Dolores Klaich, the American journalist and author best known for the 1974 social history Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism, died on March 8, 2023.
Born on August 9, 1936, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Jacob Klaich, an organizer for the Socialist Labor Party, she graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 1958. She worked as a reporter for Life magazine in the 1960s and as an associate editor of the literary journal Transatlantic Review, before turning to books, journalism and teaching focused on gay, lesbian and feminist life. She later developed HIV/AIDS curricula used by healthcare professionals during the early years of the epidemic and taught sexual health and AIDS education at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism (1974) combined historical biography with contemporary interviews and survey responses, weaving the lives and loves of figures such as Sappho, Colette, Natalie Clifford Barney, Radclyffe Hall and Gertrude Stein together with the voices of ordinary lesbians she interviewed in the early 1970s.
The book became one of the first texts assigned in early women’s studies programs, helping to establish lesbian social history as a subject of serious study.
Heavy Gilt (1988), a comic lesbian mystery novel, followed; it was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Complete Bibliography
Nonfiction: Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism (1974)
Novels: Heavy Gilt (1988)
Klaich chose to die by medical aid in dying under Vermont’s Act 39, on March 8, 2023, in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she had lived since 2004. She was 86. She left no spouse or children; the East Hampton Star obituary noted she was survived by “a circle of loving friends.”
Photography from The East Hampton Star.