Barbara Gittings (left) & Frank Kameny (right) staff a booth at the 1972 APA Convention. Photo by Kay T Lahusen, NYPL Collection
July 31, 1932- Barbara Gittings was a Gay Rights pioneer, facing prejudice in an era when few others dared.
When I was 12 years old, I would scour the stacks of books & the bibliographies for information, any scrap or mention on Homosexuality at the Spokane Public Library’s main branch. Always looking over my shoulder, nearly everything I researched brought me frightening information with these terms tossed out: Perversion, Invert, Criminal, Sinful, Suicide, & Unnatural.
During an era when very few gay people dared to come out in private, much less in public, Gittings was a vocal & visible figure in the fledgling fight for Gay Rights.
In the late 1950s, she founded the NYC chapter of the Daughters Of Bilitis, the first national organization for lesbians, even though she lived in Philadelphia. In the 1960s, she took part in the first gay rights demonstrations at the White House & Liberty Square in Philadelphia. In the early 1970s, she was instrumental in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to change its position on homosexuality. In 1973, the APA invalidated the definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder. Kids, that means that for the first time in history, homos were officially not crazy.
Gittings also worked to make information about gay men & lesbians more widely available in libraries. Though not a librarian by training, she was for many years the head of the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force; she coordinated & edited the association’s comprehensive bibliography of literature by & about gay people. Gittings felt keenly aware of this need for such a bibliography. As a young woman, when she scoured local libraries just like me, seeking, but seldom seeing, something that would help her understand her own life.
Gittings was born in Vienna where her father was a member of the US diplomatic corps, returning to the USA when she was a kid. When Gittings was a teenager her father caught her reading The Well Of Loneliness (1928), a novel of lesbian love by English author Radclyffe Hall. He told her, via a letter, to burn the book when he could not bring himself to speak to her.
Gittings studied theatre at Northwestern University, but she was increasingly distracted by the need to learn as much as she could about homosexuality. This is when she began searching libraries of Chicago. She unearthed very little that was relevant & nothing that was encouraging.
Gittings:
“I had to find bits & pieces under headings like ‘sexual perversion’, ‘invert, or ‘sexual aberration’ in books on abnormal psychology. I kept thinking, ‘It’s me they’re writing about, but it doesn’t feel like me at all.”
She left Northwestern after one year & for decades she supported her activism by taking clerical jobs. In 1958, commuting from her home in Philadelphia, Gittings started the NYC chapter of the Daughters Of Bilitis, which was founded in San Francisco in 1955. She later edited the organization’s national newsletter The Ladder.
Stonewall, watershed moment that it was, was not the only baby steps taken by brave gay people to claim their basic rights.The first public demonstration for Gay Rights in the USA, which began on July 4, 1965, 4 years before the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in NYC. The name the organizers chose for the event was The Annual Reminders, selected to remind the public that millions of American citizens were being denied the rights of “life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness” as put forth in The Declaration Of Independence.
The peaceful, orderly protest of just 39 brave souls, with lesbians wearing dresses & gay men in suits & ties, circled in front of Independence Hall with signs bearing slogans: Homosexuals Should Be Judged As Individuals, 15 Million Homosexual Americans Ask For Equality, Opportunity & Dignity. The Annual Reminders continued at the same spot on Philadelphia through 1969, but after Stonewall the movement shifted to NYC.
There was very little press coverage of the original march, although Confidential Magazine ran a feature: Homos On The March! Behind the protest was Gittings.
The Annual Reminders were commemorated in 2005 by the placement of a Pennsylvania State Historical Marker at 6th & Chestnut Streets in Philly.
In her lifetime & beyond, Gittings received many awards, including an honorary membership in the American Library Association. The Free Library Of Philadelphia named its Gay & Lesbian Collection for her, & the NYC Public Library acquired the papers of Gittings & her longtime partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen. The letters, journals, newsletters & notes chronicle more than half a century in the Gay Rights movement.
Gittings appeared in the documentaries Out Of The Past (1998), Gay Pioneers (2013), Before Stonewall (1984), & After Stonewall (1999).
In 1997, Gittings & Lahusen successfully pushed the AARP to grant them a couples membership giving the couple a discount on their health insurance Lahusen:
“Before Barbara died, we went jointly into an assisted-living facility. Our last bit of activism was to come out in the newsletter of our assisted-living facility.”
Gittings left this world, taken of that damn cancer, in February 2007. She was 74 years old. I wish she had lived to see the changes in this country in the past 8 years.
“As a teenager, I had to struggle alone to learn about myself and what it meant to be gay. Now for 48 years, I’ve had the satisfaction of working with other gay people all across the country to get the bigots off our backs, to oil the closet door hinges, to change prejudiced hearts & minds, & to show that gay love is good for us & for the rest of the world too. It’s hard work, but it’s vital, & it’s gratifying, & it’s often fun!”
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