The Barbara Gittings Story
Why Lesbians Need Lesbian History
In 1949, a 17-year-old girl named Barbara Gittings failed out of one of the U.S.’ most prestigious universities because she was spending too much time in the library.
It’s an unlikely story, but there’s a good explanation for it. During her freshman year at Northwestern University, Gittings realized that she was attracted to other women. Ostracized by peers and shamed by a psychiatrist, Gittings retreated to the library to find out what lesbians really were, and what kind of future she would have as a lesbian. Instead, she found only books calling homosexuality a disease, a perversion, and a sin.
“I thought, this is not about me,” Gittings later said. “There is nothing here about love or happiness. There has to be something better.” Obsessed with her research, Gittings stopped going to class and started spending most of her time in the library. Within a year, she had failed out of school.
Aspects of Gittings’ college experience will sound familiar to many lesbians who have been ostracized, lied to, and lied about, whether by religious extremists, academics, the psychological establishment, or the anti-lesbian ideologues who push narratives of “gender.” For centuries, we have been told that our homosexuality is a sickness that must be cured through prayer, psychoanalysis, pharmaceuticals, or electroshock torture.
If anything, anti-lesbian rhetoric has ramped up in recent years, with doctors and psychiatrists pushing artificial hormones and surgery—a newfangled homosexuality “cure” that attempts to make lesbians appear heterosexual at the cost of their health, fertility, sex lives, and romantic prospects. Today, just as in Gittings’ day, many lesbians are being shamed or bullied into going along with these dangerous and painful conversion efforts.
Gittings, unlike many lesbians of her time and ours, was undeterred by the homophobia she had encountered in the university library. She chose to love herself and support other lesbians, and she became a lesbian activist. At 26, she founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian political organization in the U.S.
As an activist and public speaker, Gittings worked to inform the public that homosexuality is not an illness, and fought to convince the American Psychiatric Association to withdraw homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She picketed the White House for equal employment, often carrying signs with slogans like “Homosexual Americans demand their civil rights.” She also revolutionized the DOB—helping shift the organization’s focus from social support to political engagement.
In 1961, Gittings met Kay Lahusen, the woman who would be her partner for over 45 years. Lahusen, a writer and photographer from Cincinnati, shared Gittings’ enthusiasm for activism. Lahusen’s mission was to document the lesbian and gay rights movement in photographs. She became the first openly lesbian photojournalist in the U.S.
Two years after they met, Gittings and Lahusen embarked on a project together: changing the face of The Ladder, the monthly magazine published by the DOB and one of the only lesbian magazines in circulation at the time. While Gittings focused on shifting The Ladder’s content toward political awareness, Lahusen took over art direction. Her photographs of regular lesbians and everyday lesbian life graced the covers of many issues.
By choosing everyday lesbians and everyday life for The Ladder’s covers, Gittings and Lahusen sent a powerful message to the public: that lesbians are not psychopaths or “queer” perverts, but rather normal people, who love, laugh, and work just like everyone else. This was an important message for heterosexuals to hear. But it was doubly important for lesbians, many of whom had been shamed into thinking of themselves as freaks who needed to be “cured.”
“My lover [Kay Lahusen] and I … wanted to show right on the cover of the magazine that lesbians were wholesome, healthy, normal human beings. Many lesbians themselves didn't know this.”
— Barbara Gittings on publishing The Ladder
Gittings and Lahusen worked to make lesbians understand that their sexual orientation was normal, that they did not need to live in shame or submit to conversion efforts. They believed that showcasing positive images of individual lesbians and lesbian couples would make lesbians happier, healthier, and more able to live productive lives.
The resurgence of conversion efforts over the past decade is proof that Gittings and Lahusen didn’t fully and permanently accomplish what they set out to do. But the tactics of today’s anti-lesbian ideologues also demonstrate that Gittings and Lahusen were on the right track.
