Born August 7: Anna Weirauch, William J. Mann

Nine years before London's 1928 deluge of lesbian fiction, including Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel, and Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack, Anna Weirauch published The Scorpion in Germany. It was the first of three novels following Mette Rudolph from childhood to adulthood. In the first volume young Mette has an affair with Olga, who eventually breaks up with her and kills herself. When Mette's parents enlist a psychiatrist to "cure" her, she dismisses the idea that lesbians are sick or need treatment. In the next two volumes she encounters most of the social ills of Weimer Berlin, including drug abuse, alcoholism, and rampant promiscuity but in the end, she finds contentment by leaving the city. Once she's settled in a rural area, restored by nature, she's ready to really love another woman. An abridged single-volume translation of the three novels, unnecessarily titled Of Love Forbidden, was published in America in 1933. That same year, when she was 46, Weirauch and her partner moved from Berlin to Upper Bavaria. After the war they moved to Munich and returned to a very different West Berlin in 1969 when she was 82. She died there the following year.

Dividing his time between Palm Springs and Provincetown, and between fiction and nonfiction, William J. Mann has published ten books since 1997. The first of his five biographies was the terrific joy Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star, which single-handedly lauched a Haines revival. Seek out Haines' movies, from 1922 to 1934, which are witty, effervescent delights. Mann reclaimed more queer movie lore in Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. Although his landmark biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn [Kindle] was a NYT Notable Book in 2006, it didn't quite get the widespread attention it deserved because the mainstream didn't want to hear their icon was primarily a lesbian and her endlessly hyped romance with Spencer Tracy was cover for their separate same-sex adventures. His less overtly gay How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood [Kindle] from 2009 was followed last October by Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand [Kindle].