Maria Popova is a voracious reader. She posts her reflections on literature, which she calls “Brain Pickings.” She reads widely and writes about whatever interests her. Her interests are broad.
In this post, she gathers the greatest love letters of all time among people of the same sex. She does this to honor what is known as Pride Month.
Here you will find love letters by Margaret Mead, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, and more.
June has been auspicious for LGBT people. In June 2013, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down federal laws that prevented the recognition of gay marriage in a case called United States v. Windsor. Edie Windsor, a technology manager at IBM, lived with Thea Spyer for 40 years and cared for her as Thea’s health declined. They married in Canada in 2007. Thea died less than two years later.
The federal government proceeded to tax Thea’s estate, which she left to Edie, as if they were strangers. Edie owed the IRS almost $400,000. She fought the federal tax collectors to win recognition of the legitimacy of her marriage to Thea. She won in the lower courts and in the Supreme Court, clearing the way for gay marriage for others. Subsequently, she reveled in her role as a gay icon, leading parades and celebrations. Edie Windsor died in 2017 at the age of 88.
In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that discrimination in the workplace based on LGBT status was sex discrimination and therefore prohibited. Surprisingly, the decision was written by Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointment to the Supreme Court.
With Edie Windsor, August 2013
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautiful photo of you and Edie. Brave women, all.
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Yes. Freaking beautiful!!!
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Too bad Edie Windsor didn’t live to see the Supreme Court decision this year. I remember reading about her valiant struggle to gain equal rights for same sex couples.
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Edie had a glorious life. She lived with the person she loved for 40 years, then won a landmark Supreme Court case. It doesn’t get better than that. She was petite, beautiful and had a will of iron.
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What a beautiful photo of two gorgeous ladies.
It is sad that so many people disparage love between two people. Anyone who has someone to love is experiencing the best that human life has to give.
It saddens me greatly that prejudices and biases still exists in way too many minds. My hope is that someday humans will begin to care for each other and realize that love is the greatest joy that one can give to another.
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Love is love, and it’s beautiful. The young adults coming up grok this. Good for them. The times they are a’changing.
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These gorgeous letters are water in a desert. How very, very wonderful!
I would like to add a few other examples: Many of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, are, of course, love letters to a certain “Fair Youth.” It requires extreme, unlikely contortions of the obvious sense of the pieces to construe them otherwise. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is chock full of quite personal pieces celebrating male/male love (and since such activity was common in nineteenth-century America, people generally thought little of this; Whitman was attacked by some for writing freely about sex in general, but not because he wrote (often quite explicitly) about sex between men per se. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” cannot reasonably be construed as anything other than an extended eulogy and coming to grips with the loss of his beloved A.H.H. To those who are unfamiliar with the work, I want to recommend, highly, the discussion of nineteenth-century “romantic friendships” between women (including samples from representative letters) in Lillian Faderman’s magnificent Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. These romantic friendships were very, very common. President Lincoln, of course, had numerous male lovers. Some people do not understand that before the late-19th and early 20th-century medical establishment in Europe created the category of “the homosexual,” romantic same-sex relationships, some involving sexual activity and some not, were very, very common, but because people lacked the category of “the homosexual,” they didn’t think that engaging in romantic and sometimes passionate same-sex relationships made them into a particular category or type of person. Again, the category of “the homosexual” was a very late invention (Michel Foucault has written about this; see also the discussion in Harvard historian John Stauffer’s Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln).
In addition, it seems pretty obvious based on “natural experiments” that in the absence of social conditioning to limit oneself to opposite sex partners, bisexual behavior is the norm. This has always been the case historically. For an extended discussion of this, see the following essay:
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In other words, it’s my contention that historical evidence proves that people have to be taught–to be microconditioned by homophobic cultures–to be homophobic and to limit themselves to opposite-sex partners. Wherever such microconditioning by a homophobic culture has been absent, bisexual behavior has been the norm. I know, I know. It’s difficult for people raised in a recently very homophobic culture like ours to understand this. But the argument seems, to me, incontrovertible.
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Prejudice has to be taught. (“You have to be taught, before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate. You have to be carefully taught.”)
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Yes, prejudice has to be taught, but not explicitly. In fact, it tends to stick better if it’s not explicit. If a child goes to an establishment where the clientele are all a certain kind of people and the front of the house workers are all a different kind of people and the back of the house workers are still another kind of people, the child has gotten a perfect lesson in prejudice, especially if Mom and Dad say nothing about it.
When Mom takes her daughter aside to have That Talk about boys, or when Grandma asks her college age grandson at Thanksgiving dinner if he has a “special lady” in his life, the children have learned a lesson about prejudice.
When children see on television that Asians are perfect students who go on to become doctors, whites are “normal Americans”, Latinos sell tacos and blacks are poor/gangsters, they learn lessons about prejudice.
I could, of course, give hundreds more examples of every day experiences all baked into the clay of “normal” life, which children grow up believing is just the way it is, maybe even the way it should be because they never think to question it. At least when families talk explicitly about “lazy” blacks or “criminal” immigrants, children have conscious thoughts that some day they may come to reflect on when they’re actually confronted with real people in those categories.