One major contributing factor in the resurgence of conversion efforts is the widespread erasure of lesbian history and lesbian role models. For most of the 20th century, lesbians were kept in the closet by laws that prohibited same-sex relationships. When those laws were changed and lesbians came out of the closet en masse, anti-lesbian ideologues developed a new strategy to push us back out of sight: they used a false psychiatric diagnosis to rebrand us as “trans men.” When lesbians follow doctors’ orders and pose as heterosexual men, their homosexuality disappears from public view, as has already happened with a number of well-known lesbians.
As we’ve seen in recent years, the disappearance of lesbians is a self-perpetuating cycle. When prominent lesbians vanish into pseudo-heterosexuality and lesbian historical figures are posthumously rebranded as men, young lesbians who could have looked up to and modeled their lives on those women are left with no positive lesbian role models at all. Instead, they are led to believe that same-sex attraction naturally leads to medicalization, mutilation, and pretense—and they believe that this is the future they are destined for.
The current wave of conversion efforts may appear somewhat different than the last. Lesbians are no longer asked to hide our attraction to women—instead, we’re asked to hide our biological sex. And rather than carrying signs bearing the slogan “God hates fags,” the current conversion movement is plastered with rainbows and proudly calls itself by a different homophobic slur: “queer.”
Still, the effects of both conversion movements, old and new, are eerily similar. For one thing, they both pressure lesbians to pretend to be something they’re not. For another, they aim at the medicalization of homosexuality, and do lasting harm to lesbians’ physical and mental health. In the 20th century, prominent lesbians like Pauli Murray and Gladys Bentley were pushed to take estrogen injections and undergo surgeries that would supposedly turn them into heterosexual women. Today, lesbians are pushed to take testosterone injections and undergo surgeries that supposedly turn them into heterosexual men.
If anything, today’s conversion efforts are more devastating than last century’s—because artificial testosterone is so much more dangerous to women than artificial estrogen, because the surgeries being performed on lesbians are so debilitating, and because life-altering conversion procedures are being performed on suspected lesbians before they even hit puberty.
Now more than ever, lesbians need access to lesbian history. Young lesbians in particular need role models to show them that painful lifelong medicalization is not the only future available to them. And all of us need portraits of everyday lesbians, to remind us that we’re normal, that we can have normal lives, and that we don’t have to participate in the cult of “queer.”
Gittings and Lahusen provided many role models and positive portraits of lesbians during their time with The Ladder. In so doing, they became role models themselves: two regular people who for the most part lived regular lives, who loved each other for almost half a century, and who worked hard to improve the lives of other lesbians.
After Gittings’ death in 2007, Lahusen donated her photo library to the New York Public Library, ensuring that future generations of lesbians would have access to at least some of their history—and at least some of the information a young Gittings was looking for in her college library. Because of Lahusen, we have hundreds of photos not only of Barbara Gittings and other members of the DOB, but of everyday lesbians whose names we will never know. What Kay Lahusen left us was proof that other lesbians have existed, that they have been comfortable with their sexual orientation and accepted their natural bodies, and proudly called themselves lesbians. She left us hope for our own futures—that we, too, can be happy and whole.
There is a lot of ground left to cover in the fight against modern-day conversion efforts. But combating lesbian erasure is an important step. By remembering the lesbians who came before us and sharing their stories, we can pass our role models down to the next generation, and perhaps prevent them from making irreversible mistakes in the name of fitting in.
Digitized issues of The Ladder can be found at Alexander Street, and much of Lahusen’s photo library is available on the New York Public Library’s website.
In the News
Last week, Lesbians United presented at WDI’s Saturday seminar on the importance of accurate language and positive, proactive messaging. Check out the video below.
Call for Volunteers
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At 77, I am thrilled to have been a woman and a lesbian for all my life , not gay or queer. Thank you for speaking up for our reality.
An excellent piece and very enjoyable read, thanks very much.
Solidarity!