by Sarah Prager
Seven-year-old Rafael ran home to his mom and demanded answers. That’s when Mrs. de Acosta looked her child in the eye and admitted the truth: Rafael had been born a girl—a girl named Mercedes.
“Who of Us Is Only One Sex?”
* * *
For the rest of her life, Mercedes referred to that day as “the tragedy.”
“In that one brief second everything in my young soul turned monstrous and terrible and dark,” she wrote. Mercedes had lived happily and naturally as a boy until that moment, thanks in large part to her mother. Mrs. de Acosta noticed that her child, assigned female at birth, was demonstrating a lot of masculine qualities in her youth and just sort of . . . went with it. She cut Mercedes’s hair short and encouraged her to play boy games. Mercedes thought of herself as a boy right up until she found out that the other boys had penises . . . and Mercedes didn’t.
After “the tragedy,” Mercedes’s parents, immigrants from Cuba and Spain, got spooked. They started looking into studies about the perversion of “masculine women” and came upon the story of a lesbian teenager from Tennessee who murdered her girlfriend because she wouldn’t marry her. That story, and other negative messages about lesbians, made the de Acostas think their daughter’s extreme tomboy tendencies might be a bigger problem. Her parents did a one-eighty and sent her to a convent to learn how to be feminine.
Mercedes told a nun at the convent, “I am not a boy and I am not a girl, or maybe I am both—I don’t know. And because I don’t know, I will never fit in anywhere and I will be lonely all my life.” After what Mercedes had just been through over her gender identity, it’s no wonder she had such a depressing outlook on life.
Mercedes didn’t get why everyone was so hung up on genitalia when it came to gender. Mercedes might have fit right in with the nonbinary crowd today, but this was a hundred years ago, when male/female constructions were even more rigid. As an adult she later wrote: “I do not understand the difference between a man and a woman, and believing only in the eternal value of love, I cannot understand these so-called ‘normal’ people who believe that a man should love only a woman, and a woman love only a man. If this were so, then it disregards completely the spirit, the personality, and the mind, and stresses the importance of the physical body.”
Mercedes seems to have chosen to identify as a woman, but neither did she deny her masculinity, once writing, “Who of us is only one sex?” She dressed like a mod pirate, with silver-buckled shoes, long capes, and a signature tricorn hat, all in black and white only. All she was missing was a sword as she strode down New York City’s wide avenues. Mercedes wrote for a living—mostly plays and poems. But she isn’t remembered as much for that today. Mercedes’s prowess with the ladies, and her brazen openness about it, is what really cemented her reputation.
A Casanova
* * *
Truman Capote explained it best when he said that Mercedes de Acosta was the most valuable card to have when playing the game he called “international daisy chain,” where you try to connect one person to another through everyone they’ve slept with. With Mercedes in the mix, he said you could get from a cardinal to a duchess.
Women didn’t stand a chance when they encountered Mercedes, who left a trail of broken hearts in her wake. Champagne and caviar were part of her MO in wooing the objects of her affection. The women she seduced were always famous and intriguing, like dancer Isadora Duncan, who wrote a steamy poem praising Mercedes’s naked body, and movie star Ona Munson, famous for her role as Belle Watling in 1939’s Gone with the Wind. Ona once wrote a letter to Mercedes saying she wanted to “pour my love into you.” Mercedes wasn’t kidding when she bragged, “I can get any woman from any man.” Mercedes even helped start the trend of women wearing pants by sending her female lovers to her tailor for custom pairs. One time a paparazzo snapped a buzzworthy shot of one of Mercedes’s famous lovers leaving the shop, and when pics of the celeb were published, everyone wanted to look like her.
Even on the crowded roster of Mercedes’s A-list lovers, the famous actress Marlene Dietrich stood out. Like most of the women before her, Marlene became almost obsessed with Mercedes. After the two met, the actress showered Mercedes with flower deliveries. Tulips, roses, and carnations kept arriving at Mercedes’s home, sometimes twice a day. More than one hundred rare orchids were once flown in from San Francisco. “I was walking on flowers, falling on flowers, and sleeping on flowers,” Mercedes remembered. She told Marlene to quit it and donated all the flowers to a local hospital. Marlene didn’t take the hint and started delivering nonfloral gifts instead: vases, scarves, lamps, pajamas, and just about everything else you can imagine. Mercedes returned them all. The pair ended up laughing about it and starting a nine-month affair.
Marlene didn’t tone down the enthusiasm, though. The gifts continued: cakes, handkerchiefs, hair products, buttons, watches. She also wrote Mercedes letters even though they saw each other almost every day. She even tried to encourage a relationship between her daughter and Mercedes—she was that sure they would be in love forever. Mercedes knew they wouldn’t, but while it lasted she called Marlene her “Golden One.” She probably loved Marlene’s statement that “in Europe it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive.”
