Maureen Duffy, the English novelist, poet, playwright and activist whose 1966 novel The Microcosm was set in London’s Gateways Club, died on 27 May 2026. Born Maureen Patricia Duffy on 21 October 1933, in Worthing, Sussex, she also wrote as D. M. Cayer. She took an English degree at King’s College London in 1956, taught … Read more
Corinne Diana, the Provincetown poet and public defender who wrote the poetry collection Lesbian in Hiding, died on February 1, 2026. Born in Boston on May 29, 1943, and orphaned soon afterward, she was adopted by Ray and Norma Buttaro and raised in East Cambridge and then Woburn, Massachusetts. After graduating from Woburn Memorial High … Read more
Jeanne Córdova, the lesbian feminist activist, journalist and publisher whose memoir When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography, died on January 10, 2016. Born Jeanne Robert Córdova on July 18, 1948, in Bremerhaven, Germany, the second of twelve children of a Mexican father and … Read more
Eve Zaremba, the Canadian writer who created Helen Keremos, one of the earliest lesbian detectives in genre fiction, in her 1978 novel A Reason to Kill, died on October 8, 2025. Born in 1930 in Kalisz, Poland, Zaremba fled with her family to the United Kingdom after the outbreak of the Second World War and … Read more
Andrea Gibson, the American poet, performer and activist best known for the spoken-word collections Lord of the Butterflies and You Better Be Lightning, died on July 14, 2025. Gibson was born on August 13, 1975, in Calais, Maine, and used they/them pronouns. They came out at age 20 while studying creative writing at Saint Joseph’s … Read more
Victoria A. Brownworth, the Philadelphia journalist and author who wrote the Lambda Literary Award–winning novel Ordinary Mayhem, died on May 22, 2025. Born in February 1956, Brownworth studied American studies and women’s history at Temple University. She began her career at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News in the 1980s and early 1990s, … Read more
Yvonne Zipter, the Chicago poet, columnist and author best known for the poetry collection The Patience of Metal and the lesbian softball study Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend, died on February 10, 2025. Zipter was born on January 6, 1954, in Milwaukee, and grew up in West Allis, Wisconsin, graduating from West Allis Central … Read more
Dorothy Allison, the lesbian-feminist author best known for the novel Bastard Out of Carolina and the story collection Trash, died in November 2024. Born Dorothy Earlene Allison on April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina, to a 15-year-old mother, Ruth Gibson Allison, she was the first in her family to graduate from high school. She … Read more
Amber L. Hollibaugh, the American lesbian activist, organizer, filmmaker and writer best known for her essay collection My Dangerous Desires, died on October 20, 2023. Hollibaugh was born on June 20, 1946, in Bakersfield, California, to working-class parents of Irish and Romani descent. She left home as a teenager, worked as a sex worker and … Read more
Born Eva Maria Kollisch on August 17, 1925, in Vienna, she was the daughter of the poet, journalist and translator Margarete Kollisch and the architect Otto Kollisch. She grew up in a secular Jewish family, and in 1939, after Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, her parents put her and her two brothers on a Kindertransport. … Read more