- Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986), “The Poet Warrior,” was a poet-philosopher and lesbian-feminist pioneer known through her love poetry, essays, and autobiography, the film Word is Out, and Druid Heights, her Zen-inspired retreat among the California redwoods. Elsa's writings challenge class privilege, religious and political dogmas, and sexism while celebrating all varieties of love and beauty as diverse flowers in a garden of unity. She insisted that daily life was the canvas of true art: “We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.” Elsa led the precarious life of a freelance journalist, often supporting relatives and friends. Born in Yorkshire, England, Elsa emigrated with her family to French Canada. Raised in Page 350 →privation, she was mainly self-educated. She published On a Grey Thread, the first North American book to celebrate lesbian love (1923), and later expanded it into the poetry classic Sapphic Songs (1982). Elsa became a leading figure in San Francisco’s bohemian, then psychedelic, New Age, and feminist circles. The '50s saw her unsuccessful prosecution by McCarthyites. ELSA: I Come with My Songs is the first full-life, explicitly lesbian autobiography yet published, “the chronicle of an irrepressible free thinker.”
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