist and the last mistress of the poet W.B. Yeats, from 1937 until his death in 1939. From 1944 until her death in 1976, she lived with openly lesbian artist Gluck. Yeats called her “the best-paid woman journalist of her time” and novelist Arnold Bennet called her the “most brilliant reviewer” in London. (Photo of Gluck & Edith – 1940’s)

09-12-1946 – 07-02-2023 Minnie Bruce Pratt – Born in Selma, Alabama. She was an American educator, activist, and essayist. Pratt is a Professor of Writing and Women’s Studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She was invited to help develop the university’s first Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Study Program. She is the widow of the author and activist Leslie Feinberg, who died in November 2014. She has two sons from a prior marriage which ended in divorce in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1975. She lost custody of her children because the state criminalized homosexual activity at the time. Along with lesbian writers Chrystos and Audre Lorde, she  In received a 1991 Hellman/Hammett award from the Fund for Free Expression to writers “who have been victimized by political persecution. In 2012 she received the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Inside the Money Machine. Pratt’s children, Ben and Ransom Weaver, announced in June 2023 that Pratt had been diagnosed with a ‘severe health problem’ and was receiving palliative care. She died on July 2, 2023, at the age of 76.

09-12-1953   Nancy “Nan” Goldin – Born in Washington D.C. She is an American photographer that is known for her LGBT photographs that document the post-Stonewall gay culture. Her most notable work is her 1986 collection titled, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Her first solo show was in Boston in 1973 and was based on her photographic journey among the city’s gay and transgender community. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS. Goldin lives and works in New York City, Berlin, and Paris. She is bisexual.