Lady Gaga has fuelled further rumours about her sexuality by admitting she could fall in love with another woman.

The singer recently insisted she is single and too busy to settle down, despite rumours linking her to pre-fame ex-boyfriend Matthew Williams.

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A U.S. high school cancelled its prom after a lesbian student asked to bring her girlfriend.
Constance McMillen, 18, also wanted to wear a tuxedo to the event, due to be held on April 2.

But  Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, initially responded by banning her from arriving with her girlfriend.
She was told that they could be thrown out ‘if any of the students complained about their presence’ - and that she could not wear a suit.

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“Women who love women are Lesbians. Men, because they can only think of women in sexual terms, define Lesbian as sex between women” - Rita Mae Brown

Life Span: Born January 29, 1975
Star Sign: Aquarius
Famous As: American actress
 
 
Childhood:  Sara Rebecca Abeles  was born in Santa Monica, to a Jewish family. Her parents are Barbara Crane (née Barbara Cowan) and Harold Abeles.

Her two older adoptive half siblings were stars of Little House on the Prairie: Melissa Gilbert and Jonathan Gilbert. Melissa and Jonathan were adopted by Barbara and her first husband Paul Gilbert (born Paul MacMahon); Paul died in 1975.

Abeles changed her surname to Gilbert to become an actress in 1984.

Gilbert decided at age six that she wanted to be an actress after her older sister, Melissa Gilbert, got a plaque on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Following appearances in television movies and a commercial for Kool Aid, at the age of thirteen she landed the role of Darlene Conner, the sarcastic middle child, in Roseanne. Sara was a cast member during the show’s nine-year run from 1988 to 1997, for which she also wrote a fourth-season episode called “Don’t Make Me Over”. Sara’s contribution was considered so important to Roseanne that the show’s producers juggled storylines and taping schedules to allow her to study at Yale University while remaining part of the cast, shooting remote segments of Darlene at a soundstage in New York. At Yale, she majored in art with an emphasis on photography; she graduated with honors in 1997. (more…)

Life Span: Born 2nd March 1930
Star Sign: Pisces
Famous As: British peace activist and writer
 
Background: Her mother and father (who both died in 1976) were Margaret Vera Kingham and George Ernest Arrowsmith. Pat went to Farrington’s and Stover School, and later Cheltenham Ladies College. She achieved a degree in History at Newham College, Cambridge, and in the early fifties went to Chicago to study Social Sciences. She completed her education two years later in Liverpool, achieving a Certificate in Social Science.

Work: While in Chicago, from 1952, she experienced humble beginnings working as a community organiser, and later a cinema usher. In 1954, she returned to England to complete her education and also worked with Liverpool’s Family Service Unit as a social caseworker. In the years following, she performed more social work, a childcare officer (in 1955) and a nursing assistant in Deva Psychiatric Hospital (from 1956 to 1957).
Perhaps a combination of her experiences in this field and her natural compassion for the well being of others led her to activism.
This began in 1958, when she became an organiser for several anti-Nuclear campaigns - the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, the Committee of 100, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
It was her work for the latter that was to gain her the most public awareness, and she still takes part in anti-nuclear protests as a voice for the organisation today - most notably in April 2004, on a march from Aldermaston to London carrying the original 1954 CND logo on a small placard, and later addressing the crowd in Trafalgar Square with a speech.
Throughout the sixties, Arrowsmith continued her activism while taking on various different jobs - another position as a child care officer came along in 1964, and then in 1965 she began reporting for the activist newspaper ‘Peace News’.
In 1966, she moved into politics and became a parliamentary candidate for Fulham, representing the Radical Alliance, and later was the parliamentary candidate for the Hammersmith Stop the South East Asia War Committee - a group protesting international involvement in the Vietnam War, and a canditate in Cardiff as an Independent Socialist.
She was also involved in race issues between 1969 and 1971, when she was a researcher for the Society of Friends Race Relations Committee.
Arrowsmith’s tireless activism on many different issues was mainly funded by numerous jobs she had during the seventies - Farm worker, waitress, office temp, sales person, bartender, cleaner, holiday camp rep - she was thoroughly dedicated to making the struggle in these issues her career, as opposed to settling down to one well paid job.
In 1971, she took on the role of assistant editor for Amnesty International - a role which she fulfilled until 1994.
Arrowsmith was arrested and jailed 11 times as a political prisoner between 1958 and 1985, and a result was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, on two occasions.
In recent years, she has continued to be involved in peace activism, and also exhibits her paintings.

