Today is the birthday of the American transcendentalist MARGARET FULLER, the first editor of “The Dial” and the first female journalist to work on the staff of a major newspaper. Edgar Allan Poe once remarked that “Humanity is divided into Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller.” Her biographers have written of her harboring “”homosexual traits” because of lines like these:

“It is so true that woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man. It is pleasant to be sure of it, because it is undoubtedly the same love that we shall feel when we are angels. It is regulated by the same laws as that of love between persons of different sexes, only it is purely intellectual, spiritual, unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts, undisturbed by any need of consulting temporal interests; its law is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole, which makes it seek in another being that which it finds not in itself.” — Margaret Fuller died on Fire Island, New York in 1850.