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City unveils marker dedicated to lesbian author

Tribute to Dayton native Natalie Barney is the first in Ohio to reflect a person’s sexual orientation.

A small crowd watch as the cover pulled off of the new Natalie Barney Historical Maker in Copper Park Sunday October 25, 2009. The new maker is the first in the state to acknowledge sexual orientation. Jim Noelker/Dayton Daily News

Jim Noelker/Staff photographer A small crowd watch as the cover pulled off of the new Natalie Barney Historical Maker in Copper Park Sunday October 25, 2009. The new maker is the first in the state to acknowledge sexual orientation. Jim Noelker/Dayton Daily News

ENLARGE PHOTO

Photos: Marker for Natalie Barney

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By Jim DeBrosse, Staff Writer Updated 9:54 PM Sunday, October 25, 2009

DAYTON — She may be the most famous Daytonian unknown to Daytonians, but now Natalie Barney — literary patron and lesbian author who lived most of her life in Paris — has her own Ohio Historical Marker near the downtown library.

The marker was unveiled Sunday, Oct. 25, in a ceremony at Cooper Park attended by city commissioners, Ohio Historical Society officials and members of state and Dayton area gay rights organizations, which led the effort to recognize Barney for both her place in history and her pioneering openness about her sexuality.

Of Ohio’s 1,250 historical markers, it’s the first to indicate a person’s sexual orientation.

“Not only are we celebrating history today, but we’re making history,” Robert Berger, head of Ohio’s Gay History Initiative, told a gathering of about 50 people Sunday.

The Ohio Historical Society launched the initiative in 2006 to review and approve applications for monuments to honor “the history of all its people,” including gays and lesbians, said acting director James Strider.

Barney’s writings supported feminism, paganism and pacifism. In 1900, she published her first book of lesbian love poems, “Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes,” all copies of which her disapproving father purchased and destroyed. That same year, she began holding literary salons in her apartment on the Left Bank.

During the next 60 years, many of the greatest writers and artists of the 20th century were frequent guests there, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Elliot, Isadora Duncan, Sinclair Lewis and Truman Capote. She used her wealth to promote many of them.

Barney was born in Dayton in 1876, the great grand-daughter of E.J. Barney, the founder of the rail car manufacturing company that for many decades was the city’s largest employer. Her mother, Alice Pike Barney, was a well-known portrait artist. The author spent just 10 years here, in a mansion at Fifth and Wilkinson streets, before her family moved to Washington, D.C.

Barney was “probably the most famous lesbian poet since Sappho” of ancient Greece, said Leon Bey, a local gay rights activist who has researched her history. Her openly gay lifestyle at the turn-of-the-century was “unheard of” at the time, he said.

Thanks to the marker, “Natalie is now a legend in her state of Ohio, never to be unknown again,” Bey said.

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