Barbara Gittings, 75, gay rights pioneer
Kelly
The Associated Press
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Barbara Gittings, 75, gay rights pioneer
Barbara Gittings, a gay rights activist since the late 1950s, died Sunday.
She was 75.
Gittings died after a lengthy fight with breast cancer, said Mark Segal, a
friend and the publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News.
Gittings helped organize the New York City chapter of the Daughters of
Bilitis, an early lesbian rights organization, in the 1950s. During her work
with that group, she met her life partner, Kay Lahausen. Gittings edited the
group's publication, the Ladder, from 1963 to 1966, and worked with Lahausen
on her 1973 book, "The Gay Crusaders."
She first became well known to the public in 1965, when she helped organize
gay-rights demonstrations at the White House and Independence Hall. In 2005,
Gittings and Lahausen attended the unveiling of a state historic marker
noting those demonstrations across the street from Independence Hall.
Gittings had served as head of the American Library Association's Gay Task
Force; in 2003, the association presented her its highest honor, a lifetime
membership.
Gittings was also active in the campaign that led to the American
Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to drop homosexuality from its list
of mental disorders.
Kelly
Two photos of Barbara Gittings @
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Barbara Gittings, 75, leader in the fight for gay rights
By Sally A. Downey
Inquirer Staff Writer
Barbara Gittings, 75, formerly of Philadelphia and Wilmington, a gay-rights
pioneer, died Sunday at Kendal at Longwood, a retirement community in
Kennett Square, after a seven-year struggle with breast cancer.
On July 4, 1965, Ms. Gittings helped organize a march at Independence Hall
to support homosexual civil rights. "It was both scary and exhilarating,"
she said later. "We knew we were doing something that hadn't been done
before. It was our first in-your-face street picketing."
The demonstrators dressed conservatively. "We were fighting for federal
employment," said Ms. Gittings' partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen. "We wanted to
look employable."
Ms. Gittings continued to march on July Fourth at Independence Hall for
three more years, and in 1972 she helped organize the city's first major gay
pride parade. In 1990, she was grand marshal of a parade that included
10,000 participants in a crosstown march from Rittenhouse Square to Penn's
Landing. "Barbara was a real pioneer who fought tirelessly in the name of
human decency and human dignity," Gov. Rendell said.
"She is our Rosa Parks," said Malcolm Lazin, executive director of the
Equality Forum in Philadelphia.
"Barbara gave a face to the gay community when it was deeply in the closet,"
said Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News.
"She had a sense of humor," Lahusen said. "She had fun winning over hostile
audiences."
Ms. Gittings said in an interview in 2001 that as a young woman, she tried
to resolve her sexual orientation through books and literature, and could
only find homosexuality listed under "sexual perversion." "This was not
about me," she said. "There is nothing here about love or happiness."
Eventually, she said, "I simply found my own people."
In the 1950s, she became involved in gay rights, and was a founder of the
New York chapter of the lesbian-rights group Daughters of Bilitis and edited
its magazine, the Ladder. She was active in the campaign that led the
American Psychiatric Association to drop its categorization of homosexuality
as a mental illness in 1973, and received an award from the association last
fall.
Ms. Gittings headed the American Library Association Gay Task Force and
edited its gay bibliography. The Free Library of Philadelphia's Gay and
Lesbian Collection is named in her honor.
Ms. Gittings was born in Vienna, Austria, where her father was serving in
the U.S. diplomatic corps. She graduated from Wilmington High School and
spent a year at Northwestern University. She worked at office jobs and in a
music store in Philadelphia while pursuing her activism. She and Lahusen met
in 1961 at a picnic in Rhode Island. They lived in Center City and in
University City, and moved to Wilmington in the 1990s to care for Ms.
Gittings' mother and aunt.
She enjoyed classical music concerts, especially baroque and renaissance
music, and sang with the Philadelphia Chamber Chorus for 50 years.
In addition to her partner of 46 years, Ms. Gittings is survived by a
sister, Eleanor G. Taylor.
A wreath-laying ceremony in honor of Ms. Gittings will be held at noon today
at the northwest corner of Sixth and Chestnut Streets, in front of the
historical marker commemorating the Independence Hall demonstrations.
A memorial service will be held a future date.
Memorial donations may be made to Lambda Legal Defense Fund, 120 Wall St.,
Suite 1500, New York, N.Y. 10005-3905.
Contact staff writer Sally A. Downey at 215-854-2913 or
sdo...@phillynews.com
Kelly
The Bay Area Reporter [lgbtq]
San Francisco CA
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Gay rights pioneer Barbara Gittings dies
by Bob Roehr
One of the nation's earliest and longest serving gay rights activists has
died. Barbara Gittings lost her battle with breast cancer in Philadelphia on
Sunday, February 18. She was 75.
Ms. Gittings was instrumental in the early fight for lesbian rights,
founding the New York City chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, which was
started in San Francisco in 1956 by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. DOB was the
first lesbian rights organization and an alternative to the bars, which were
then subject to police harassment and raids. Sodomy was illegal in all 50
states until Illinois became the first to repeal its law in 1962.
