Know Your History: Barbara Gittings

LGBT, NewsBites, Society & Culture — By Speak Equal on October 22, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Barbara Gittings (July 31, 1932 – February 18, 2007) was a prominent American activist for gay equality. She organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) from 1958 to 1963, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people by the largest employer in the US at that time: the United States government. Her early experiences with trying to learn more about lesbianism fueled her lifetime work with libraries. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, forming the first gay caucus in a professional organization, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in 1972. Her self-described life mission was to tear away the “shroud of invisibility” related to homosexuality that associated it with crime and mental illness.[1]

She was awarded a lifetime membership in the American Library Association, and the ALA named an annual award for the best gay or lesbian novel the The Barbara Gittings Award. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) also named an activist award for her. At her memorial service, Matt Foreman, the directory of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said, “What do we owe Barbara? Everything.”[2]

In 1965, Gittings marched in the first gay picket lines at the White House,[30] the US State Department, and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to protest the federal government’s policy on discrimination of homosexuals, holding a sign that read “Sexual preference is irrelevant to federal employment.”[31][32] The men who agreed to picket had to wear suits and ties, and the women who participated were to wear dresses, heels, and pantyhose so as to look employable by the federal government. Reactions from passersby were varied. A tourist witnessing the demonstration remarked, “I still don’t believe it. Somebody’s kidding.” A stunned high school student pointed out, “They all look so normal.” [33] Gittings recalled, “I remember a man said to his kids, ‘Hold your noses — it’s dirty here.’ And there was a woman dragging a string of kids who said, very angrily, ‘You should all be married and have children like me.’”[8] Leaflets were distributed to passersby that described their reasons for picketing, surprising some recipients who were unaware gays and lesbians could be fired so easily, and disgusting others. Gittings remembered, “It was risky and we were scared. Picketing was not a popular tactic at the time. And our cause seemed outlandish even to most gay people.”[34] The evening prior to the group’s picketing the State Department, Secretary of State Dean Rusk announced the pickets at a press conference. Gittings connected the high-profile visibility with a “breakthrough into mainstream publicity.”[35] From 1965 to 1969 Gittings participated in picketing at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, until the Stonewall Riots in June 1969. After the riots, the annual Gay Pride Parade commemorating the riots took its place.

Differences in Gittings’ political stance and the leadership of the DOB began to show, and came to a culmination in 1966 when she was ousted as the editor of The Ladder for, as one source claims, creating the issue that reported on the DOB convention late,[23] but according to another source because she removed “For Adults Only” on the cover of the magazine without consulting the DOB.[36]

In November 1967, Gittings and Kameny worked together as co-counsel in hearings held by the Department of Defense to discredit an expert witness named Dr. Charles Socarides, who testified that homosexuals could be converted to heterosexuality, and to call in question the policy held by the Department of Defense that homosexual employees could be fired for being named as homosexuals.[37] “Publicity was the objective,” Gittings recalled many years later. Kameny and Gittings dressed conservatively, but wore buttons that said “Gay is Good” and “Pray for Sodomy.” “We held press conferences for the benefit of sharp-eyed reporters. When we first went into a hearing room, we made certain to shake hands with all…participants so (they) could not avoid reading our buttons.[38] Although neither were attorneys, at the end of their cross-examination, the Department of Defense removed Socarides from their lists of expert witnesses.[39][40]

Gittings made hundreds of appearances as a speaker in the late 1960s.[41] She carried on her mission to convince heterosexuals and homosexuals alike that homosexuality is not an illness, stating in a letter in 1967:

“I keep trying to convince people in the movement that the charge of sickness is perhaps our greatest problem… we can’t really progress in other directions until the unsubstantiated assumption of sickness…is demolished! It’s almost always there, however slyly or covertly or even unconsciously, however ‘sympathetic’ the person: the attitude that homosexuality is somehow undesirable, some sort of twist or malfunction or failure or maladaptation or other kind of psychic sickness. And in our society sick people, by any definition of sick, just DO not get equal treatment. Equal treatment — no more, no less — is what we want! And compassion — which many homosexuals gladly swallow because they think it represents an improvement in attitudes toward them — is not equal treatment.”[32]

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