Marty Mann (left) (1904-1980) was an early member of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) when there were only two AA groups in the United States. She attended her first AA meeting at Bill W.'s home in 1938. Marty Mann is known as the first lesbian member of AA when gay and lesbians were not accepted in mainstream society.

She has been called "The First Lady of AA." Mann got sober in 1940. She helped start 'The Yale School of Alcoholism and Alcohol Studies' and organized 'the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism' (NCEA).

She is the author of the chapter "Women Suffer Too" in the second through fourth editions in the Big Book of AA.

She gave hundreds of lectures and served as a consultant to congressional and state legislative committees. In part because of her professional efforts Alcoholism became viewed less as a moral issue and more as a disease/health issue.

In the 1950's Edward R. Murrow included Marty Mann in the list of the 10 greatest living Americans.

Marty Mann's book, 'New Primer on Alcoholism' was published in 1958.

Marty Mann grew up in a privileged Chicago family. At 21 she was married for one year to a man she later said was an alcoholic.

Early on she had her own successful Public Relations business.

Her drinking brought her to the charity ward in Bellevue Hospital and she attempted suicide according to reports.

Her biographers, Sally and David Brown, state she was a a lesbian all her life and may have used the 'Mrs.' title to protect her privacy as society's prejudice toward homosexuality as well as alcoholism was strong during the 1940s and 1950s.

In a 2012 article in 'the Atlantic,'  Amanda Smith writes that within the insular gay and lesbian communities of Manhattan and Fire Island Mann and Priscilla Peck were known as a committed couple that lived together.

In the early 1950s the couple sold their Cherry Grove cottage. As Fire Island developed a reputation as a gay and lesbian summer retreat, Marty Mann felt she could not risk the exposure. She feared AA could be blighted by any taint of what was considered to be sexual deviance.  

Carson McCullers (right) (1917-1967) was an American novelist, poet and  playwright. Her first novel " The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" explored the spiritual isolation of misfits in a small town in the U.S South.

Her stories have been adapted to stage and film.

Another novel, 'The Member of the Wedding' (1946) made a successful Broadway run in 1950-51. She was friends with W.H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

At age 20 she married  Reeves McCullers, divorcing  4 years later. Later on Reeves had a love relationship with an openly gay composer David Diamond before remarrying Carson again in 1945.

Carson had a love relationship with a number of women and pursued them sexually with questionable success.

Her biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, said Carson McCullers bragged about having sex with Gypsy Rose Lee yet her friends reportedly never heard of this. Her biographer said that she wore a lesbian persona in literature and in life, wrote against heterosexual convention, wore men's clothing and was outrageously aggressive in her consistently failed search for sex and love with women.