Born On This Day- July 31st... Gay Rights Pioneer, Barbara Gittings

During an era when very few gay people dared come out in private, much less in public, Barbara 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 early gay rights demonstrations at the White House & Liberty Square in Philadelphia. In the early 1970s, she helped lobby the American Psychiatric Association to change its stance on homosexuality; in 1973, the APA invalidated the definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Gittings also strove 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 the need for such a bibliography as a young woman, when she scoured local libraries, seeking, but seldom seeing, something that would help her understand her own life.

Gittings was born on July 31, 1932, in Vienna, where her father was a member of the United States diplomatic corps, returning to the United States when Barbara was young. When she was a teenager, her father caught her reading The Well of Loneliness, the 1928 novel of lesbian love by the English writer Radclyffe Hall. He told her, via a letter, to burn the book. Gittings’ father mailed the letter, when he could not bring himself to speak to her.

Gittings studied theatre at Northwestern, but she was increasingly distracted by the need to learn as much as she could about homosexuality. She haunted the libraries of Chicago, unearthing 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 her freshman year, & for decades she supported her activism with 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. In 1965, she took part in one of the first gay rights pickets of the White House, in an effort to end discrimination against gay people in federal employment.

Gittings received many awards, among them 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, which chronicle more than half a century in the gay rights movement.

She appeared in the documentaries Out of the Past, Gay Pioneers, Before Stonewall & After Stonewall.

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 died of cancer in her home on February 2007 at 74 years old.