Barbara Gittings

A teacher in Wilmington kept her out of the National Honor Society because of what he took to be her homosexual inclinations. That was how Barbara Gittings first heard the word. At Northwestern, rumors about a close friendship sent her looking for an explanation, and she went where a serious person goes: to the library. What was there had been written by doctors, it called her a deviant, and the Library of Congress filed the whole subject under abnormal sexual relations, including sexual crimes. She kept reading, stopped going to class, and failed out at 17. Her father found The Well of Loneliness in her bedroom and wrote her a letter instructing her to burn it.

In 1958 Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon asked her to open a New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, and fewer than a dozen women answered her notice. From 1963 she edited the organisation's magazine, The Ladder, added the subtitle A Lesbian Review, and put photographs of actual lesbians on the cover. In 1966 the leadership removed her, over a late issue or a cover change depending on the account. Beginning in 1965 she picketed Independence Hall every Fourth of July until Stonewall, wearing a dress, because Frank Kameny insisted the marchers look employable and she agreed.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual listed homosexuality as a mental illness, which meant a doctor, a judge, an employer and a parent could all point at the same page. Gittings and Kameny went after the page. At the 1971 convention she organised a panel of non-patient homosexuals. At the 1972 convention she got a working gay psychiatrist onto the platform: John Fryer appeared as Dr H. Anonymous in a rubber joke-shop mask, a wig, a baggy tuxedo and a microphone that distorted his voice, because he had already lost a residency and a job for being gay. Gittings read aloud the letters from psychiatrists who had declined to come. In December 1973 the association struck the classification. American medicine stopped calling her a patient, and every legal argument that followed rested on that.

She joined the American Library Association's Task Force on Gay Liberation in 1970, the first gay caucus in any professional body, became its coordinator in 1971, and ran it for 16 years. It compiled the first bibliographies of gay-positive books, pushed the Library of Congress to move the subject out of the sexual-crimes classification in 1972, and began the Gay Book Award. She and the photographer Kay Tobin Lahusen were together 46 years. Gittings died of breast cancer on February 18, 2007, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. That award is now the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the Free Library of Philadelphia keeps roughly 1,500 items under her name.

Barbara Gittings's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Daughters of Bilitis, New York chapter other
  She founded it and was its first president until 1961 1958
• The Ladder other
  Edited the national lesbian magazine until 1966 and put real lesbians on the cover 1963
• The Annual Reminder other
  Picket at Independence Hall held every Fourth of July until Stonewall 1965
• The Gay Book Award other
  Started by the ALA task force and now the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award 1971
• Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals — A Dialogue other
  The APA panel where John Fryer spoke as Dr H. Anonymous 1972
• Gays in Library Land other
  Her own history of the ALA task force's first sixteen years 1998

• c. 1950 aged ~18 Fails out of Northwestern at 17 after reading her way through the library She had gone looking for books about homosexuality. What she found was written by doctors and shelved with sexual crime.
• 1956 aged ~24 Travels to California and meets Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon They had founded the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco the year before.
• September 20, 1958 aged 26 Advertises for women to start a New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis Fewer than a dozen answered. She served as the chapter's first president until 1961.
• 1961 aged ~29 Meets Kay Tobin Lahusen at a picnic in Rhode Island They were together for the next 46 years.
• 1963 aged ~31 Takes over The Ladder and puts photographs of actual lesbians on the cover The Daughters of Bilitis leadership removed her as editor in 1966.
• July 4, 1965 aged 32 Marches in the first Annual Reminder outside Independence Hall Thirty-nine people picketed, the women in dresses and the men in jackets and ties.
• November 1967 aged 35 Acts as co-counsel at Defense Department hearings and breaks Charles Socarides as a witness Neither she nor Kameny was a lawyer. The department dropped Socarides from its expert list.
• May 1972 aged 39 Puts a masked gay psychiatrist on an American Psychiatric Association panel John Fryer appeared as Dr H. Anonymous. The APA struck the diagnosis in December 1973.
• February 18, 2007 aged 74 Dies of breast cancer at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania

• Frank Kameny 1925–2011
  Gay rights activist fired by the federal government in 1957 worked with him for four decades
• Marsha P. Johnson 1945–1992
  Transgender activist and Stonewall uprising figure who co-founded STAR to help homeless LGBTQ youth. Stonewall replaced her Annual Reminder
• Harvey Milk 1930–1978
  First openly gay elected official in California whose assassination made him a martyr for LGBTQ rights. the elected generation that followed
• Coretta Scott King 1927–2006
  Civil rights organizer, peace activist, and founder of the King Center carried the cause into the civil rights mainstream
• Roger Baldwin 1884–1981
  Founder and first director of the American Civil Liberties Union built the civil liberties tradition she used