Barbara gittings making gay history

At a picnic, she met the photographer Kay Tobin Lahusen, her partner for the next 46 years. At the ALA convention, she made headlines by organizing a gay kissing booth. Purchase a print.

Barbara Gittings Legacy Project

Gittings grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, before moving [ ]. Seeking out gay literature became an obsession, and at college, she skipped so many classes to go to the library that she failed out. Barbara Gittings () and Kay Tobin Lahusen () were gay civil rights pioneers and partners for nearly forty-six years.

InGittings started the New York City chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, an early lesbian organization, although she was often at odds with the more conservative members. She started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in[2] edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from to[2][3][4] and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people in the United.

Barbara Gittings LGBT 50th

Today, a number of awards and collections are named after Gittings in memory of her lifelong activism. Self-described gay rights fanatics and life partners Barbara Gittings and Kay “Tobin” Lahusen helped supercharge the nascent movement in the s and brought their creativity, passion, determination, and good humor to the Gay Liberation s, leaving behind an inspiring legacy of dramatic change.

Brian Epstein Reed Erickson E. Barbara Gittings to — American activist, and influential figure in the pre-Stonewall gay rights movement. Barbara Gittings (July 31, – February 18, ) was an American LGBTQ activist.

The collection contains their personal and professional papers, photographs by Lahusen created in the course of forty-five years of gay rights activism, and the extensive collection of materials they gathered and preserved to document the movement.

The collection. Gittings was co-Grand Marshall of the New York City Gay Pride Parade where she was declared a “Mother of Lesbian and Gay Liberation." Inthe Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) bestowed to her the first “Barbara Gittings Award” for Activism.

Inshe picketed in the first ever gay and lesbian demonstration in front of the White House, signs from which are currently housed at the Smithsonian. Barbara Gittings, known to some as the “Mother of the Gay Rights Movement,” was one of the earliest lesbian activists in America.

A studious child, she turned to the library to learn more about her sexual orientation, and was disappointed with the clinical, negative, and unrelateable snippets that she found. As a direct result, homosexuality was removed from the list of psychiatric mental disorders in InGittings returned to her earlier passion for books, and joined a gay caucus that had formed within the American Library Association, the first of its kind.

She worked with librarians throughout the 70s and 80s to increase the number of positive gay resources in libraries. American activist, and influential figure in the pre-Stonewall gay rights movement.