Barbara Gittings: The Mother of LGBTQ+ Rights

Most people have never heard her name. But if you have ever told a doctor you are gay without being handed a diagnosis, or checked out a book from a public library that treated queer people like human beings, you have Barbara Gittings to thank. She spent more than fifty years on the work, never took a salary for it, and walked away having changed two of the institutions that shaped how America saw gay people. Here is the story of the woman they call the mother of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

Who Was Barbara Gittings?

Barbara Gittings was born on July 31, 1932, in Vienna, where her father was posted as a United States diplomat. The family came home before the war, and she grew up Catholic in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1949 she enrolled at Northwestern University. That is where the trouble started, and where her life's work began.

A dorm adviser suggested she might be a homosexual. Gittings, then seventeen, did what a curious student does. She went to the library to find out what that meant. What she found was a wall of books filed under abnormal psychology, describing people like her as sick, deviant, and dangerous. She failed a class that year because she spent her time reading psychiatric texts about herself instead of attending lectures. She left Northwestern after one year. But the experience planted a question she would spend decades answering: who decided that gay people were broken, and how do you make them stop?

By the early 1950s she had moved to Philadelphia, found her way into the small underground world of gay and lesbian life, and decided she was not going to spend her years hiding. She wanted to organize. The problem was that in 1956, there was almost nothing to join.

The Ladder and the Daughters of Bilitis

In 1955, two women in San Francisco named Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon had started the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the country. Gittings heard about it, traveled west to meet them in 1956, and came home determined to build a chapter on the East Coast. In 1958 she founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and ran it for three years.

Then she took over the magazine. From 1963 to 1966 Gittings edited The Ladder, the Daughters of Bilitis newsletter and the most important lesbian publication in America at the time. She made two changes that look small now and were radical then. She added the subtitle "A Lesbian Review" to the cover, putting the word in print where anyone could see it. And in 1964 she started running photographs of actual lesbians on the cover, real faces instead of abstract drawings. Her partner, the photojournalist Kay Tobin Lahusen, shot many of them. Visibility was the whole point. You cannot fear what you can see clearly.

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Picketing in Heels: The Annual Reminders

Visibility on a magazine cover was one thing. Standing on a public sidewalk and demanding rights was another. In 1965 Gittings joined a small group of activists led by Frank Kameny, the astronomer the government had fired for being gay, and they started picketing. They marched in front of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Civil Service Commission. Most Americans had never seen an openly gay person ask for anything, let alone carry a sign.

The most famous of these were the Annual Reminders. Every July 4 from 1965 to 1969, the group picketed Independence Hall in Philadelphia to remind the country that a whole class of citizens was being denied the rights the building represented. Kameny enforced a strict dress code. Men wore suits and ties, women wore dresses, no exceptions. The idea was to look as ordinary and respectable as possible so no one could dismiss them as fringe. Gittings walked that line in a dress every year, carrying a sign, in front of cameras, at a time when being identified could cost you your job, your family, and your freedom.

The last Annual Reminder was on July 4, 1969, days after the Stonewall uprising in New York. The energy had shifted. The next year the picket was folded into the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march, the event we now know as the first Pride parade. The polite sidewalk demonstration had grown into a movement that filled the streets.

The Fight to Declassify Homosexuality

Everything Gittings learned in that Northwestern library came down to one institution: the American Psychiatric Association. The APA's manual, the DSM, listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. As long as that line stayed in the book, every gay person in America could be called sick by a doctor, denied a job on medical grounds, committed against their will, or subjected to "cures" that ranged from useless to brutal. Gittings decided the line had to go.

Here is how she and her allies took the diagnosis apart.

1	They got onto the convention floor. Gittings and Kameny pushed their way into the APA's own annual meetings, where the diagnosis was debated. In 1971 Kameny grabbed a microphone and told a room of psychiatrists, "Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate." The profession was being confronted by the people it had labeled.
2	They put a gay psychiatrist on the panel. At the 1972 convention in Dallas, Gittings organized a panel called "Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals." She recruited a closeted gay psychiatrist, Dr. John Fryer, who appeared as "Dr. H. Anonymous" in a rubber mask, a wig, and a voice-distorting microphone. "I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist," he told the room. It was the first time a gay psychiatrist had spoken to the profession as one of its own.
3	They won the vote. On December 15, 1973, the APA's board of trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM. When some members forced a referendum, the full membership upheld the decision in 1974. Gittings liked to joke that it was the day millions of gay Americans were "cured" all at once, by a single vote.

1973 The year the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, after a campaign Barbara Gittings spent more than a decade waging. It remains one of the single most consequential wins in LGBTQ+ history.

It is hard to overstate what that vote changed. Overnight, the medical foundation under every anti-gay law in the country got weaker. The argument that gay people were sick had a citation behind it for decades. After 1973, it did not.

