2023

This work was from the exhibition Love’s Galaxy, the title a line from a poem titled The Lesbian Poets by C.A. Kelly. The poem was published on 21 September, 1894, in the Plattsburgh Daily Press (a newspaper from the North Country, US). The poem is notable in the way it queers the rainbow, Sappho a known symbol of lesbian love at the time. Research suggests the earliest known queering of the rainbow was in 1915 through the novel The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence which features a lesbian relationship. Kelly’s poem precedes this by more than 20 years so it could be one of the earliest known examples of the rainbow being queered.