Originally, the magazine was created for sharing soft thoughts and opinions around the lesbian lifestyle, lesbian literature, poetry, meetings updates, and such like. She would meet her life-long partner Kay Lahusen during this time.ĭuring her time in the DOB, Gittings would become editor of The Ladder, the DOB’s magazine.
Two years later, Gittings would initiate and become president of the New York City chapter for 3-years.
The DOB was a safe space for women who didn’t feel safe with lesbian bars, due to police harassment, and who were afraid to come out publicly. In 1956, following a trip to California, Gittings became involved with the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a lesbian civil and political rights group. She would continue collecting books on homosexuality as an alternative to the scene. While there she would come across the various people and cultures but would never quite fit in with any of them. Gittings would move to Philadelphia at the age of 18 and would regularly travel to New York to engage with the LGBT scene. Though she would not consider these resources great, back home in her small town the resources were much more meagre. Her previous research attempts were more accessible thanks to the university libraries, despite what she found came under ‘sexual perversion’ and ‘sexual aberration’ in ‘abnormal psychology’ books. With no one to talk to and her family unaware of the reasons behind her abrupt ending with academia, Gittings was left to hide her sexuality and continue her research in private. Her fervent research would lead to her failing university and returning home in mystery. As we learnt from Michael Schofield, there wasn’t much literature around the topic that wasn’t medical and didn’t describe same-sex attraction as an abhorrent act. It would not be until her time at Northwestern University that she would begin to question her sexuality.ĭuring this time, through common misconception of the time, Gittings would try and seek out a cure but was unable to obtain the resources to do so. A devout Catholic, Barbara was aware of her attraction to girls but did not know what it meant until a teacher told her. Gittings was born mid-summer in 1932 in Vienna Austria and her family returned to America following the outbreak of WWII.
As the matriarch of the LGBT civil rights movement, civil rights campaigner, public educator and fellow bibliophile, Barbara Gittings chose conversation over aggression. Whether that’s sit-ins, marches or violence, todays activist took a different approach on this, though she was involved with a number of protest marches herself. We continue the LGBT+ History month celebrations with another chapter in the Queeroes series.Ĭivil activism is often engaged through various means of action.
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