Queer Portraits in History
A compendium of queer figures in the 19th and 20th centuries, drawn and written by Michele Rosenthal.
About
I was a junior when my university first introduced a Queer Studies minor, back in the 2000s. I signed up for whatever classes I could, and learning about Stonewall for the first time made me wonder what other histories had been kept from me. That started a lifelong passion for collecting queer narratives.
In 2014, I began creating portraits of some of my favorite historical queer people, writing a sentence or two about each and sharing them on Tumblr. At first I only had a handful of people in mind, but the project kept growing as the biographies grew more in depth.
Two years later, I took my first 60 illustrations and hand-built this website, a permanent home for the project and an entry point to exploring LGBTQ history through the people who created it.
I also had the opportunity to illustrate queer portraits for a series of books that were published by Hardie Grant between 2017 and 2020. I consider these books related to the project, but their own separate thing.
The first queer portrait was Oscar Wilde in October 2014, and last queer portrait was Chavela Vargas in September 2019. I always said I would come back and add more portraits someday, and maybe fix the old portraits I don't like anymore, and maybe lengthen the shorter bios, and maybe clean up the writing, and maybe...
But maybe it's okay to let the project stand as it is, imperfect and incomplete, but made with love.
- Michele, June 6, 2025
Contact
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Complaints? Email me at michele rosenthal at gmail dot com.
The website will always be free to access, but if you’d like to donate a bit of money to help pay for web hosting, that would be awfully nice of you!
Queer Portraits I Didn't Get To Draw
- Jane Addams
- Chantal Akerman
- Vicente Aleixandre
- Hans Christian Andersen
- W.H. Auden
- Alice Austin
- Amelio Robles Ávila
- John Ashbery
- Gilbert Baker
- Tallulah Bankhead
- Samuel Barber
- Jean-Michel Basquiat
- Sir Edmund Blackhouse
- David Bowie
- Wilmer Broadnax
- Romaine Brooks
- Margaret Wise Brown
- William S. Burroughs
- Lord Byron
- Karin Boye
- Luis Cernuda
- Rose Cleveland
- Jean Cocteau
- Lynn Conway
- George Cukor
- Dave Davies
- Carol Ann Duffy
- Ernestine Eckstein
- Lili Elbe
- Sergei Eisenstein
- Chevalier d'Éon
- Esquerita
- Manuel de Falla
- Rotimi Fani-Kayode
- Dmitry Filosofov
- Louise Fitzhugh
- Anne Frank
- Greta Garbo
- Jean Genet
- André Gide
- Elsa Gidlow
- Duncan Grant
- Alec Guiness
- William Haines
- Radclyffe Hall
- Katherine Hepburn
- David Hockney
- A. E. Housman
- Brenda Howard
- James Howe
- Langston Hughes
- Alberta Hunter
- Tab Hunter
- Max Jacob
- Evgeny Kharitonov
- Dilly Knox
- Larry Kramer
- Reggie Kray
- Pedro Lemebel
- Little Richard
- Joseph Lobdell
- Ludwig II of Bavaria
- Jeanne Mammen
- Katherine Mansfield
- Jean Marais
- James Marshall
- Ann M. Martin
- Leonard Matlovich
- David McReynolds
- Eileen Miles
- Gian Carlo Menotti
- Gabriela Mistral
- Agnes Moorehead
- Pauli Murray
- Ursula Nordstrom
- Rudolf Nureyev
- Violet Oakley
- Frank O'Hara
- Joe Orton
- Wilfred Owen
- Tomie de Paolo
- Pat Parker
- Charlie Parkhurst
- Peter Pears
- Peter the Great
- Francois Poulenc
- Raymond Radiguet
- Robert Rauschenburg
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Jane Rule
- RuPaul
- Luciano Saornil
- Siegfried Sassoon
- Annemarie Schwarzenbach
- Maurice Sendak
- Jackie Shane
- Pamela Colman Smith
- Valerie Solanis
- Dusty Springfield
- Sylvester
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe
- Patrick Trevor-Roper
- Hugh Trevor-Roper
- Wu Tsao
- Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
- Paul Verlaine
- Alice Walker
- Ethel Waters
- John Waters
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Elsie de Wolfe
- Thelma Wood
- ...and so many more