By Samantha Pious
Judith Teixeira, who wrote love poetry to women and men in the Roaring Twenties, is the first bisexual woman poet to publish in Portugal—the first we know of, at least. “We” are, of course, the ones who know.
When I translated a selection of Judith Teixeira’s poems several years ago, I was surprised to find how little “we” actually did know. Thanks to Maria Jorge (assisted by Luis Manuel Gaspar), some basic facts had been established. Judith’s birth year, once mistaken as 1888, was corrected to 1880. In 1907, she sued her own mother in order to be acknowledged as the legitimate daughter of both her parents. Her first marriage, to one Jaime Levy Azancot, ended in 1913. The following year, she married a lawyer, Álvaro Virgílio de Franco Teixeira. The rest of the timeline is devoted to her publications. From 1927 to 1959, there is silence—no record of her existence, literary or otherwise, after the rise to power of the Portuguese National Dictatorship. Finally, there is her date of death, with dutiful notation that she died without husband, children, or will and testament.
What was her childhood like? What kind of education did she receive? When did her first marriage begin? Was her second marriage a happy one? How did she survive for thirty years under a totalitarian regime? Who were the women she loved?
It was only in September of 2025, after my translations were published, that I began looking. The timing could not have been more serendipitous: I was on my very first visit to the island of Lesvós, giving a workshop on vintage sapphic poets for a women’s festival. Afternoons were hot enough, even in autumn, that it was best to respect the siesta and spend the hours between one and four o’clock resting indoors. So I was sitting on the bed in a vacation studio, entering search terms in the online system of Portuguese archives, when I found an entry for Judith’s divorce—not from her first husband, Jaime Levy Azancot, who was already known to have ended their marriage, but from her second husband, Álvaro Teixeira. I kept searching. There were entries for Judith’s lawsuit against her mother, for her first marriage and her first divorce, for a lawsuit against her second husband. There were property inventories for both her husbands, taken after their deaths. None of these items, except her first marriage certificate, seemed to have been digitized. I would have to visit the archive in person.
In mid-October, after two weeks’ vacation in Germany and two weeks researching another poet in Paris, I touched down in Lisbon. The documents were even better than I had let myself hope. Letters, some enclosed and others transcribed in the trial records, painted a vivid picture of a childhood spent in poverty and an unhappy second marriage. The inventories detailed the lavishness of her husbands’ wealth. The depositions of maids and chauffeurs not only specified the duration of her affair and the means of elopement—they also revealed that Judith was involved with at least two people at once, a man and a woman. The man, Álvaro, is old news. The woman, whose identity I discuss at greater length in a new online exhibit at OutHistory, lived openly in Lisbon and in Paris as a lesbian. Her name was Olga de Moraes Sarmento. Another woman in Judith’s letters, Julia de Moraes Sarmento, would have been Olga’s mother or perhaps her sister; without baptism certificates or a complete family tree, I have not yet been able to determine the nature of their relationship.
The only love letters I have found so far are a few of Álvaro’s to Judith, from a later period. Without letters written by Olga, Julia, or Judith herself, I can only speculate as to their polyamorous configuration. Were Álvaro, Judith, and Olga a triad? Did they form a V, with Judith at the center? Was Julia merely chaperoning Olga, or was she, too, making love to Álvaro and/or Judith? Did the four of them form an N, a V, or an arrow? Can we assume they were not an incestuous full quad?
Portuguese-speaking literary scholars have been aware of Judith Teixeira since the 1970s. Much ink has been spilled on her poems—they are transgressive, subversive, acts of resistance. She has been compared, predictably and vaguely, to Sappho and Baudelaire. But there has been no serious effort at assembling her biography. Why did her relationship with Olga de Moraes Sarmento remain undiscovered until now? How could her two marriages have drawn so much speculation but so little research?
Ah, but “we” cannot be certain of her bisexuality. After all, a woman who was married not once but twice, each time to a man considerably younger than herself, must have been attracted to men. Never mind that other women, past and present, have reported experiencing attraction to more than one gender over the course of their lives. Never mind that some of Judith Teixeira’s most passionate love poems are addressed to women, or that in the vast majority, the addressee’s gender is left ambiguous—no easy feat in a Romance language like Portuguese, in which all articles and most nouns and adjectives are clearly marked by their endings as masculine or feminine.
Those marriage certificates are incontrovertible. Never mind that divorce had only just been introduced into the Portuguese legal system when her first husband chose to take advantage of the law. Never mind that by 1923, fascism in Portugal was already on the rise. The first print run of Judith Teixeira’s first book was seized and destroyed by the city government at the urging of a fascist student group, specifically because she was a woman writing love poems to women. Never mind that under the National Dictatorship, which lasted from 1926 to 1974, it was nearly impossible for single women of a certain age to find work or earn a living. Many would have stayed in loveless marriages just to survive.
In any case, it is not the woman but the poetry that interests “us.” If Judith Teixeira is truly to enter the canons of world literature, she deserves a pedestal as lofty as Baudelaire’s. Her sapphic contemporaries—Renée Vivien, Natalie Clifford Barney, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Marie-Madeleine, H.D., Gabriela Mistral, Djuna Barnes, Marina Tsvetaeva, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Elsa Gidlow—do not merit comparison.
2026 is the centennial year of the third and last poetry collection Judith Teixeira published in her lifetime. Perhaps if Judith were a man, if she were not bisexual, there would already be an announcement for a centennial biography. But resources are limited. For scholars without a tenured position or a university affiliation, writing a successful grant proposal most often means sticking to the usual suspects. It is virtually impossible for researchers without advanced degrees to secure funding.
As bisexual women, we need money—fellowships, stipends, subventions. Lesbians could use money, too. In my dreams, there is a Library of World Sapphic Literature, with an endowment large enough to fund research—our research—into bi and lesbian poets and writers of the past. We are the ones who will find our ancestors. We will turn the crumbling pages gently, whispering their names and the names of their lovers.
Olga. Judith.
Samantha Pious is a poet, translator, editor, and researcher. She has translated a selection of Judith Teixeira’s poetry as Cactus Flowers (Headmistress Press, 2025). Related translations include Renée Vivien, A Crown of Violets (2015, revised 2017), and Natalie Clifford Barney, Selected Poems (2025). You can find her new exhibit, “Judith Teixeira (1880–1959): A Bisexual Woman Poet of the Roaring Twenties,” at OutHistory: https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/judi
Photo caption: Judith Teixeira’s third and last published poetry collection, Núa (Nude), 2nd edition (Lisbon, 1926), side by side with Cactus Flowers, the first selection of her poetry to appear in English translation in the United States.