Writer Elsa Gidlow—dubbed the "Poet Warrior"—is regarded as a lesbian-feminist pioneer, and was an active participant in many of the San Francisco Bay Area’s cultural and political movements over the course of nearly six decades.

Gidlow was born on December 29, 1898, in Yorkshire, England. Her family—which would eventually include seven younger siblings—emigrated to Quebec when she was a girl. Though she came from a poor family and had little formal education, Gidlow later recalled that she aspired from an early age to become an independent woman and a poet.

As a teenager, Gidlow moved with her family to Montreal, where she worked as a typist and took classes at McGill College. It was during this time that she had her first romantic relationships with women. A few years later, Gidlow moved to New York City, where she lived in Greenwich Village and worked as poetry editor for the progressive political magazine Pearson’s. Throughout her life, she would support herself— and sometimes also family and friends—as a freelance journalist and creative writer.

Gidlow lived an openly lesbian life long before an organized gay movement existed in the United States. In 1923, she published On a Grey Thread, widely considered to be the first book of lesbian love poetry in North America. (The work was expanded and republished as Sapphic Songs, by Gidlow’s own Druid Heights Press, in 1976 and again in 1982.) In the late 1920s, Gidlow briefly lived in Europe, where she met other lesbian expatriates, including pioneering author Radclyffe Hall.

In the late 1920s, Gidlow moved to San Francisco. She first lived in the bohemian enclave of North Beach, and was friends with people who would become leading lights of the Beatnik scene in the 1950s. She later purchased a ramshackle property in the redwood forest of Marin (now part of Muir Woods National Monument). There, she established Druid Heights, an "unintentional community," in her words, which became a haven for writers, philosophers, and other creative and eccentric types. "We consider the artist a special sort of person," she once wrote. "It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist."

Gidlow lived with her long-term partner, Violet Henry-Anderson—whom friends called "Tommy" and Gidlow nicknamed "Panther"—for 13 years, until Tommy died of cancer in the late 1930s. Even in the pre-liberation era, Gidlow later recalled, "We were profoundly sure of our right to be as we were, to love and live in our chosen way, we were happy in it." Several years later, Gidlow began a relationship with a Caribbean woman, Isabel Grenfell Quallo. The two lived together for about a decade, but Gidlow never ceased to cherish her independence, vowing "never again to permit love to bind me, nor myself to bind a lover." In her 70s, Gidlow had a shorter relationship with a woman some 50 years her junior.

Gidlow was as unabashedly open about her radical politics as she was about her sexuality. An activist on numerous fronts, she was a member of the first U.S. lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in the 1950s. During the McCarthy era, she was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee. However, as revealed in recently released records of the hearings, Gidlow told the committee that she was an anarchist and considered Marxism to be an oppressive ideology.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Gidlow was an active participant in the psychedelic subculture, the antiwar movement, and the New Age and alternative spirituality communities, embracing both paganism and Eastern religions. With Alan and Jano Watts, she co-founded the Society of Comparative Philosophy, which helped popularize Buddhism in the United States.

By the time lesbian feminism emerged, Gidlow was already in her 70s, and was soon hailed as movement foremother; her standing was strengthened with the publication, in 1975, of Ask No Man Pardon: The Philosophi-cal Significance of Being Lesbian. Gidlow, however, was never a separatist, stating in her autobiography, "I was, and am, first a human person," she wrote, "then a woman, then a woman whose primary identification and loyalty is with women as lovers and friends."

Over the course of her career, Gidlow authored a dozen books, mostly poetry. In her final years, she continued to write and tend her garden at Druid Heights. After experiencing a series of strokes, she died in June 1986, just a month after the publication of her autobiography.

Summing up Gidlow’s 88 years, Celeste West, her long-time editor, wrote, "Elsa fought life-long against class privilege, organized religion, and sexism, while fighting for all varieties of love and beauty."