Oh, and did we mention that Mercedes was married to a man for most of this? No? Well, she was. For fifteen years, starting in 1920, Mercedes was married to the painter Abram Poole, though she refused to go by “Mrs.” All of Mercedes’s sisters had married, and her mother was putting on some pressure, so she agreed to the marriage on the condition that she would keep her last name. Mercedes and Abram were friends and lovers until the couple split up when Mercedes recommended Abram take a model he was fond of as his mistress. She meant it as an innocent suggestion because she was worried about him being lonely, but he was offended. Abram divorced Mercedes and, not for nothing, married the model. Mercedes thought it was ridiculous to end a marriage over something as silly as sleeping with other people.
The Leading Lady
* * *
All these relationships were meaningless flings compared to the one woman who dominated Mercedes’s life: Greta Garbo. Greta was the one who had Mercedes wrapped around her finger instead of the other way around. No matter what relationship either was in at the time, for decades Greta could beckon and Mercedes would come running.
They met in 1931 at a party in Hollywood, where Mercedes had just arrived to work on a screenplay. Greta complimented Mercedes on her bracelet and Mercedes took it off and gave it to her, saying, “I bought it for you in Berlin.” Mercedes didn’t know it then, but she would be hooked on Greta for the next thirty years.
Greta Garbo was from Sweden and had a reputation of being as cold as her homeland. Her public persona was serious, and she stayed as private as possible. She had only been in the United States a few years when Mercedes came into her life; she helped the actress improve her English and manners, since she was from a wealthy family. Mercedes helped her career in other ways too, like adding lines to the movie Queen Christina (yes, Greta wore men’s clothes and kissed a woman while playing our dear Kristina in a 1933 film!). Mercedes got to see a warmer side of the Nordic actress for a while, but eventually the icy wind turned against her.
Greta was furious when Mercedes published her tell-all autobiography in 1960. Mercedes violated the actress’s years of careful privacy because she needed the money. Now it was Mercedes who sent mountains of gifts in desperation. In the winter of 1961, Mercedes sent a Christmas tree that Greta never acknowledged. Mercedes took it as a good sign that she didn’t send it back, so she followed up with a gift basket. Greta returned almost all of it, keeping just the bottle of vodka.
The next years were a painful downward slope for the writer, due to a series of debilitating health problems. When a friend told Greta she should visit Mercedes and get some closure before it was too late, she responded that she had enough on her plate. Mercede
s died of natural causes without seeing Greta again. In her last poem to her beloved, Mercedes wrote, “You and me. There is no other way.”
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
1884–1962
tl;dr So much more than FDR’s first lady
The inauguration might as well have been Eleanor’s sentencing.
She sat numbly behind her husband as he droned on, captivating all one hundred thousand people in the audience—everyone except her. Out of boredom she focused her attention on the sapphire-and-diamond ring on her left hand. It had been a gift from Hick, a reminder that someone loved her. Even if that someone wasn’t her husband.
Hick . . .
Eleanor wished it was yesterday evening again, when she and Hick were together in Eleanor’s bedroom reading over a draft of Franklin’s inaugural speech. Now that Eleanor was first lady, it would be much harder to find the time and privacy to be together . . . but maybe if they could figure out a way to steal more nights like last night, the loneliness would be easier to bear.
“The only thing we have to fear is,” Franklin intoned from behind that giant podium, “fear itself.”
Eleanor sure knew something about overcoming fear. After all, it was the 1930s and her beloved Hick was a woman.
A Changing Partnership
* * *
Everything changed fifteen years before the inauguration, when Eleanor found the letters.
They were from Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s secretary . . . and they were addressed to Franklin. What the letters revealed was a less than professional relationship between Lucy and Franklin—a relationship that had apparently been going on for two years.
With her typical stoicism, Eleanor offered her husband an out: divorce. But at a time when only 1 percent of marriages ended, their elite families and political advisers reminded them that splitting up would mean Franklin getting fired from his high-up job in the navy, as well as an end to his political career. His mother threatened to cut him off financially if he left Eleanor for Lucy, not to mention that there were their five kids to think about. So Franklin promised he’d never see Lucy again—which turned out to be just one of many promises he wouldn’t keep.
Even though Eleanor stayed in the marriage, the sexual part of their relationship was closed for business. Eleanor thought of sex as an “ordeal to be borne,” anyway; she didn’t feel particularly maternal, feminine, or even sexual, and decided she no longer needed to play the role of a typical wife. It was as if she’d been living on autopilot since the moment her uncle Ted (US president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt) had walked her down the aisle to marry her distant cousin Franklin when she was twenty. Discovering the affair with Lucy finally snapped Eleanor awake; she felt free from her obligations to Franklin and his political aspirations, and she was determined to pursue her own interests.
At the time, Eleanor and Franklin were living in New York City, so Greenwich Village became Eleanor’s refuge. The neighborhood was a hotbed for the Bohemian lifestyle in the 1920s and soon became the go-to hangout for Eleanor and her new adopted family: political, feminist lesbians. She didn’t set out with the intention of making friends with a bunch of lesbians specifically, but those were the people who shared Eleanor’s political beliefs, and she went with it. And it just so happened that all those queer women helped lead Eleanor down a path of self-discovery.
