Natalie Clifford Barney - Nominee

“Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.”

– Natalie Clifford Barney

Born to extraordinary wealth in Dayton, Natalie abhorred the rigid conventions of high society, which dictated she do no more than develop the necessary charms to win a suitable husband.  Knowing she was a lesbian since age 12, she would have none of it. At 24 she settled in Paris and published lesbian love sonnets under a nom de plume. After her father’s death in 1902 she vowed never to conceal her identity again, saying “My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.” For over 60 years a weekly salon was held in Barney’s home on the Left Bank where such talents as Colette, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Proust, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein all visited. Nicknamed The Amazon – her many romantic partners included Renee Vivien, Dolly Wilde, and Romaine Brooks. In 1910 she published Je Me Souviens and Actes et Entr’actes. After Barnes’ last book of poetry was published in 1920, she mainly wrote epigrams (an exclusively masculine literary form up until that time) and her memoirs. In 1920 she released Pensees d’une Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon). Her only novel – The One who is Legion (1930) – actually a novel within a novel – concerns a suicide victim brought back to life as an intersex person who reads the book of her own life. Barney was a true feminist, a pacifist, an out lesbian who opposed monogamy and lived with great passion. “If I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.” Barney died at age 95 in the same house at 20 rue Jacob in Paris where she had lived and ran her salon for decades.