Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1932: Barbara Gittings

(d. 2007) Her friend and fellow gay rights activist Jack Nichols (Mar 16) called her “the Grand Mother of Lesbian and Gay Liberation.” In fact, it would be very difficult to overstate her contributions toward where we are today. Her quest for equality and dignity began when she flunked out of her freshman year at Northwestern University because she spent too much time in the library trying to understand what it meant to be a lesbian. “I devoured everything! I looked for myself in the books on abnormal psychology. I tried to find myself in legal books. I tried to find myself in encyclopedias. I found everything I possibly could. What I found was puzzling. It was me they were talking about, but it wasn’t me at all. It was very clinical; it didn’t speak of love; it didn’t have very much humanity to it.”

But one book in particular did catch her attention: Daniel Webster Cory’s The Homosexual In America (Sep 18). “The book was fascinating because, now that I look back on it, Cory’s book was very much a call to arms. … He said that we were a legitimate minority like any other minority group.” In 1956, she got in touch with Cory to find out what she could do for her minority group. He told her about One, Inc in Los Angeles, which had a large library and published ONE, the first national gay magazine to be sold on newstands. She flew to Los Angeles and went to One, Inc’s offices and asked what she could do. They told her about the Mattachine Society in San Francisco. She hopped on another plane and flew to San Francisco where the Mattachine folks told her about the Daughters of Bilitis. “Then I found myself for the first real time, not in a bar, but in someone’s living room in a nice setting with twelve other lesbians.”

Two years later and living in Philadelphia, Gittings got a call from Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon asking if she would organize a DoB chapter in New York. She formally joined DoB and traveled every weekend to New York to get the chapter established. It was through the New York DoB that Gittings met her life partner, Kay Lahusen  (Jan 5, she adopted the alias of Kay Tobin when she took up activism herself). Gittings later gained a national platform within the gay and lesbian community as the editor of the DoB newsletter, The Ladder in the mid-1960s.

No Limits: Barbara Gittings picketing the White House, 1965.

In 1963, Gittings and Lahusen met Frank Kameny (May 21), the pioneering gay rights activist based in Washington, D.C.. He was, as she described him, “the first gay person I met who took firm, uncompromising positions about homosexuality and homosexuals’ right to be considered fully on a par with heterosexuals.” Together, they formed a collaboration that would transform the gay rights movement from one of timidity and defensiveness to bold action and determined demands for equality. Those actions included the first ever gay rights protests in front of the White House (Apr 17), Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (Jul 4), and the Pentagon (above), all beginning 1965. The protests were audacious for their time — the Daughters of Bilitis officially opposed picketing, and they would force her removal as editor of The Ladder in 1966 over the issue.

Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and John E. Fryer as “Dr. H. Anonymous” at the 1972 APA panel on homosexuality.

Gittings, Lahusen and Kameny made a powerful team. Their greatest accomplishment came in the campaign to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. In 1971 Kameny and Gittings organized an exhibit at the APA convention in Washington, D.C. While there, they attended a panel discussion on homosexuality, and were outraged to discover that there were no gay psychiatrists on the panel. Kameny grabbed the microphone and demanded that the APA hear from gays themselves. The following year they were invited to participate in a panel discussion entitled “Psychiatry, Friend or Foe to Homosexuals? A Dialogue.” They got Dr. Judd Marmor, a pro-gay psychiatrist to appear on the panel, and of course Gittings and Kameny would participate. Lahusen thought something was still missing. “Look, you have psychiatrists on the panel who are not gay, and you have gays on the panel who are not psychiatrists. What you’re lacking on the panel are gay psychiatrists.” After considerable effort, Gittings finally convinced Dr. John E. Fryer, a gay psychiatrist to take part. But he would do so only on the condition that he would remain anonymous; he could wear a disguise and use a microphone to alter his voice. The appearance of “Dr. H. Anonymous” on that panel created a sensation at the convention, as he described how he was forced to be closeted while practicing psychiatry (May 2). Gittings, in turn, read aloud letters from other gay psychiatrists who refused to participate out of fear of professional ostracism. The following year, homosexuality was removed from the APA’s list of mental disorders, and Gittings celebrated by being photographed with newspaper headlines, “Twenty Million Homosexuals Gain Instant Cure.”

Gittings (left) kissing Isabel Miller. Photo by Kay Tobin Lahusen (Jan 5). (Source.)

In the 1970s, Gittings’ passion returned to where she first tried to find information about what it means to be a lesbian: the library. She helped to found the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force, which is believed to be the first professional organization for gay people in the country. In 1971, she hit on an idea that would sure to gain attention at the ALA’s 1971 convention in Dallas. “We needed to get an audience,” she remembered. “So we decided… let’s show gay love live. We were offering free—mind you, free—same-sex kisses and hugs. Let me tell you, the aisles were mobbed, but no one came into the booth to get a free hug. So we hugged and kissed each other. It was shown twice on the evening news, once again in the morning. It put us on the map.”

She continued, “You know that kissing booth wasn’t only a public stunt. It gave the message that gay people should not be held to double standards of privacy. We should be able to show our affections.”

Gittings never turned down an opportunity to represent the gay community. She appeared on the Phil Donahue Show in 1970, and on the David Suskind Show with a panel of six lesbians in 1971. A week after her David Suskind appearance, a middle-aged couple spotted her in a supermarket. The wife approached her and said, “You made me realize that you gay people love each other just the way Arnold and I do.”

Gittings died in 2007 after a long battle with breast cancer. She is survived by Kay Tobin Lahusen (Jan 5), a fellow gay rights advocate and her partner of 46 years. You can see a personal remembrance of Barbara Gittings by Jack Nichols here. You can view a three-part video of a 1988 interview with Gittings and Lahusen here, here, and here. In 2012, a portion of Locust Street in Philadelphia was re-named Barbara Gittings Way in her honor, and she was inducted into Chicago’s Legacy Walk.

[Additional source: Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1940-1990. An Oral History(New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 104-126, 213-227.]