BARBARA GITTINGS, born on this date, (d: 2/18/2007) was one of the founding mothers of the modern LGBTQI+ movement. It would be impossible to explain her accomplishments and impact on the Lesbian and Gay cause in this space.
She started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1958, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people in the United States government, the largest employer of the country at the time. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, especially its Task Force on Gay Liberation, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in the early 1970s.
Barbara Gittings was born to Elizabeth (née Brooks) Gittings and John Sterett Gittings Jr. in Vienna, Austria, where her father was serving as a United States diplomat. Barbara Gittings and her siblings attended Catholic schools in Montreal. At one point in her childhood, she considered becoming a nun. Her family returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War II and settled in Wilmington, Delaware. Although aware of her attraction to other girls, Gittings said she first heard the word “homosexual” when she was rejected for membership in the National Honor Society in high school based on what a teacher believed were her “homosexual inclinations.”
In 1956, Gittings traveled to California on the advice of Edward Sagarin, to visit the office of the new ONE Inc., an early homophile organization. While in California, she met Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who had co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in San Francisco.
In 1958, Martin and Lyon asked Gittings to start a chapter of the DOB in New York City, which she did; fewer than a dozen women responded to her notice in the Mattachine Society newsletter asking for “all women in the New York area who are interested in forming a chapter of the DOB” on September 20, 1958. Gittings served as the chapter’s first president for three years, from 1958 until 1961. While she was president attending members numbered between ten and forty per meeting. They met twice a month and often invited doctors, psychiatrists, ministers, and attorneys to address their meetings, even if their message was disparaging to lesbians.
From 1963 to 1966, Gittings edited the DOB’s magazine, The Ladder. Articles and essays in The Ladder sometimes carried viewpoints of medical professionals speaking negatively about homosexuality, since it was difficult to get psychiatrists and doctors to address homosexuality in any form. However, Gittings was profoundly influenced by Frank Kameny’s advocacy against homosexuality being viewed as a sickness, and began to diverge from the DOB’s policies.
Gittings began to implement changes in The Ladder that included adding the subtitle “A Lesbian Review” and featuring photographs of actual lesbians on the cover. Gittings distributed The Ladder in six bookstores in New York and Philadelphia; one Greenwich Village store displayed the magazine prominently, selling 100 copies a month. The focus of the magazine shifted to tackling more controversial issues for debate.
Gittings admitted that early meetings and writings in the Daughters of Bilitis urged their members not to upset mainstream heterosexual society. The New York chapter of the DOB distributed a newsletter to about 150 people, which Gittings worked on. During this time, she spent ten years as a mimeograph operator for an architectural firm. In 1959, after using company envelopes to mail the newsletter out, someone wrote to the firm to notify them that a newsletter about lesbianism was being distributed. She was not fired but was cautioned to be more careful.
She was awarded an American Library Association Honorary Membership, and the ALA named an annual award for the best LGBTQ novel the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. GLAAD also named an activist award for her.
Gittings participated in many of the earliest LGBT actions in the United States. In 1965, Gittings marched in the first gay picket lines at the White House, the State Department, and Independence Hall to protest the federal government’s policy on discrimination of homosexuals.
From 1965 to 1969, she and Frank Kameny led the Annual Reminder, picketing at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, until the Stonewall Riots in June 1969. After the riots, the annual Gay Pride Parade commemorating the riots took its place. Differences between Gittings’ political stance and that of the DOB leadership began to show, and came to a culmination in 1966 when she was ousted as the editor of The Ladder.
Gittings was sometimes described as the “Rosa Parks” of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. She appears in the documentary films Gay Pioneers, Before Stonewall, After Stonewall, Out of the Past, and Pride Divide.
Gittings and her partner Kay Tobin Lahusen donated copies of some materials and photographs covering their activism to the Cornell University Library’s Rare and Manuscript Collections.