Friends & Relationships: She met her long time lesbian partner Wendy Butlin in 1962. The two remained together until 1976.
In August 1979, Arrowsmith married Donald Gardner. The marriage was annulled on the sa me day, however.

Greatest Achievements: In 1964 she was awarded the Holloway Prison Green Arm band and in 1991 she was awarded the Americans Removing Injustice, Suppression and Exploitation (ARISE) peace prize. As a result of her activism with CND she was entered in Who’s Who. When asked to list her clubs for this entry, she mentioned the Gateways lesbian club, and was given an honorary life membership.

If gay and lesbian people are given civil rights, then everyone will want them! - Author unknown

Life Span: Born 1960; died October 1993

Famous As: British photographer, Queer dyke activist 
 
Friends & Relationships: Nerina Ferguson.

Work: Her series of photographs Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex, 1989, addressed the issue of how lesbians are influenced by AIDS and how they could continue to enjoy sexual expression in the face of sensational press stories.
In a series of portraits, The Knight’s Move, 1990, she looked at lesbian history and stereotyping. A photograph from this series is reproduced in Emmanuel Cooper, (1994), page 308.

Living and working in London at a time when lesbians and gay men were starting to call themselves “queer” and when sadomasochistic sex play moved out of the margins in this new queer culture, Boffin was an outspoken advocate of lesbian sexual freedom. Working with her partner, Nerina Ferguson, she developed a queer sex-show “Crucifixion Cabaret,” performed in 1992 to great controversy. Tessa Boffin played a Centurion in full costume with red and gold cloak, and Nerina Ferguson took the role of a gold-painted naked slave.

Boffin was active in promoting the importance of lesbian photography, and in bringing it to a largely ignorant audience. In 1991 she co-edited with Jean Fraser Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, 250 pages, the first collection of its kind. As a photographic artist she took the staged tableau-sequence formula, used most famously by gay photographer Duane Michaels, and molded it into a subtle language with which to articulate specific aspects of the lesbian experience generally erased in mainstream culture.
Some of her other work includes; Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology edited with Sunil Gupta, 1990, London: Rivers Oram Press, 200 pages book and Lesbian Looks, 1994, Scarlet Press.

In her 1991 tableau-sequence The Knight’s Move she presents as lesbian heroes such iconic figures as the knight in shining armor, his leather-jerkined squire, Casanova and a lady-in-waiting, all played by women. Joining them is a lesbian angel, a fantasy figure that features in much of her work.

In the accompanying commentary in Stolen Glances, Boffin writes that she wants to place herself and her fantasy figures “into the great heterosexual narratives of courtly and romantic love: by making the Knight’s Move–a lateral or sideways leap.”
Unselfish with her time and energy, and eager to explore and support innovation in the lesbian arts, Boffin participated in the work of others far more generously than is usual with creative artists. She may be seen, for example, as one of the actors in short tableaux between the main features in Lesbian Lycra Shorts (1992), a collection of short films from independent lesbian filmmakers.

Sadly, her continuing creativity and her growing reputation as an artist were not enough to bring her contentment. In October 1993, Tessa Boffin took her own life, in the bathroom of her London home.

Greatest achievement: The first British lesbian artist to produce work in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, she was a founding member of the London-based AIDS and Photography group.        

Her Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex (1989), remains one of the most important photographic artworks to address AIDS from a lesbian perspective.

