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Jan Gay (born Helen Reitman, February 14, 1902 – ??) was a German-American researcher and author who pioneered the study of lesbian women in the 1920s. She is known for her work as a subtler form of activism, documenting the many shades of queer identity and showing the world that queer people were more like the rest of society than they had been given credit.

Early Life

Jan Gay was born in Leipzig, Germany on February 14, 1902. Her father, Ben Reitman, was a prominent doctor and anarchist activist, who also had a habit of womanizing. On July 4, 1901, he married May Schwartz, a music student from a wealthy family in Illinois. Soon after, the two of them traveled to Prague, the first stop in a larger European tour that the two had planned. Though accounts differ, at some point, Schwartz checked into an asylum in Leipzig, and Reitman returned to the United States, According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Gay was born while her mother recovered from mental health issues.

Career

When Gay moved to the United States, she studied at Northwestern University. Afterward, she cycled through odd jobs: She wrote for the Chicago Examiner and worked as a translator at the publicity department for Mexico’s national train service. In 1927, to distance herself from her father, she changed her name to Jan Gay—either as a nod to the dual meaning of the word gay, or, more likely, as a reference to her mother’s family. (Gay was her maternal grandfather’s middle name.)

Around the same time, she met Eleanor Byrnes, an illustrator who eventually took on the pseudonym Zhenya Gay. The two teamed up to publish a series of children’s books, including the 1931 picture book The Shire Colt. Gay also became an early figure in the nudism movement: She served as the director of the Out-of-Door Club, a nudist colony of 50 people in Highland, New York, where she encouraged researchers to study the psychological differences between nudists and people who wore clothes. In 1932, she published On Going Naked, a book that blends Gay’s own experience of nudism with a larger history of the nudism movement. When the book was adapted into a documentary called This Nude World, Gay wrote the script. Newspapers dubbed her “the leader of nudism in New York.”

But her core focus was always her study of queer women. In 1931, she traveled to Berlin to meet the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and later, she interviewed queer women in cities across the world about their lives and identities. Her manuscript was never published under her name, and her experiences are recounted in only a few history books, including, most recently, in Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer.

Legacy

Jan Gay's work has been largely forgotten by history, but her research and activism was a pioneering effort for the LGBTQ+ community. Today, her legacy is remembered as a picture-book author, a nudist leader, and the one-time roommate of Andy Warhol. However, her most important work, her research on queer women, has been lost to history.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth, her life and work has been reconstructed through material held at the Library of Congress and the Johns Hopkins Medical Archives, as well as from letters sent to a family member of Gay