“As a teenager, I had to struggle alone to learn about myself and what it meant to be gay.”
TRQ: Barbara Gittings, Born July 31, 1932
Activist and editor, Barbara Gittings, known as the mother of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, was born in Vienna, Austria on July 31, 1932. The daughter of an American diplomat, Gittings spent her life advocating for LGBTQ rights, starting even before the Stonewall gay rights movement.
Gittings knew she was lesbian from an early age, which led to her removal from the high school National Honor Society. Studious and intellectually curious, she was discouraged that the school library had little to offer on homosexuality as subject.
Even at Northwestern University, where she enrolled in 1949 as a theatre major, what little information on homosexuality she was able to find was biased, negative, unrelatable, male-centered and without mention of love. She saw a psychiatrist in her freshman year, who offered to cure her homosexuality, which she declined. She began researching gay literature to the point where she failed her courses after skipping many classes.
At the age of 18, Gittings moved to Philadelphia and hitchhiked to New York City, to go to gay bars. Finding it difficult to relate to the club scene’s butch and femme types, and weary of the public homophobic attacks on her friends, Gittings turned towards books and political activism.
In 1956 she headed for California. These were the early, early days of LGBTQ activism. Gittings later explained, “There were scarcely 200 of us in the whole United States. It was like a club — we all knew each other.”
She joined the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in San Francisco, but then went to start a chapter in New York, where meetings would include doctors, psychiatrists and clergy who sometimes insisted on talking about homosexuality as an illness. At one of the picnics in 1961, Gittings met activist and photojournalist Kay Lahusen, and the two fell in love and became life partners for nearly 50 years. Gittings and Lahusen were in agreement that their homosexuality was more of a target for oppression than their status as women.
When Gittings assumed editorship of The Ladder, the DOB’s publication, in 1963, she started using the word “lesbian” and Lahusen’s photographs of queer women on the cover, which were firsts for the magazine. In 1965, she joined Frank Kameny in forming Annual Reminders, the gay and lesbian demonstrations that took place in front of Independence Hall every Fourth of July until 1969. Also in 1965 she joined the first ever LGBTQ demonstration in front of the White House.
In 1970, Gittings joined a gay caucus within the American Library Association to start including more gay resources within libraries. She coordinated the Gay Task Force within the association for 16 years, and during that time she edited their bibliography and wrote a history of the group called “Gays in Library Land.” For her efforts, the association awarded her with a lifetime membership.
In 1972, Gittings and Kameny also participated in “Psychiatry: Friend of Foe to the Homosexual?” a debate in 1972, for the American Psychiatric Association. Considered to be one of Gittings’ biggest contributions to the LGBTQ movement, the debate resulted in homosexuality’s removal from the list of psychiatric disorders.
As they entered their later years, Gittings and Lahusen continued to fight for LGBTQ rights, even taking on the AARP to demand a couple’s membership. In 2001, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) awarded Gittings the first recipient of the Barbara Gittings Award for Activism.
In 1998 Gittings appeared in Jeff Dupre’s documentary film, Out of the Past. She appears as herself, alongside Gwenyth Paltrow as Sarah Orne Jewett, Edward Norton as Henry Gerber, among others. On February 18, 2007, Gittings died from breast cancer. Lahusen still lives in Pennsylvania. All of couple’s work has been donated to the New York Public Library.
In June of 2019, Gittings was one of the movements’ first pioneers to be inducted inaugurally into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Museum in New York’s Stonewall Inn.
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