Two couples—Elizabeth and Esther, and Nan and Marion—each happily accepted Eleanor as a permanent third wheel. She joined these politically active ladies in organizing other women, who had recently won the right to vote.
Eleanor, Nan, and Marion eventually moved in together upstate, not far from the Roosevelt home there, in a little cottage Franklin called the “love nest.” The three were essentially life partners. Nan carved their initials, E. N. M., into the cottage’s furniture and Eleanor embroidered the same letters into the linens. The women never revealed if Eleanor was romantically or sexually involved with the couple; all anyone knows for sure is that the friendship was more intense than typical.
“Je t’aime et je t’adore”
* * *
Eleanor was already in her late forties by the time Franklin’s campaign for the presidency began in earnest. She was justifiably afraid that a win for her husband could mean a loss for her: the end of her feminist activism and any semblance of a private life. Even campaigning on Franklin’s behalf instead of staying home to crochet had gotten her criticized for stepping out of a woman’s place and into the political sphere.
Then Lorena Hickok came into Eleanor’s life.
Nicknamed “Hick,” Lorena was an up-and-coming Associated Press journalist assigned to cover the would-be first lady during FDR’s presidential campaign. Cigar-smoking, work-boots-wearing, poker-playing Lorena had only ever dated women. The two ladies hit it off, bonding over late-night talks, and Lorena’s priority quickly became Eleanor as a person instead of journalistic subject. Unbeknownst to the public, she got her own room to sleep in at the White House for whenever she was in town, right next to Eleanor’s.
Putting It to Paper
* * *
When the two women were apart, they wrote each other letters every single day (which was a lot, before it became normal to send twenty texts a minute), and Eleanor often signed her letters “Je t’aime et je t’adore.” Years later, after Eleanor’s death, Lorena burned hundreds of the saved notes because, as she told Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, “Your mother wasn’t always discreet in her letters to me.” The surviving sixteen thousand pages of correspondence between them were released in 1978, ten years after Hick’s death, as she requested.
March 9, 1933 (E.R. to H.)
“My pictures are nearly all up & I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can’t kiss you so I kiss your picture good night & good morning!”
January 22, 1934 (H. to E.R.)
“Dearest, it was a lovely weekend. I shall have it to think about for a long, long time. Each time we have together that way—brings us closer, doesn’t it?”
January 27, 1934 (E.R. to H.)
“Gee, what wouldn’t I give to talk to you & hear you now, oh, dear one, it is all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures, these are the things I think about & long for.”
April 19, 1934 (H. to E.R.)
“Oh, damn it, I wish I could be there when you feel as you did Sunday night and take you in my arms and hold you close. Well, I’ll try to make you happy every minute while I’m there in May—”
May 2, 1935 (E.R. to H.)
“I know I’ve got to stick. I know I’ll never make an open break & never tell F.D.R. how I feel.”
The letters reveal that Eleanor and Hick dreamed about having their own place one day and that they were ridiculously into each other right from the start. They even once took a road trip without any Secret Service agents in tow, after Eleanor promised she’d take a gun with her for protection (she kept it unloaded at the bottom of the trunk).
Another Changing Partnership
* * *
Lorena encouraged Eleanor to make the role of first lady into something it had never been before. At Lorena’s suggestions, Eleanor held weekly press conferences exclusively for female reporters (FDR’s only allowed men) and started writing a daily syndicated column she used as a policy soapbox—both firsts for a first lady.
As time passed and Franklin continued proving himself a formidable president, the women began to fight. The magic of their romance wore off and Lorena quit her AP job since she could no longer objectively report on her subject. While Lorena’s career and finances started to tank, Eleanor was making a name for herself as a political force through the office of the first lady. Eleanor was everything to Lorena, but Lorena was fast becoming just one facet of Eleanor’s complex, full life. In the years to come, Eleanor would become a force for global diplomacy, as a delegate to the United Nations and as one of the creators of the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Eleanor and Lorena continued to write to each other for three decades, and always signed off with phrases like “I love you with all my heart.” Though it was Eleanor’s husband who famously said the only thing to fear is fear itself, it was the first lady and Hick who demonstrated fearless love. For them, it made all the difference.
BAYARD RUSTIN
1910–1987
tl;dr MLK’s right-hand man fights his way out of the shadows (nonviolently)
The Kentucky heat was oppressive. Bayard loosened his red tie as he boarded the Louisville–Nashville bus. While Bayard fumbled around for his ticket, a white child sitting on its mother’s lap in the front seat reached up to play with his tie like it was a dangling toy. The baby’s mother slapped its hand away, telling her child not to touch Bayard while referring to him with a racial slur that hit like a second blow.
Bayard, a Northerner, wasn’t used to traveling in the South or to encountering the open bigotry that came with it. Shocked and saddened, he headed to the back of the bus to take his seat in the section reserved for black people.
The incident changed something in Bayard that day in 1942. As he sat there, he turned to a black couple next to him and asked, “How many years are we going to let that child be misled by its mother?” The couple ignored him—but Bayard couldn’t ignore his inner voice telling him that what he was experiencing was wrong. He decided he would never again let Jim Crow laws dictate where he sat on a bus.
