The Daughters of Bilitis: The First Lesbian Rights Group in America

Eight women met in a San Francisco living room in September 1955 because they were tired of going to the same lesbian bar and getting raided by the police. They wanted a place to dance without being arrested. What they built instead became the first lesbian rights organization in the United States, and it lasted longer than anyone thought it would.

Who Were the Daughters of Bilitis?

The Daughters of Bilitis was the first national lesbian rights organization in the United States. It was founded on September 21, 1955, in San Francisco by four lesbian couples. Two of those founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, would stay together for fifty-five years and become the public face of the group. The other three couples wanted privacy. That mix of public and private was the whole story of the DOB in miniature.

They were not trying to change the world at first. They wanted somewhere to socialize that was not a bar, somewhere the vice squad would not show up with a paddy wagon and a list of names to send to employers. The original purpose was almost mundane. Get together. Have a potluck. Maybe dance to a record without anyone losing their job over it.

Within a year the social club had become something else. The eight women had started writing a newsletter. The newsletter had a name borrowed from a 19th century French poem. And the small group in a San Francisco apartment was getting mail from lesbians in Iowa and Texas who had never met another gay woman in their lives. The DOB stopped being a club. It became a lifeline.

Why Are They Called the Daughters of Bilitis?

The name was a code. In 1955 you could not put the word "lesbian" on the cover of anything that traveled through the U.S. mail without expecting your mailbox to be searched. The Comstock Act was still on the books. Postal inspectors did seize what they considered obscene material, and a publication openly aimed at gay women was going to qualify.

So they reached for cover. Bilitis was the fictional narrator of Les Chansons de Bilitis, an 1894 collection of erotic poetry by the French writer Pierre Louÿs. The poems were presented as translations from an ancient Greek poet who had supposedly lived on the island of Lesbos with Sappho. They were not actual translations. Louÿs made the whole thing up. But the conceit was useful. If you knew, you knew. If you did not, "Daughters of Bilitis" sounded like a literary society or a sorority for women who read a lot of poetry.

Del Martin later joked that the name was so obscure that members could tell their families they were going to a DOB meeting and parents would assume it was a women's club. Which, technically, it was.

The Ladder: The First U.S. Lesbian Magazine

One year into the organization, the DOB launched a publication. The Ladder printed its first issue in October 1956. It was sixteen mimeographed pages, sold for fifty cents, and mailed in a plain brown envelope to anyone who asked. The cover illustration showed a small figure climbing a ladder. That was the whole image. No rainbow. No flag. No clue to anyone reading over your shoulder on the bus.

The Ladder was the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in U.S. history. It ran for sixteen years. It published essays, fiction, news, surveys, and reader letters that read, often, like the first time the writer had ever told another person the truth about herself. Subscribers wrote in from small towns in Mississippi and Idaho. They wrote in pseudonyms. They asked questions that did not have answers anywhere else.

Editors included Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, and later Barbara Gittings, who took over in 1963 and pushed the magazine in a more activist direction. The cover stayed black and white for years to keep printing costs down. The masthead always carried the line "A Lesbian Review" once they got brave enough to put the word on the cover in 1964. That was a real decision. There was a vote.

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What Did They Actually Do?

The Daughters of Bilitis had four stated purposes when they incorporated as a non-profit in 1957. They were unusually specific for a group meeting in someone's living room.

1	Education of the variant. "Variant" was the word they used for lesbian. Educate her about herself. Give her information about her own life that no library, no doctor, and no priest was going to hand her.
2	Education of the public. Get lesbians treated like human beings by employers, doctors, and the people who wrote the laws. Sponsor research. Show up to give talks at universities and church groups.
3	Participation in research. Cooperate with sociologists, psychologists, and doctors studying homosexuality, on the condition that the work would be done with respect and not pathology.
4	Investigation of the penal code. Work to change the laws that criminalized lesbians and gay men. This was the line that scared the most members at the time, and the one that turned out to matter the most in the long run.

