Gale Wilhelm was an American writer most noted for two books that featured lesbian themes written in the 1930s: We Too Are Drifting and Torchlight to Valhalla.
Early life
Wilhelm was born in Eugene, Oregon of Ethel Gale Brewer and Wilson Price Wilhelm in 1908. She was the youngest of five children. By age ten, she had moved to Boise, Idaho with her mother and siblings, but seemingly, her father was absent at this time. In 1921, Wilhelm’s sister closest in age to her, Louise, died. This death may have been what spurred Gale’s move back to Oregon by 1923. Wilhelm completed high school, and spent at least ninth grade at Medford High School in Medford, Oregon. By 1930, Wilhelm had moved with her family to California. At 21 years old, she lived in Berkeley, CA with her sister, Nina Clark in Clark's family home, along with Nina’s husband and their three children.
Writing career
Wilhelm published several short stories in 1934 and 1935, her first appearing in Literary America. With the assistance of a literary agent, Wilhelm published We Too Are Drifting in 1935 by Random House, to many favorable reviews. In 1938, Random House published Torchlight to Valhalla, another lesbian-themed novel in which the protagonist, a young woman, is pursued by a very handsome and charming young man, but realizes her true happiness is with another young woman. Wilhelm wrote three more novels, Bring Home the Bride in 1940, The Time Between in 1942 and Never Let Me Go in 1945, all with heterosexual themes. Never Let Me Go included praise from Wilhelm's friend Carl Sandburg on the book jacket. In 1943, Wilhelm received an honorary membership in the InternationalMark Twain Society for her “outstanding contribution in the field of fiction”. Wilhelm also published stories in Colliers and Yale Review in the early 1940s, but didn't publish anything new after 1943. However, both Wilhelm's lesbian themed books were reprinted many times in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Torchlight to Valhalla was given a new name,The Strange Path, with a rather salacious cover in 1953. In 1975, Torchlight to Valhalla was reprinted by Arno Press's library edition of . Wilhelm is now lauded for prose imitating, if not on par, with Hemingway’s, as well as her accomplishment in We Too Are Drifting of taking the lesbian narrative away from the root of homosexuality and instead creating a discourse on gendered and sexual dynamics in lesbian relationships that had been scarcely written about at the time.
Personal life
Around 1935, when We Too Are Drifting was published, Wilhelm briefly lived in New York City, before returning to California by 1940. Wilhelm lived with Helen Hope Rudolph Page inSan Francisco from 1938 until Page's death in the late 1940s. When they first started living together, they lived along with Page’s mother, and Wilhelm is written in the 1940 census as a “friend” of the household. Wilhelm's disappearance from the writing and publishing world coincided with both the death of her father in 1941, and more noticeably, with the death of Helen Page in the late 1940s. Barbara Grier spent several years attempting to locate Wilhelm. The 1984 Naiad Press edition of We Too Are Drifting included a foreword by Grier describing Wilhelm's life and pleading for any assistance from anyone who knew any information on the whereabouts of Wilhelm. Grier speculated that Wilhelm stopped writing before she turned 40 years old because "the world would not let her write the books she wanted." In 1985 Grier received an anonymous note pointing her to Wilhelm who was living in Berkeley, California. She found Wilhelm aged and ill, but delighted that her books were still being read and enjoyed. By the time Naiad Press reprinted Torchlight to Valhalla in 1985, it contained a foreword by Wilhelm herself, an autobiographical sketch of herself. Wilhelm lived with her partner, Kathleen Huebner, from 1953 until Wilhelm passed away in 1991 of cancer.