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Beautifully said, Dienne. Yes. Microconditioning. What is learned by osmosis. Enculturation. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/from-notes-to-krystalina/
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“it tends to stick better if it’s not explicit.”
D77: Great point. What does that little truth say about standards in education?
“it’s my contention that historical evidence proves that people have to be taught–to be microconditioned by homophobic cultures”
Bob: True of almost any societal construct, don’t you think?
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Yes, Roy, certainly. However, those opposed to LGBTQX rights claim that gender and sexual orientation are not social constructs. That’s why I wrote this piece. And, Bethree and Dienne, I did not argue that enculturation regarding the constructs is EXPLICITLY taught. I simply argued that it comes from enculturation, which typically involves both explicit and implicit “teaching.” Linguists make the distinction between “learning the grammar of a language” (via a process of explicit instruction) and “acquiring the grammar of a language” (via automatic and largely unconscious processes), and the latter is the means, ofc, by which the overwhelming majority of the grammar of a native language is typically acquired.
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Very well said, Dienne. It’s insidious because it’s invisible. It’s invisible because it’s not discussed or questioned, it just “is.”
At 19 I studied in Mexico for awhile. I spent some time in Texas traveling to, then from. On returning through Texas I was startled: Mexican-Americans were a servant class. Before, I didn’t see them.
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For this reason, I think it makes sense to speak of an acquired “cultural grammar.”
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So, my point was not to address the issue of the method(s) of enculturation but, rather, to advance the argument that what Jared Diamond calls “natural experiments” provide substantial evidence that sexual orientation is not primarily innate.
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So Dienne is spot on that enculturation is, like the acquisition of the grammar of a native tongue, largely unconscious and automatic. Culture is acquired. It was the genius of Simone de Beauvoir to be the first to articulate this with regard to gender. In her The Second Sex (1946, I believe), she argued that one is born female but becomes a woman–that is, a person acquires the gender roles embedded in one’s culture, unless he/she/they rebel against these.
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So I’m arguing that in general, both sexual orientation and gender identification are acquired, largely automatically, from the ambient culture–that they are constructs–things made. And as such, they can be unmade to a greater are lesser degree. My addition to the argument is that cultures that don’t insist on these, strictly, demonstrate the fact.
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“Before I didn’t see them.” Wow. That’s freaking powerful!!!!
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Like enthusastically.
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Enthusiastically, rather.
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This post brought back some memories and caused some reflection. When I was in 4th grade at a DoD school in Germany, it was cool to call people you didn’t like or wanted to make fun of faggots. We didn’t know what it meant. I used to take a bus to school from a German neighborhood with a female high school student who overheard me on a ride home and she pulled me aside after we got off and explained what a “faggot” was. It was the first time I ever heard of or conceived homosexuality and I was still confused, but she planted a seed. I never used that word again, even though I really didn’t get it. A couple of years later, I used to get my hair cut at Mr. Sid’s in Birmingham, AL, who was famously the first transexual in Alabama and later renamed her salon Ms. Sid’s. I’ll admit it was hard for a 7th grader to understand, but my earlier experience made it easier. And as others boycotted her salon, my mother made a point of making me go for more haircuts than I probably needed. I moved a year later and forgot about Ms. Sid until today, so I did a search on her today. She was shot in the chest at a motel near wear I lived in 1977 by a 26 year old male. I wish I had known earlier. She was a pioneer and it all seems so sad today. We all need to to stand up for LGBT rights, especially those of us who are not. We need to stand up for human beings everywhere all the time.
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Oh my Lord, Greg. So moving and sad!!!!!
Here: my experience of the same: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/casey/
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Or, I should say, one such experience. I’ve had several.
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I gitcha, Bob. Casey’s story resonates as well. When I attended an all-boys Catholic high school, one of my classmates, who I didn’t know well, we had one class together–religion!–was gay and constantly ridiculed and denigrated. I didn’t stand up for him because I didn’t have the self-confidence to do so and didn’t have any interaction with him. I learned 10 years ago that he was the first of our class do die, about 5 years after we graduated. It is unclear to me if he died of suicide or AIDS. Either way, it is not an episode of my life of which I feel proud.
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GregB: “We need to stand up for human beings everywhere all the time.”
The last time I visited Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Borneo, I went with a friend to get a foot massage. The owner of the place, a lady, asked if I mined having a man give me a foot massage. I said, “No”.
The ‘man’ was a trans lady who was beautifully dressed with dark lipstick.
I felt bad that she was still labeled a man.
All people are equal in the eyes of God. Unfortunately there are ‘Christian’ religions that quote the bible to confirm their bigoted beliefs. They believe that they are superior and have the right to judge.
This does bother me.
My hairdresser is gay. His Christian mother once told me that gays are abominations in the eyes of God. He is now a Buddhist.
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Beautifully said, Carol!!!
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What a wonderful post and comments.
My daughter graduated high school Friday so our weekend has been a whirlwind of photos, celebrations and change.
Amidst everything, reading this is such a nice way to start Sunday.
Thanks to all!
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Congrats, John!!!!
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