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Hug a Homosexual: Fixing the Libraries

Gittings never forgot the library that called her sick. So she went back for it. In 1970 she joined the American Library Association's Task Force on Gay Liberation, the first gay caucus inside a national professional organization, and she led it for years. Her mission was simple: get honest, positive books about gay life onto public shelves, and get the slanderous ones reclassified. She helped compile the first bibliography of affirming gay and lesbian literature so librarians had something to recommend.

She also had a sense of humor about it. At the 1971 ALA conference in Dallas, the Task Force set up a kissing booth with a sign that read "Hug a Homosexual." There was a women's side and a men's side. The press showed up expecting a spectacle and got one: almost no one from the public would step up, so the activists hugged and kissed each other while cameras rolled. It made the point better than any speech. The Task Force also created the first literary award for LGBTQ+ books, now known as the Stonewall Book Award, still given today.

Why Barbara Gittings Matters Today

Gittings worked for more than sixteen years without pay, holding down ordinary jobs to fund a life of full-time activism. She and Kay Tobin Lahusen were partners for 46 years, until Gittings died of breast cancer in 2007 at the age of 74. She did not live to see marriage equality, but she lived long enough to watch the diagnosis she fought disappear from the textbooks and the libraries she loved fill with books that told the truth.

Her line about the work still lands. "Equality means more than passing laws," she said. "The struggle is really won in the hearts and minds of the community, where it really counts." She understood something the legal fights sometimes miss. You can change a statute in an afternoon. Changing how people see each other takes a magazine cover, a picket sign, a panel, a kissing booth, and somebody willing to stand there in plain view for fifty years.

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Four Myths About Barbara Gittings, Corrected

MYTH 01

A psychiatrist alone declassified homosexuality.

The 1973 decision is often told as a story of enlightened doctors changing their minds. It was not. It happened because activists like Gittings and Kameny spent years confronting the APA on its own floor, organizing panels, and refusing to leave. The profession was pushed, not persuaded on its own.

MYTH 02

She was a behind-the-scenes figure.

Gittings picketed the White House and Independence Hall in front of cameras in the 1960s, edited the most visible lesbian magazine in America, and ran a kissing booth at a national conference. For her era, she was about as public as a gay person could be.

MYTH 03

The library work was a footnote.

It was central. Gittings believed the books people could find shaped what they believed was possible. Reclassifying slanderous texts and getting honest ones onto shelves reached millions of readers who would never attend a march. The Stonewall Book Award still grows out of that work.

MYTH 04

She got famous for it.

She mostly did not. Gittings worked without a salary, stayed out of the spotlight that later activists enjoyed, and died without the household-name recognition her impact earned. Philadelphia named a street Barbara Gittings Way in 2012. Most people still do not know who she was. This is part of why telling the story matters.

The thread running through all of it is patience. Gittings did not win her biggest fights in a year or even a decade. She won them by showing up to the same institutions over and over until they cracked. That is a different kind of courage than a single dramatic moment, and it is the kind that actually moves big systems.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Barbara Gittings?

Barbara Gittings was an American LGBTQ+ activist who founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, edited the lesbian magazine The Ladder, helped get homosexuality removed from the list of mental illnesses in 1973, and led the American Library Association's gay task force. She is often called the mother of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

What is Barbara Gittings best known for?

Her most consequential achievement was the campaign that pushed the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the DSM, its manual of mental disorders, in 1973. That single change pulled the medical justification out from under decades of anti-gay law and policy.

How did the APA remove homosexuality from the DSM?

Activists including Gittings and Frank Kameny confronted the APA at its own conventions, organized panels, and in 1972 presented a masked gay psychiatrist known as Dr. H. Anonymous. On December 15, 1973, the APA board voted to remove the diagnosis, and the membership upheld that decision in a 1974 referendum.

What were the Annual Reminders?

The Annual Reminders were picket demonstrations held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia every July 4 from 1965 to 1969. Gittings and Kameny led activists in formal dress to remind the country that gay Americans were denied basic rights. After Stonewall, the picket grew into the first Pride march in 1970.

Was Barbara Gittings married?

Gittings was the lifelong partner of photojournalist Kay Tobin Lahusen, whom she met in 1961. They were together for 46 years until Gittings died in 2007. Lahusen photographed many of the lesbian cover models Gittings featured on The Ladder.

Why is Barbara Gittings called the mother of the LGBTQ+ rights movement?

Because she shaped the movement on several fronts at once: organizing, publishing, public protest, the medical fight, and library reform, across more than five decades. Few activists touched as many of the institutions that defined how America treated gay people, and almost none did it for as long.

If you want to keep going, read about the Daughters of Bilitis that Gittings helped grow, Frank Kameny who stood beside her in the DSM fight, the Lavender Scare that set the stage for their activism, the first Pride parade the Annual Reminders became, and why Pride is in June. The pieces connect. Gittings is the thread running through the decade before Stonewall and the decade after.

Be visible. That was always the whole idea. Gittings fought so people could be seen. Fly the flag, wear the words, take up space. Get a Pride Flag → Shop the Lesbian Flag →