Sensitive Subject

 

Unidentified woman

I've debated on what to write or even if to write this post for awhile but think I will proceed anyway. It is likely the last post on Clara Kuck's photo album (I'll do some posts on her postcard album coming up) for awhile anyway. The subject I wish to write about might not be for everyone and the last picture I might be appropriate for impressionable kids around. Though it isn't too graphic, I do think it is a bit risqué, especially considering it was taken around 1918 when times were much different than they are today.

So without further ado:

The album has 146 pages of photographs with three to five photographs per page which equals a lot photos. If you take out all the photos containing male family members or married men, which aren't numerous to start with, you are left with maybe a handful out of nearly 500 photos that contain single men and of those, none are of just one man but usually a young man among a group of females. To me this strikes me as unexpected coming from a woman who was single and in her late 20's early 30's at the time. 

Then there is the picture above of an unknown female lying on the beach and gazing back at the camera with adoring eyes. Or the picture below of my great aunt Clara adoringly hugging the same unidentified lady.

Clara Kuck on left.

If I were to categorize the album, most of the pictures would fall into a category about my great aunt interacting in some fashion with a group of her female peers like the ones below.

Clara Kuck is bottom center.

Clara Kuck is 4th from left

The final more risqué picture is below.

All these lead me to conclude that my great aunt Clara may have been gay/lesbian. I don't have any evidence to prove that and indeed, there are postcards written to her by yet unidentified male figures, so I may be wrong. She even got married later in life at age 55 to a man Herbert Foot who was married once before to a woman from New Zealand. The first wife and Herbert apparently never had kids and at some point they weren't married anymore, I have yet to know why. Does that make him gay too? Given the time frame involved and how being gay/lesbian was not as acceptable in society as it is today, getting into some sort of marriage of convenience may have been the most acceptable arrangement for such people. I feel that this is likely why my great aunt Clara married Herbert but have no proof other than a gut feeling after looking through all these pictures.

From a cursory inspection of the postcards, they are mostly just souvenirs where Clara wrote on the back of them about her experiences of seeing whatever was featured on the front. But there are a number that are correspondence between her family members too. There are also a few that were written to her by unknown individuals who mostly just signed a first name or only initials. I scanned them all as I was preserving them and all seemed innocuous, but closer inspection might reveal something different. 

Anyway, I thought I would write this for posterity that my great aunt Clara Kuck may have been lesbian and as the great Jerry Seinfeld once said, "not that there is anything wrong with that."

Clara Kuck not pictured.