In honor of LGBTQ+ history month, I wanted to share a little bit about unsung queero Julie D'Aubigny (aka La Maupin), a 17th-century bisexual French badass. She was a fencing master, who killed or wounded multiple men in duels, while also maintaining a high-profile opera career, and who once took the Holy Orders so that she could rescue a lover, who’d recently been locked away in a convent (for banging Julie).
Not only did Julie become a nun to break her lover free, she also stole the body of a recently deceased nun and used it to set the convent on fire so they could escape.
Her antics led to multiple death sentences (and multiple pardons by the King of France). She also successfully argued her way out of some punishments by (correctly) stating that laws against, for instance, dueling, only applied to men.
While parts of her story are likely too wild to be true, (indeed, even her real name is up for debate - sometimes it’s Julie, Julia, Emilie, or Madeleine), but even if a fraction of…