wahoooooo

Beauty Papers n° 1.

‘El Delfín’, row housing (highly refurbished nowadays) Blanes - Selva, Girona, Catalonia, Spain; 1960’s

Estudio BSSV - Miguel Batalla, José Maria Sen, Angel Serrano, Esteban Vicens

see map

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Division of Birds

Pictured here the famous “Feather Lady”, Roxie Collie Laybourne, and staff

Marie Laurencin, Chanson de Bilitis, 1904

“…both the painter Marie Laurencin (working in Paris in 1908) and the artist Jeanne Mammen (in Berlin in 1931) created illustrations for The Songs of Bilitis, a series of erotic poems attributed in the late nineteenth century to ‘Bilitis’, an ancient Greek philosopher, a lover of Sappho and, as was eventually revealed, an entirely fictive person. Nevertheless, when the first lesbian rights group in the United States was founded in 1955, it took the name Daughters of Bilitis both to honour the Sapphic past (in ancient Greece as well as nineteenth-century Paris) and to elude the stigma of modern words such as ‘homosexual’, ‘sex variant’ and 'lesbian’. Like 'friend of Dorothy’, 'Daughters of Bilitis’ (or DOB for short) was a term flexible enough to function as both sexual code and strategic closet. According to Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, two of the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, 'If anyone asked us, we could always say we belong to a poetry club.’”

Georg Fuchssteiner

Schwellenschwein, 2015