The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals.  That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love heterosexuals.  It’s just that they need more supervision. - Lynn Lavner

Life Span: Born 27th December 1901, Berlin-Schoneberg; Died 6th May 1992, Paris

Star Sign: Capricorn

Famous As: German singer and film star.
 
Childhood: Her parents were Louis Erich Otto Dietrich and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing. In her youth, Dietrich played the violin, but moved into acting in 1921, when she attempted to get into Max Reinhardt’s drama school. She failed the audition, and instead joined the chorus of a musical group which toured and gave revues.
After auditioning once more for Reinhardt in 1922, she was accepted to the school, and thus began Dietrich’s legendary career.

Work: It is thought that Dietrich appeared as an extra in a 1919 German film ‘In Fortune’s Shadow’, however her film debut is largely accepted as being made in 1923, as a supporting character in the film ‘Love Tragedy’.
She was to go on to play many supporting roles throughout the 20s, and also continued her work as a dancer and chorus member in cabarets and theatres.
It was not until the late 20s that Dietrich began to acquire leading roles, and in 1930, she starred in her first ‘talkie’. ‘The Blue Angel’ was directed by Josef von Sternberg, with whom she would enjoy a long and successful director-actor relationship, as he moulded her into the sensual ‘femme-fatale’ that has become synonymous with Dietrich.
She left Germany (and her husband and daughter) behind to make six films with Sternberg in Hollywood throughout the 30s, becoming an American citizen in 1937. However this, and her refusal to return to Germany to become a propaganda tool for the Nazis, caused her films to be banned there.
She instead chose to become a German anti-Nazi voice during the Second World War, and was involved in various propaganda campaigns on the US side.
She found she could put her talents to good use entertaining US troops, often within kilometres of the front lines. She was awarded a Medal of Freedom for her part in the war, and when asked why she would perform shows despite a substantial risk to her safety, she famously replied “aus Anstand”, meaning “it was the decent thing to do”.
Dietrich’s post-war activities moved her away from film and saw her becoming a successful cabaret performer for the next twenty years or so.
Despite having a limited vocal range, she stunned audiences with her dramatic renditions of popular songs from her films and other famous songs of the times. This was mainly thanks to the arrangements and musical direction of Burt Bacharach, whom she worked with until the mid 60s.
Her glamourous appearance was upheld well into old age with the help of stage lighting, facelift techniques and the costumes designed for her by Jean Louis.
In 1974, she fell and broke her leg on stage which effectively ended her career as a live performer. She spent her last years in quiet seclusion in a Par is apartment (being mostly bed-ridden) though still active as a writer, producing three autobiographies; Marlene Dietrich’s ABC (1961), My Life Story (1979) and Marlene (1987).
She also provided voice-overs for documentaries, one being Maximillian Schell’s biography of Dietrich herself, ‘Marlene’ (1984). Schell wanted to film her, but she only allowed him to use her voice.

Friends & Relationships: Dietrich was married for many years to Rudolph Seiber, a director’s assistant who went on to become a director with Paramount in France. He died of cancer in 1976.
She had one daughter, Maria Riva, with whom she became largely estranged, though got on well with her grandson Peter Riva. When Peter was born in 1948, Dietrich was famously dubbed ‘the world’s most glamorous grandmother’.
Dietrich’s place in this collection of biographies of course owes itself to the strong bisexual undertones of her films, as well as her affairs with women. It is widely thought that she was involved with Mercedes de Acosta and Claudette Colbert, among others, and it is even rumoured that Greta Garbo was once her lover. Despite this apparent promiscuous aspect of her life, Dietrich is said to have not liked sex.

Greatest Achievements: She received her only Oscar nomination for ‘Morocco’ in 1930, and in 1968, she received a Tony Award for her stage show. Perhaps greater than any award is her status as a glamorous, bisexual film star who worked largely outside Hollywood.
In 1994, after her death, her memorabilia went to Berlin to become a key part of the Film Museum in the new Sony Centre, Potsdamer Platz.

“In the beginning there was nothing. God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.” - Ellen DeGeneres