GLR September-October 2025

of her own free will and for unrelated reasons. She said she was unable to perform her job due to “conditions” existing at the school, without elaborating. § C OMING SIX YEARS before the Cooper Do-Nuts riot in L.A. and thirteen before Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, the vio lence at Los Guilucos was the largest and most publicized LGBT uprising in the U.S. until Stonewall in 1969. While it’s likely that neither school officials nor the rioters fully under stood what was at stake, the girls were fighting for a human right more basic than any denied by police in a coffee shop, restaurant, or bar. They rioted for the simple right to exist, just as they were, without psychiatric or surgical intervention. They lashed out against the idea that lesbians were mentally ill. As an inmate was heard shouting at the school physician on the first night: “You said [those girls] were crazy? Well, you’re crazy!” Their cause failed to gain traction in the gay community for several reasons. Los Guilucos was in an isolated area, away from major cities. News of the riots had spread far and wide, but the only detailed coverage was in the Santa Rosa paper, serving a town of 20,000. The rest of the nation heard a sanitized

version. An article in the October issue of Collier’s all but de nied a lesbian presence at the school: The “chick business,” with its complex social structure and rituals, was dismissed as inno cent playacting. Ignoring what the girls had told reporters, the author blamed the riots on inadequate recreational facilities and poorly trained staff, making no mention of a triggering event. Locked away in juvenile institutions, the girls had no pub lic voice. The era’s fledgling gay rights organizations shied away from any association with criminals. Fighting for the rights of lesbian delinquents was not their métier. But the most insurmountable barrier was that, among the mainstream popu lation then, it was taken as fact that homosexuals were mentally unfit and in need of psychiatric treatment. In early June, Herbert was summoned to a hearing with a special committee of the State Board of Corrections. The panel voiced disapproval for his plainspoken reporting, then asked his opinion on the cause of the riots. His explanation was probably the most reasonable and nonjudgmental assessment possible at the time. He said the girls of Los Guilucos needed, more than anything else, a sense of family, something that many had lacked even in their homes. The school failed to provide one, so the girls formed their own. And when the family units they’d created were split apart, the girls rebelled.

winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, ” from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920). While best-known for her poetry, Millay also wrote plays, including The Lamp and the Bell . She was known for her bold depictions of the female experience, especially in sexual ity. Her biographer Nancy Milford declared: “Edna St. Vincent Millay became the herald of the New Woman.” Critic Carl Van Doren observed: “Rarely since Sappho” had a fe male poet “written as outspokenly as Mil lay.” The comparison to Sappho is apt since both great female writers pursued love af fairs with women as well as men and wrote about erotic love between women. In 1923, Millay married 43-year-old Eugen Jan Bois sevain (1880–1949). This heterosexual mar riage was an open one, with both spouses engaging in romances with other people. Millay’s poem “Witch-Wife” was coura geous in capturing the erotic feelings women can have for other women: She is neither pink nor pale, And she never will be all mine; She learned her hands in a fairy-tale, And her mouth on a valentine. She has more hair than she needs; In the sun ’tis a woe to me! And her voice is a string of colored beads, Or steps leading into the sea. She loves me all that she can, And her ways to my ways resign; But she was not made for any man, And she never will be all mine.

The poem opens with a sense of the robust, letting us know its subject is “neither pink nor pale.” Yet there is also a sense of the classically ethereal in its sensuality, as we are told the subject of the narrator’s desire “learned her hands in a fairy-tale” and “her mouth on a valentine.” Even as we’re trans ported to a dreamlike world, the lines con jure images of women using hands and mouths to sexually excite and satisfy one another. Considering how many lesbians and bi sexual women from the mid-20th century to the present would identify with witchcraft and Wicca, it is oddly prescient that Millay saw the subject of this love poem as a kind of “witch.” Although not specified, “she was not made for any man” suggests the poem is about Sapphic love, albeit one tinged with disappointment for the narrator, as the woman she describes seems to be polyamorous, so she “never will be all mine.” Still, that “She loves me all that she can” suggests the “Witch-Wife” loves the narrator as much as she is able to love any individual, and that the narrator is, like the author, a woman. Close cousins envy and sexual jealousy mingle in “She has more hair than she needs,” which is accented when the sun falls upon it as “a woe” to the narrator, im plying the thick hair she envies could also represent other lovers. Right after we are told of the narrator’s discomfort caused by envy and jealousy, we are reminded of how enchanted she is by the “Witch-Wife,” whose voice enthralls as it varies in tone and modulation, a lilting musical instrument

like a “string of colored beads.” That voice reminds the narrator of the origin of all life, and the threat of death, as it invites her “into the sea.” Or then again, perhaps it simply and playfully invites her “into the sea” for the warm relaxation of a swim. The Lamp and the Bell was a fantasy play that Millay wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of Vassar College’s Alumnae Association in 1921. It is set in a fictional medieval Italian court, with its story centering on princesses Beatrice and Bianca, whose relationship is tested through various trials. Literary scholar Sarah Parker argues that the play is “an overlooked lesbian modernist work” and “represents an outspoken defense of fe male same-sex love at a time when such ‘romantic friendships’ were under increased scrutiny, especially at women’s colleges.” Parker points out that Millay cleverly “cloaks her controversial theme in the anti quated idiom of Renaissance verse drama” to escape “the censor.” By putting charac ters in fairy tale drag, they sidestep homo phobes and “elevate lesbian love.” A character in the play says of Beatrice and Bianca: “I never knew a pair of lovers more constant than those two.” The inten sity of their attraction is made vivid when Bianca says to Beatrice: “You are a burning lamp to me, a flame/ The wind cannot blow out, and I shall hold you/ High in my hand against whatever darkness.” Beatrice tells Bianca: “You are to me a silver bell in a tower/ And when it rings I know I am near home.” Denise Noe is a writer based in Missouri.

September–October 2025

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