Barbara Gittings (1932-2007) was one of the most influential members of the LGBT civil rights movement.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today, we’re celebrating a woman regarded as one of the most influential members of the LGBT civil rights movement. Nearly a decade before the pivotal Stonewall riots, she was working to make queer literature more accessible in major cities. Her activism is also one of the biggest reasons we no longer classify homosexuality as a mental illness.
Today, we’re talking about a pioneer of the gay rights movement: Barbara Gittings.
Barbara was born on July 31, 1932, in Vienna, Austria. Her father was a member of the United States diplomatic corps. Her family returned to the states while Barbara was still young. There, Barbara started to cultivate a love of queer literature.
It was a love her father did not share. When he caught her reading a copy of the 1928 novel “The Well of Loneliness,” which had become a censorship battleground over its portrayal of lesbianism, he ordered Barbara to burn the book.
As she continued into young adulthood, Barbara’s desire to learn about sexuality -- especially her own -- continued to grow. She enrolled at Northwestern University in Chicago and studied drama. But queer studies continued to call. Around this time, she realized how few books on homosexuality were available in libraries—and those she did find cast itin an unflattering light. It was the 1950s, and, homosexuality was considered to be a social and mental disorder by most doctors.
After just a year, Barbara left Northwestern.She began supporting herself and her activism through clerical jobs, a practice she could continue throughout her life.
In 1958, Barbara took the first step in her career. She started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis -- known as the D-O-B -- the first lesbian civil rights organization in the US.
Barbara also worked across Philadelphia, New York, and DC to organize public protests for LGBT equality. She called them annual reminders. By the time Stonewall rolled around in 1969, the annual reminders had tripled in size. Their 1970 march commemorated Stonewall’s anniversary. It traveled from Greenwich Village to Central Park. It’s remembered as the first New York City Pride parade.
In the 1960s, gay women found themselves in a complicated position. The feminist and gay rights movements were both flourishing, but neither embraced lesbians as part of the cause. While many lesbians advocated for separating from both causes, Barbara was a strong proponent of one, cohesive movement.
This unity came in handy in the 1970s, when Barbara, along with other activists, waged war on the American Psychological Association, the A-P-A. They were determined to de-pathologize homosexuality as a mental disorder.
Barbara and her peers at the Gay Liberation front and Gay Activists Alliance crashed the APA’s 1970 meeting to demand attention on the issue. At next year’s meeting, they took over the mic. And in 1972, they launched their most ambitious plan yet.
They organized a panel on homosexuality and provided their own expert to educate the APA. The stigma against homosexuality in professional circles was so severe that they couldn’t get a psychologist to speak openly on their behalf: instead, the panel was led by one Dr. H Anonymous, who spoke through a voice modulator and wore a mask. Together, the panel shifted the conversation on what constitutes a mental illness away from homosexuality, and onto homophobia.
The next year, the APA announced it would remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
In the later years of her career, Barbara returned to her love of queer literature. She became coordinator for the Gay Task Force of the American Library Association and held the position for 16 years, despite not being a librarian herself. She wrote a history of the group and worked to make queer literature readily available in libraries across the nation.
In 2001, the Free Library of Philadelphia established the Gittings Collection, the second-largest collection of gay and lesbian materials in a public library.
Barbara died on February 18, 2007, of breast cancer. Just before her death, she and her life partner had checked into an assisted living facility and taken one last opportunity to display their history of activism: they came out in the facility’s newsletter.
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Talk to you tomorrow!