by Elsa Gidlow

Elsa Gidlow's autobiography was completed only a few months before her death. Elsa published the first openly lesbian poetry in the United States in 1921. This account of eight decades of her life takes the reader through a splendid journey from Montreal to New York City to San Francisco with such characters as Frank Harris, June Singer, Robinson and Una Jeffers, Ella Young, Alan Watts, Clarkston Crane, Lou Harrison and many more.
excerpt...My thought revolved around the recent transitions of my life: from city to country, concrete to earth, from rented flat to my own space, from the death of a beloved and a tumultuous relationship to solitude. As the rain poured down and the storm shook the small redwood house, there was born the possibility of a joyous sense of connectedness. A tilting storm battered house, an emotionally and economically precarious era, at the doorstep of mid-life with no obvious achievement other than survival: none of them mattered. Deeply inward, something new was happening. I watched the burning madrone logs contribute to one anothers glow, each keeping the other alight. I again felt the presence of the women who had been familiars of this element. I heard their voices telling me: This fire on your hearth is neither individual nor separate any more than your living self is separate from us. We are part of one another as your small blaze is part of our chains of fires linking the centuries, a spark of the cosmic element itself.
For a moment, I wondered... fire not a separate element? Then I saw. This fire I had lighted included earth, air, water, and my human agency. The wood that nourished it included the trees nurturing earth, the water that had made its food available, the air without which it could not live or bum. The flame on my hearth was composite of all the elements. I comprehended why it was a symbol of the sacred. Before going to bed, I placed more logs on the glowing coals of the evening fire.
This is a hardback copy. The book is Out-Of-Print.