By 1959 there were chapters in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, and eventually Australia. Each chapter ran its own discussion meetings, its own newsletter inserts, its own local "gab and javas" where members talked over coffee about whether they should tell their landlord, their mother, their boss. The DOB conducted some of the first survey research on lesbian life in America. Members filled out questionnaires about their jobs, their educations, their relationships, their experiences with police. The results were published in The Ladder. For thousands of readers it was the first time they ever saw their lives counted.

1956 The Ladder publishes its first issue. It runs for sixteen years and becomes the longest-running lesbian publication in U.S. history.

What a DOB Meeting Looked Like

A meeting in 1957 happened in someone's apartment. There would be folding chairs in a circle. A coffee pot in the kitchen. Curtains drawn. The host might tell her downstairs neighbor it was a bridge club. Members used first names only and sometimes false ones. Some women would not give their real names for years.

A typical meeting had a discussion topic. Sometimes a guest speaker, often a sympathetic psychiatrist or attorney who would come and answer questions. The DOB worked hard to find professionals who would treat them like patients and clients instead of case studies. Those names were shared by word of mouth across chapters. A safe doctor in Cleveland might be the only safe doctor a woman in Akron would ever find.

The conversations were practical. How do you keep your custody case from going sideways. How do you handle the FBI showing up at your office. How do you find an apartment when landlords ask if you have a boyfriend. There was no internet. There was no support group at the local clinic. There was a circle of folding chairs and the women who showed up.

The Conflict That Eventually Broke the DOB

By the late 1960s the DOB was caught between two generations and two strategies. The older members, including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, had built the organization on a model called assimilation. Look respectable. Wear dresses to the picket lines. Make the case that lesbians were ordinary people who deserved ordinary rights. That approach had moved the needle, slowly, for fifteen years.

The younger members coming up after Stonewall in 1969 had a different read. They wanted radical action. They wanted to march, not petition. They wanted alliances with the feminist movement, the Black power movement, the antiwar movement. They did not want to wear dresses to anything. The split was not really about clothes. It was about whether lesbian rights belonged inside the broader women's liberation movement or stood as its own thing.

The national organization dissolved in 1970, only fifteen years after it started. The New York chapter voted to leave first. Other chapters followed. The Ladder stopped publishing in 1972 after a fight over editorial control. Local DOB chapters in some cities kept meeting into the late 1990s. The Boston chapter ran continuously until 1995.

It is fair to call the breakup painful. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon eventually moved on into the feminist movement and stayed activists for the rest of their lives. They were the first same-sex couple legally married in California in 2008, two months before Del Martin died at 87. Phyllis lived until 2020.

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Why the Daughters of Bilitis Still Matters

The DOB is one of those pieces of history that is easy to underrate because it never staged a riot, never produced a single famous quote, and never got a Hollywood biopic. But three things came out of it that the modern LGBTQ+ movement is built on.

First, the DOB and the Mattachine Society together invented the idea that gay people could organize as a group with shared interests. Before 1950 there were no gay rights groups in the United States. Just bars, blackmail, and silence. The Mattachine Society started in Los Angeles in 1950 for gay men. The DOB started in 1955 for lesbians. Both groups had to invent the concept of a movement from scratch.

Second, the DOB created the first lasting media made by and for lesbians. The Ladder reached women who had no other access to lesbian life. Stories repeat themselves of women who found the magazine on a library shelf, hidden behind something else, and realized for the first time they were not alone.

Third, the DOB built the network of relationships that produced everything that came after. Barbara Gittings edited The Ladder before she worked with Frank Kameny to get homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental illnesses in 1973. Del Martin co-wrote the first major book on domestic violence in 1976. The connections forged in those living rooms turned into lifetimes of activism.

Things People Get Wrong About the Daughters of Bilitis

MISTAKE 01

It was a social club, not a political organization.

It started as a social club and pivoted within a year. By 1957 the DOB was lobbying, publishing research, and working to change criminal laws. The social part was the trojan horse.

MISTAKE 02

They were too cautious to matter.

Caution in 1955 looked different. Police raids were a near-weekly event in San Francisco gay bars. Members could be fired, evicted, or institutionalized if outed. The DOB built the only national lesbian network of the decade while running that risk, every meeting.

