American writer, academic and critic Camille Paglia was BOTD in 1947. Born in Endicott, New York to Italian immigrant parents, she studied at Binghamton University and later at Yale, where she claimed to be the only openly lesbian student on campus. An acolyte of literature professor Harold Bloom, she took up academic posts at Bennington, Wesleyan and Yale. She exploded into academic celebrity with her 1990 book Sexual Personae, an energetic reading of Western literature and visual art as a Freudian struggle between Apollonian order and Dionysian excess. Arguing for an essentialist view of human sexuality, she controverisally outed poet Emily Dickinson as a sado-masochistic lesbian. She became more widely known her essay collections Sex, Art and American Culture and Vamps and Tramps, analysing the sexual power of Elizabeth Taylor and Madonna and the psychosexual undercurrents of Alfred Hitchcock‘s film The Birds. A regular contributor to Interview, The Advocate and Salon, she published brutal critiques of mainstream and radical feminism, pillorying the “anti-sex” agenda of feminist luminaries Kate Millett, Elaine Showalter, Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Judith Butler. A witty, articulate and reliably provocative public speaker, she became a fixture of TV talk shows and college lecture halls during the 1990s, bridging a gap between high academic discourse and pop culture gossip. Paglia identifies variously as lesbian and trans, though unsurprisingly has little patience for contemporary sexual politics. She has been in relationships with Patty Paglia and Alison Maddex, and legally adopted Maddex’s son in 2002.