Today's Out Spotlight is a gay pioneer who was out and proud before Stonewall. Forthright, out, and outspoken, organized, hardworking and a strategist she participated in the first organized annual gay civil rights demonstrations, helped convince the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and crusaded for more gay resources and materials in libraries across the United State. Today's Out Spotlight is Barbara Gittings.
Barbara Gittings was born on July 31, 1932 in Vienna, Austria, where her father held a post with the American diplomatic service. The family returned to the US when she was young eventually settling in Wilmington, Delaware. As a teenager, her father caught her reading “The Well of Loneliness,” the 1928 novel of lesbian love by English writer Radclyffe Hall. He told her to burn the book, not in person but by letter, because he couldn't bring himself to speak to her.
After graduating from high school in 1949, she enrolled at Northwestern University,in Chicago, as a theater major. She had been excluded from the National Honor Society in high school because an advisor thought she had "lesbian tendencies" and found herself during her freshman year she consulting a Chicago psychiatrist who confirmed her inklings that she was homosexual--and offered to "cure" her.
Instead of going into psychotherapy, she hit the library, the college, medical school and law school as well looking for any information on homosexuality. She quickly discovered that resources were few, and often to be found "under such headings as 'abnormal,' 'perverted,' or 'deviate.' In addition she found out that what information there was, was almost exclusively concerning gay men and was struck by the fact that there were no references to love.
Where she found mentions of love where in pulp novels. There were "fairly realistic, flesh-and-blood characters" that she could identify herself in contrast to the image of homosexuality she had found in scientific literature.
From then on Gittings was on a mission to find out everything she could find about homosexuality.She stopped going to classes, which found her failing out of the semester. She returned to home to her family but quickly set out on her own and moved to Philadelphia.
In her quest for resources, she discovered The Homosexual in America (1951), written by Edward Sagarin under the name Donald Webster Cory. She called his publisher, and arranged a meeting with him. Through Sagarin, she learned about organizations in the fledgling homophile movement, including the Mattachine Society and their publication ONE. In 1956 on a visit ONE's office, in California, she heard about the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and attended her first meeting, where she met the society's founders, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin.
Two years later, in 1958, Lyon and Martin asked her to form the first New York chapter of DOB. She traveled from Philadelphia to New York to head up the chapter.
In the 1950's gay activism was in its infancy. Describing those years, she said, "There were scarcely 200 of us in the whole United States. It was like a club---we all knew each other." It was at a DOB picnic in 1961 that she met Kay Lahusen, herself an activist. The two fell in love and soon became partners, together for 46 years.
[We met in] 1961 at a picnic in Rhode Island. We hit it off, we started courting. I flew to Boston [to see her] and got off the plane with a big bunch of flowers in my hand. I couldn’t resist. I didn’t care what the world thought. I dropped the flowers, grabbed her and kissed her. That was not being done in 1961.
In 1963 she became the second editor of DOB's magazine, The Ladder, a position that she held for more than three years. Under Gittings, The Ladder became a more militant journal that challenged some of the DOB's post. Under her The Laddder questioned medical authorities and the idea that homosexuals were sick and needed to be cured.
She also rejected the DOB's stance against direct political action. She had met Washington, D. C. activist Frank Kameny, who held the same ideal of speaking out.
In 1965 they marched in the first gay picket lines at the White House and other Federal sites in Washington, DC to protest discrimination by the Federal government. She also joined the first annual demonstrations for gay and lesbian civil rights that were held each July 4 from 1965 to 1969 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The yearly protests laid the groundwork for the Stonewall rebellion in 1969 and the first New York gay pride parade in 1970.
The tactic of picketing was somewhat controversial at the time within the group and contention led to Gittings's decision to leave DOB.
Kameny was campaigning to have homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders and invited Gittings to join the effort, she eagerly accepted.
In 1971 they had an exhibit at the APA's annual convention, which led to them being invited to participate in a panel discussion the following year entitled "Psychiatry, Friend or Foe to Homosexuals? A Dialogue."
When her partner Kay pointed out that the psychiatrists on the panel were heterosexual, she found a gay psychiatrist who agreed to take part on the provision that he could do so anonymously. He participated in the discussing wearing a disguise and using a microphone to alter his voice--itself a dramatic statement about homophobia with in the profession and in society at large. At the panel Gittings read anonymous written statements from other gay psychiatrists as well.
Following the pa meeting,the APA Board of Trustees removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, which was supported by the whole association. Interviewed by Philadelphia newspapers on the occasion, she quipped "a wonderful headline"--"20 Million Homosexuals Gain Instant Cure."
She never lost sight of the frustration of days in her youth when she combed through libraries and bookstores looking for explanation and validation of her orientation. and crusaded to make gay literature available in libraries for everyone. Learning that some gay members of the American Library Association were organizing an interest group, the Task Force on Gay Liberation, (later renamed the Gay Task Force in 1975)at their annual meeting. She attended the meeting which was open to non professionals as well, and found herself becoming a leading participant in the Task Force on Gay Liberation's first project, compiling "a short, manageable list of the most positive materials" on gay topics.
She edited its Gay Bibliography and wrote a history of the group, Gays in Library Land. What started out with thirty-seven titles, the Gay Bibliography soon grew and grew and becoming a valuable resource for libraries and schools. The group soon received requests for lists dealing with specialized topics and subtopics within the collection.
Task Force panels were initiated in 1975, have become a fixture at ALA conventions.
Gittings pushed to have the annual Gay Book Award made an official award of the ALA. As she stepped down as coordinator of Gay Task Force in 1986, she was able to announce that the proposal had been adopted. Her campaign to promote gay materials and eliminate discrimination in libraries was recognized in 2003 by an honorary lifetime membership conferred by the American Library Association. The Free Library of Philadelphia honored her in 2001 with the creation of the Barbara Gittings Gay/Lesbian Collection.
In 1998 she appeared as herself in the documentary film Out of the Past, which presented the lives of a number of American gay men and lesbians including those early pioneers, Sarah Orne Jewett (voiced by Gwyneth Paltrow) and her partner Annie Adams Fields (Cherry Jones), Bayard Rustin (Leland Gantt), and a lesser known figure, Henry Gerber (Edward Norton), a postal clerk who founded one of the country's first gay rights organizations.
In 2001 GLAAD created the the Barbara Gittings Award for activism, of which Gittings was the first recipient.
In 2005, she and Kay attended the unveiling of a state historic marker across from Independence Hall, that marked the history of those demonstrations they participated in 40 years earlier to bring about change in the GLBT community.
Gittings and Kameny were both honored in October 2006 with the first Fyrer Award from the APA for their leadership in the relation between psychiatry and homosexuality.
Together with Lahusen, she was active in GLBT organizations until the very end of her life. The couple planned to donate their extensive collection of books, documents, and photographs to libraries and archives. Lahusen was the documentarian of the collection. Their collection was spread to many libraries and archives and have become a treasure trove to scholars and others as well as a tribute to their lifelong commitment to activism for gay rights.
Following a battle with breast cancer, Barbara Gittings died on February 18, 2007. She was survived by her loving partner Kay Lahusen.
“She was one of the rare people in the homophile movement — before Stonewall — who took a militant stance. And she not only took a militant stance, but she was in the forefront.” David Carter, author of “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution.
“Equality means more than passing laws. The struggle is really won in the hearts and minds of the community, where it really counts.” — Barbara Gittings
