From The California Digital
Library
This site describes the
content of Elsa Gidlow's papers, kept at the GLBT Historical
Society of Northern California.
Biographical Excerpt:
Shortly after Elsa Gidlow's death Phyllis Matyi,
Elsa's friend, attorney and executrix of the Gidlow estate, issued
a press release presenting a biographical summary of Elsa's life.
The text of that release is printed below.
Poet-philosopher Elsa Gidlow died peacefully in
her mountain home retreat, "Druid Heights," near Muir
Woods, Mill Valley, California on June 8, 1986.
Born in Yorkshire, England in 1898, six-year-old
Elsa Gidlow immigrated with her family of nine to the French
Canadian village of Tetreauville. She was mainly self- educated,
being allowed what she called, "the untutored space to
be."
Gidlow's editor, Celeste West of Booklegger
Press, says "We always joked that Elsa was born avant garde:
North American's first published writer of a lesbian poetry volume
(1923); radical feminist of the "first wave;"
protest-poet attacked by McCarthyites; member of San Francisco's
bohemian, psychedelic, then New Age and women's spirituality
circles. Elsa fought life-long against class privilege, organized
religion, and sexism, while fighting for all varieties of love and
beauty."
Gidlow led the precarious career of a freelance
journalist. She created a rich vein of protest and love poetry,
while supporting her family and others. She also created, in the
fifties, one of the renown garden-retreats of the coast redwoods.
Gidlow insisted her life was her art: "We consider the artist
a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a
special sort of artist."
Gidlow left Montreal for New York in 1920, where
she became poetry editor for Frank Harris' progressive, much
censored Pearson's Magazine. She sailed to San Francisco in
1926 with her long-time companion Violet Henry-Anderson. In San
Francisco, she became friends with Ansel Adams, Robinson Jeffers,
Kenneth Rexroth, Lou Harrison, Ella Young, Del Martin, Phyllis
Lyon, Margo St. James, Clarkson Crane, Clyde Evans, and zen
philosopher Alan Watts, who dedicated his autobiography to her...
