Notable Lesbians
Thursday, August 30th, 2007This week’s Notable Lesbian is:
Maggie L. McIntosh
December 22, 1947 -
Maggie L. McIntosh is an American politician from the state of Maryland. 
She is a former Baltimore City Public School teacher who now chairs one of the six standing committees of the Maryland House of Delegates. A Democrat, she represents the state’s 43rd district in Baltimore City. McIntosh chaired the Subcommittee on Personnel and was a member of the Education and Economic Development and Capitol Subcommittees. In 1998, she assumed the position of Vice Chairman of the Commerce and Government Matters Committee and in 2001, she was named House Majority Leader. In January 2003, McIntosh was named chairman of the House Environmental Matters Committee.
Interesting tid bit:
Delegate McIntosh is a woman of many firsts. She was the first woman to be appointed majority leader in the Maryland House of Delegates and the first openly gay person in the Maryland General Assembly. She is also the first woman to serve as the chairman of the Environmental Matters Committee where she has steered several major legislative initiatives to passage. The Chesapeake Bay Restoration Act, which funded upgrades at wastewater treatment plants around the state, is among McIntosh’s accomplishments, as well as an annexation measure passed in 2006 in which she brought counties and municipalities together. One of McIntosh’s chief initiatives in 2007 is the Chesapeake Bay Green Fund, which would levy a surcharge on new development to pay for Bay restoration.
If you have a suggestion for a Notable Lesbian, e-maill me at lyndsey.darcangelo@451press.net or use the contact form above and I’ll highlight her in an upcoming post.
maggie mcintosh, the chesapeake bay restoration act, maryland house of delegates, house environmental matters committee
She is the third speaker of the City Council, which is considered the second most powerful position in city government after the Mayor. Quinn is the first woman and first openly gay person to be elected speaker. In 2007, Quinn announced that she intended to march in the LGBT section of Dublin, Ireland’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. She was invited to Dubln due to the Ancient Order of Hibernians’s policy against gays and lesbians marching openly (i.e. displaying overt symbols of their sexuality) in the New York parade. She tried to broker a deal with the organizers in 2006 to allow her to wear a gay pride pin, but failed and has since boycotted the event. Quinn currently resides in Chelsea, Manhattan with her partner, Kim Catullo
She was among the first psychotherapists to assist gay and lesbian clients. After coming out as a lesbian in 1968, she began providing therapy to gays and lesbians, and in 1971, she organized the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center as well as an organization of gays and lesbians within the American Psychiatric Association, which declassified homosexuality as a mental illness two years later. Berzon was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986. She was treated by mastectomy and her cancer remained in remission for many years. The cancer returned in 2001, and Berzon died on January 24, 2006. She is survived by Teresa DeCrescenzo, the president of Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services, whom Berzon met in 1973 and married during a mass wedding ceremony at the 1993 March on Washington.
In the 1920s, she met the only woman she ever lived with, Ceciline “Babe” Franklin. They moved together to Detroit, Michigan in 1937. Ruth became the first American woman to own a printing business in Detroit. She made a living printing stationery, fliers, and posters out of her house. Throughout her life, Ruth Ellis was an advocate for the rights of gays and lesbians, as well as for the rights of African Americans. She became a role model for African Americans, lesbians, and seniors. The Ruth Ellis Center, built after her death, honors the life and work of Ruth Ellis. The center is one of only four agencies in the United States dedicated to helping homeless LGBT teens and young adults. They have a drop-in center and street outreach program as well as housing teens and young adults in an emergency shelter and transitional living programs.
first achieved nationwide notoriety when she was linked to the murder of judge Harold Haley during an attempted Black Panther prison break; she fled underground, and was the subject of an intense manhunt. After 18 months as a fugitive, she was captured, arrested, tried, and eventually acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. She is currently Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and gender equality and for prison abolition.
Marlene Dietrich, Alla Nazimova, Tamara Karsavina, Eva Le Gallienne, Isadora Duncan, Katharine Cornell, Maude Adams, Ona Munson (”Belle Watling” in the movie Gone with the Wind), Adele Astaire, and others. Four of her plays were produced, and she published a novel and three volumes of poetry. Her memoir, Here Lies the Heart, was published in 1960 because she was seriously ill with a brain tumor and in need of money.
Later in her career, Garbo gradually withdrew from the entertainment world completely and moved to a secluded life in New York City, refusing to make any public appearances. Some people suggest that Garbo remained single in the United States because of an unrequited love for her drama school sweetheart, the Swedish actress 
was an American writer and is considered to have acted as a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. After moving to Paris in 1903 she started to write in earnest: novels, plays, stories, libretti and poems. Increasingly, she developed her own highly idiosyncratic, playful, sometimes repetitive and sometimes humorous style. Stein met her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas in 1907.
songwriter, singer, multi-instrumental musician, columnist, and author. She was a singing sensation throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and continues to write songs for numerous artists. Born in New York City, she was primarily raised in New Jersey and briefly attended the New York City High School of Music & Art. At age fifteen, Ian wrote and sang her first hit single, “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking),” about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl’s mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers. Her most successful single was “At Seventeen,” released in 1975, a bittersweet commentary on adolescent cruelty and teenage angst, as reflected upon from the maturity of adulthood. Ian currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with attorney Patricia Snyder, whom she married in Toronto, Canada on August 27, 2003.
She went on to become one of the greatest actresses of her day, successful at home as well as on the London stage. Her repertoire encompassed a wide range of parts, including male roles such as Romeo. A commanding presence both on and offstage, Cushman used her fortune and fame to champion the work of other women artists, among them her lover Emma Stebbins.
She was born in Oslo, Norway, and became a United States citizen in 1960. In 1961 she joined the Army Student Nurse Program and received a B.S. in Nursing in 1963 from the University of Maryland. In response to a question during a routine security clearance interview in 1989, Margarethe unknowingly disclosed that she was a lesbian. The “
spoken word. After a stint as a professional actor, she branched into audio books in the mid-1990s. In 2004 she won the distinguished Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki - which in a review was called “just about perfect.”
Anne is best known for her coded journals in which she recorded her daily life, romances, and seductions, as well as her rigorous program of study. She also traveled widely. Her affair with a wealthy heiress, Ann Walker, was a story of local repute.
She was billed as “The Mother of the Blues.” She did much to develop and popularize the form and was an important influence on younger blues women, such as Bessie Smith, and their careers. Although she married fellow vaudeville singer William ‘Pa’ Rainey in 1904, it was widely known, though less discussed, that she was 
