American writer and cultural theorist Susan Sontag was BOTD in 1933. Born in New York City to a wealthy middle-class family, she was raised in Los Angeles. A prodigious scholar, she studied at the University of California Berkeley, Harvard and Oxford University. Returning to New York in 1959, she worked as a teacher and editor, publishing her first novel The Benefactor in 1963. She is best known for her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, explaining camp for a mainstream audience and providing a language for the discussion of queer culture. She also mounted a public defence of Jack Smith‘s experimental queer film Flaming Creatures, campaigning successfully to allow the film to be screened in cinemas. Her 1966 essay collection Against Interpretation argued that art should be experienced viscerally and cerebrally, championing style over content. She controversially praised the films of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, revising her opinions in later life by critiquing the fascist aesthetics in Riefenstahl’s photography. Diagnosed with cancer in the mid-1970s, her experiences with long-term illness informed much of her writing, including Illness as Metaphor. In her collection AIDS and Its Metaphors, she became one of the first writers to analyse the social stigma of AIDS in the early days of the pandemic. In Regarding the Pain of Others, she critiqued the creation and consumption of war photography and other images of pain, horror and atrocity. In later life, she published two historical novels, The Volcano Lover and In America, the latter of which triggered claims of plagiarism. The last of the celebrity philosophers, she was quoted widely in popular culture, as famous for her lustrous skunk-streaked hair as her ideas. Married twice and with a son, Sontag identified as bisexual though seldom spoke publicly about her relationships with women. Her lovers include Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, María Irene Fornés, Carlotta Del Pezzo, Eva Kollisch, Nicole Stéphane and Lucinda Childs. In later life, she had a long-term relationship with photographer Annie Leibovitz, though neither publicly acknowledged each other as romantic partners. Sontag died in 2004, aged 71. Her lesbianism and diva qualities were hilariously critiqued by Terry Castle in her 2005 essay Desperately Seeking Susan.