On a Grey Thread is the groundbreaking poetry collection of Elsa Gidlow – the first in North American history to openly express lesbian desire.
Both personal and political, Gidlow’s poems express the poet’s complex feelings as a young woman whose political ideology and sexual identity ran counter to the traditional values of her time.
Opening her collection with “The Grey Thread,” Gidlow expresses herself with ornamental imagery, decorating her drab existence with the colorful beads of her personal identity. Employing the double meaning of “gay,” offering a brief erotic “moan” on the precipice of enjambment, Gidlow stretches her stanza to its sinful conclusion, recalling Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden.
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Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986) was a Canadian American poet, journalist, and philosopher. Born in Yorkshire, England, Gidlow moved with her family to Canada in 1905, settling in Montreal. At seventeen, she began pursuing amateur journalism full time, working with Roswell George Mills to publish Les Mouche fantastique, a pioneering magazine that was the first in North America dedicated to gay and lesbian content. Gidlow left for New York at 21, finding work as a poetry editor of Pearson’s and befriending influential poet Kenneth Rexroth, whom she would follow to San Francisco in 1926. A lesbian and anarchist, Gidlow was involved in some of California’s most influential radical political and artistic circles, befriending Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Robert Duncan, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, and Maya Angelou throughout her life. At her ranch Druid Heights, purchased in 1954 and shared with her partner Isabel Grenfell Quallo and carpenter Roger Somers, she established a bohemian community that was home to such figures as Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Catherine MacKinnon. Persecuted by the United States government’s House Un-American Activities Committee for her beliefs, Gidlow was a tireless artist and activist whose autobiographical works, philosophical texts on lesbianism, and poetry collections―including her debut On a Grey Thread (1923)―remain essential, groundbreaking works of queer literature.