MISTAKE 03

It was a white organization.

The DOB was majority white, especially at the leadership level, and that is a real critique. But Black lesbians including Ernestine Eckstein, who joined the New York chapter in the 1960s, did real work inside the DOB and pushed it toward more confrontational activism. Eckstein was the only Black woman to appear on a cover of The Ladder.

MISTAKE 04

The name was a typo or a play on the word "Lilith."

Neither. Bilitis is a deliberate literary reference to Les Chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs (1894), a poetry collection about a fictional contemporary of Sappho. The reference was selected to be obscure on purpose. Postal inspectors did not read French symbolist poetry.

MISTAKE 05

It died before it accomplished anything.

The DOB published research that contributed to the 1973 APA decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness. It produced two of the founders of the National Organization for Women's lesbian rights work. It trained a generation of organizers, including Barbara Gittings, who later got "Gay" added to the American Library Association in 1970. The DOB itself ended. Its alumni ran the next forty years.

One more thing worth saying out loud. The DOB was not just history happening to lesbians. Lesbians made it happen, in their own apartments, on their own dimes, with no protection and almost no money. That part matters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded the Daughters of Bilitis?

Four lesbian couples founded the DOB in San Francisco on September 21, 1955. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were two of the founders and became the most public faces of the group. The other three couples kept their names out of the press, which made sense in 1955.

What does "Bilitis" mean?

Bilitis was a fictional character invented by the French poet Pierre Louÿs for his 1894 book Les Chansons de Bilitis. She was presented as a contemporary of Sappho on the island of Lesbos. The DOB picked the name because it was an obscure reference that postal inspectors would not catch.

What was The Ladder magazine?

The Ladder was the official publication of the DOB and the first nationally distributed lesbian magazine in U.S. history. It launched in October 1956, ran for sixteen years, and reached thousands of subscribers, many of whom had never met another lesbian. It was mailed in plain brown envelopes for subscriber safety.

How is the DOB different from the Mattachine Society?

The Mattachine Society was founded in 1950 in Los Angeles by Harry Hay and focused on gay men. The Daughters of Bilitis was founded in 1955 in San Francisco and focused on lesbians. The two groups often worked together and sometimes shared meeting space, but they were separate organizations with separate priorities. Lesbians wanted lesbian-specific spaces because gay male groups often did not address their issues.

When did the Daughters of Bilitis end?

The national organization dissolved in 1970. The Ladder stopped publishing in 1972. Some local chapters continued meeting for decades after. The Boston chapter held its last meeting in 1995. The DOB existed in some form for forty years.

Did Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon stay together?

Yes. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were together for fifty-five years until Del's death in 2008. They were the first same-sex couple legally married in California after the state Supreme Court ruling in 2008. Phyllis Lyon died in 2020 at age 95.

Why were lesbian groups separate from gay male groups in the 1950s?

Two reasons. First, lesbians faced different issues than gay men in custody fights, employment, and medical treatment. Second, both gay men and lesbians felt that mixed groups tended to default to male leadership and male priorities. Lesbians wanted to run their own organization and set their own agenda. The DOB and the Mattachine Society cooperated but stayed structurally separate.

Where can I read original issues of The Ladder today?

Most issues of The Ladder are archived at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society in San Francisco, the ONE Archives at USC, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. Some issues have been digitized and are available through university library systems. Reading them is a strange experience. The voices are so familiar and the world they came from is almost gone.

For more LGBTQ+ history, the Mattachine Society was the male-focused organization founded five years earlier in Los Angeles, and Frank Kameny picked up where the DOB and Mattachine left off in Washington. The Lavender Scare covers the federal hunt for gay workers that ran throughout the DOB's early years, and Stonewall was the 1969 turning point that the next generation of lesbian organizers built on after leaving the DOB.

One of the women who built the Daughters of Bilitis on the East Coast went on to shape the entire movement. Read about Barbara Gittings, who founded the New York chapter and edited The Ladder.

Fly Quietly or Fly Loud The Daughters of Bilitis built a movement in living rooms. We get to fly the flag they could not. Get the Lesbian Pride Flag → Or the Heart Tee →