Ms. Gittings established the New York City chapter of DOB in 1958 and was
its first president. She served as editor of DOB's The Ladder , the first
lesbian publication with national distribution, from 1963 to 1966.
Lyon said that she and Martin first met Gittings when she visited San
Francisco in the late 1950s. They met again in New York in 1958 at the
national convention of the early gay rights group the Mattachine Society,
and that led to the founding of the NYC chapter of DOB. Lyon called Ms.
Gittings "a really wonderful person who was very sharp and had a great sense
of humor."
But it wasn't always a bed of roses. Ms. Gittings's delay in putting
together a 1966 issue of The Ladder led Martin to pull the magazine from her
control, and led to strained relations. The magazine was the only way to
promote the upcoming DOB conference in San Francisco. It would prove to be a
landmark event with unprecedented numbers of local officials addressing the
LGBT community. Lyon said those wounds healed with time and they were in
regular contact with each other over the years.
Ms. Gittings was among a handful of people who participated in the first
public gay rights demonstrations. She picketed the White House, the Civil
Service Commission, and the Pentagon. On July 4, 1965, she took part in the
gay rights demonstration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
Gay icon Frank Kameny recalled her as being "one of the few activists who
has been around longer than I." He founded the Washington, D.C. chapter of
the Mattachine Society in 1961 and does not remember how they first met.
Kameny said he knows they had frequent interaction while Gittings was editor
of The Ladder.
"Things were heating up but had not yet reached their peak" in 1965 in terms
of social protest over civil rights and Vietnam, said Kameny.
"At that point, picketing at the White House was the expression of dissent
par excellence," he said. It got so congested that police assigned groups
particular spots in front of and along the sides of the White House
compound.
"Those demonstrations put the issue of gay rights on the table in ways that
it hadn't been done before," said Ken Sherrill, professor of political
science at Hunter College. "They said that this was a fit subject for
discussion."
San Francisco resident Tommi Avicolli Mecca met Ms. Gittings in Philadelphia
not long after he came out in 1971, when she spoke at a gay liberation forum
he helped organize at Temple University, where he was a student. The
following year they worked on Philly's first gay pride march together. While
the two didn't always agree politically, Avicolli Mecca said she made major
contributions to the LGBT community.
"She and I had huge political differences, I being the more radical and she
the more moderate," Avicolli Mecca said in an e-mail. "I was living in drag,
she dressed very conservatively. I was a Marxist, she a Democrat. Still, we
came to respect each other a whole lot over the years."
Avicolli Mecca credited Ms. Gittings with working tirelessly to "break the
terrible silence that kept us queers in our closets."
Ms. Gittings served on the founding boards of directors of many
organizations, including the National Gay [and Lesbian] Task Force (1973)
and the Gay Rights National Lobby (1976), a precursor to the Human Rights
Campaign Fund, now known as the Human Rights Campaign.
"She exuded this incredible warmth and friendliness," said Sherrill, adding
that Ms. Gittings was the glue that helped keep together often-contentious
organizations during the early phase of the movement. He first met Gittings
through the founding of the short-lived Gay Academic Union in 1973. "She was
a deeply principled, highly courageous person, but also warm and focused. If
she had any enemies, I never met them."
Ms. Gittings was a librarian by profession and from 1971 to 1986 led the Gay
Task Force of the American Library Association, editing gay reading lists
such as the "Gay Bibliography."
In the pre-Internet days, the library was one of the main ways that young
people could find out information about homosexuality, said Sherrill. "It
was important to have materials about our lives and experiences available,"
he said. Ms. Gittings played a major role in making that possible, he added.
Kameny last saw Gittings in October when both were honored by the American
Psychiatric Association for their work in getting the organization to
"delist" homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. He said she looked frail
from the cancer therapy she was undergoing but she managed to keep herself
amazingly active until the end.
HRC President Joe Solmonese praised Ms. Gittings for her decades of work
that benefited the community. "Barbara Gittings was a true pioneer for our
community," said Solmonese in a statement, adding that her impact on the
lives of LGBT Americans has been felt for nearly five decades.
Ms. Gittings and her partner of 46 years, activist and historian Kay Tobin
Lahusen, had moved to an assisted living facility in Kennet Square,
Pennsylvania. It was at the facility that Ms. Gittings went into a coma
Sunday morning; she died that evening with Lahusen at her side.
The ever-analytical Kameny called her "a very effective gay pioneer."
Most LGBT Americans probably came to know Ms. Gittings through her
appearances in documentaries on the community such as Before Stonewall and
Gay Pioneers . She was named one of the community's 40 heroes by the
Equality Forum in 2005 when it held a 40th anniversary celebration of the
July 4, 1965 gay rights demonstration in Philadelphia.
Gittings was born in Vienna, Austria, where her diplomat father was
stationed, in 1932, and moved frequently as a child. During most of her
school years, she and her family lived in Wilmington, Delaware.
In addition to Lahusen, Ms. Gittings is survived by her sister, Eleanor
Gittings Taylor of San Diego. Lahusen asked that donations in Ms. Gittings's
memory be made to Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. A memorial
service is being planned.