Here are some cool gals looking mighty dapper! You can click on each photo for names and here’s some info on each fabulous woman:
Lily Elsie: English actress during Edwardian era, famous for being in many musicals and operettas
Josephine Baker: French bisexual actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s, refused to perform for segregated audiences, active with the French Resistance during WWII and the Civil Rights movement in the 50s
Dorothy Arzner: American lesbian film director who was the only female director in Hollywood during the 1930s, created the first boom mike for the Clara Bow film “The Wild Party” (1929)
Dorothy Mackaill: British-American actress who was involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, also notable for her silent-film roles
Daphne du Maurier: English bisexual author and playwright, famous for her works like Rebecca and “The Birds”
Frida Kahlo: Mexican bisexual painter, known for the feminist and nationalist themes in her paintings, created 55 self-portraits and once stated “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”
Hannah Gluckstein, known as “Gluck”: British lesbian artist known for her evocative Modernist paintings, adopted the name “Gluck” because she thought the sex of a painter is irrelevant
Olive Thomas: American silent-film actress, involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, possibly the first “Vargas Girl” after posing for pinup artist Alberto Vargas
Jessie Matthews: English actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s
Katharine Hepburn: American actress who helped to create the “modern woman” image in Classic Hollywood during the 1930s and 40s, wore trousers before it was fashionable for women to do so, won four Academy Awards for Best Actress
Here’s a few more!
Gladys Bentley: Blues singer in 1920s Harlem. She performed at the famous gay speakeasies the Clam House and the Ubangi Club, sometimes backed by a chorus line of drag queens. She was openly gay in her early career and married a woman in 1931 in Atlantic City.
Marion Barbara ‘Joe’ Carstairs: Eccentric heiress and accomplished speed boat racer known for her tattoos, her butch presentation and her affairs with women including Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankead, Marlene Dietrich and Oliver Wilde’s niece, Dorothy Wilde. After working with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in World War I, she founded the car-hire and chauffeuring service featuring a women-only staff of drives and mechanics.
Anna May Wong: Considered to be the first Chinese American Hollywood movie star. Tired of being both typecast and being passed over for lead Asian character roles in favor of non-Asian actresses, Wong left Hollywood in 1928 for Europe and became a sensation, eventually performing on the stage, TV, and films on both sides of the Atlantic.
