Lili Elbe

Lili Elbe

Lili Elbe (28 December 1882 – 13 September 1931) was a transgender woman and one of the first identifiable recipients of sex reassignment surgery. Elbe was born in Denmark as Einar Mogens Wegener and was a successful artist under that name. She also presented as Lili, sometimes spelled Lily, and publicly was introduced as Einar’s sister. After transitioning, however, she made a legal name change and stopped painting.

Elbe’s year of birth is sometimes stated as 1886. This appears to be from a book about her, which has some facts changed to protect the identities of the persons involved. Factual references to Gerda Gottlieb’s life indicate that the 1882 date is correct as they clearly married while at college in 1904.
Wegener met Gerda Gottlieb at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and they married in 1904, when she was 22 and Gottlieb 19. The two of them worked as illustrators, with Wegener specializing in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. They both traveled through Italy and France, eventually settling in Paris in 1912, where Wegener could live openly as a woman and Gottlieb could be actively lesbian. Wegener received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (the Artists Fall Exhibition), Vejle Art Museum and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automme in Paris. She is represented at Vejle Art Museum in Denmark.

Wegener started dressing in women’s clothes one day filling in for Gottlieb’s absentee model; she was asked to wear stockings and heels so her legs could substitute for those of her model. Wegener felt surprisingly comfortable in the clothing. Over time, Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting almond-shaped eyes dressed in chic fashions. In approximately 1913, the unsuspecting public was shocked to discover that the model who had inspired Gottlieb’s depictions of petite femmes fatales was in fact Gottlieb’s wife, “Elbe”.

Beginnings of Homo-eroticism 

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden was a German photographer who worked mainly in Italy. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys, which usually featured props such as wreaths or amphoras, suggesting a setting in the Greece or Italy of antiquity.

Von Gloeden was a minor German aristocrat from Mecklenburg who, suffering from what appears to have been tuberculosis, came to Taormina in Sicily in 1876. He was wealthy and provided a considerable economic boost in this comparatively poor region of Italy, which might explain why the homosexual aspects of his life and work were generally tolerated by the locals.

Von Gloeden, who in the 1880s had started photographing boys, but had also made portrait studies of local peasants and engaged in some landscape photography, turned his hobby into a profitable business in the 1890s when his family fell on hard times financially. Already a local celebrity in Taormina, his work (and his models) drew to Sicily such luminaries of the times as Oscar Wilde, the 'cannon king' Alfred Krupp, Richard Strauss, as well as the German Kaiser.

In total the Baron took over 3,000 images, which after his death were left to one of his models, Pancrazio Bucini, also known as Il Moro for his North African looks. In 1936, over 2,500 of the pictures were destroyed by Mussolini's police under the allegation that they constituted pornography. Most of the surviving images therefore come from private collections.

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