A New Biography of Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is a brand-new biography about the lesbian who led the charge for LGBT rights beginning in the late 1950’s, when she organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), through the tumultuous 1960’s when she edited DOB’s The Ladder and walked the picket line protesting the US government’s homophobic hiring policies, into the 1970’s where she worked to bring LGBT liberation to the American Library Association and to the American Psychiatric Association. 

The biography is written by Tracy Baim, who is no slacker herself when it comes to LGBT activism . Baim is the publisher and executive editor of Windy City Media Group, which produces Windy City Times, the oldest LGBT newspaper in Chicago—co-founded by Baim in 1985. She has authored, co-authored, or edited books about the LGBT press, about lesbians in the service, about Obama’s relationship to the LGBT community, and about mothers of LGBT kids. In 2014 she was inducted into the Hall of Fames for both the Chicago Headline Club and the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association. In other words, Baim, like the subject of her biography, is a lesbian force of nature.

Baim brings her insider’s appreciation of the world of activism to her subject, along with her editor’s ear for a good story—and Gittings’ life was full of those. She also brings her journalist’s eye for photography to the (literally) hundreds of photos that are included in the book, which had initially been conceived as a photo album. Fortunately for us, Gittings’ partner, Kay Lahusen, documented their life, and in doing that, she ended up documenting five decades of a movement.
 
Baim has done so many important things in her writing of this book. Here are just a few:
 
She has written a major lesbian activist back into a history of the LGBT civil rights movement that was at risk of looking like a gay male movement. The erasure of lesbians has now, alas, become a “thing.” Advocate writer and blogger Victoria Brownworth has written about it. Feminist scholar Dr. Bonnie Morris has a book coming out this year titled The Disappearing L. Last year Curve Magazine published a story on “Erasing Our Lesbian Dead,” and AfterEllen posted a reminder to the culture at large that lesbians are gay people, too. So, thank you Tracy Baim, for giving Gittings such a solid, cast-in-cement,  gold-star biography in our LGBT Walk of Fame.

Next, there are the photos. These have been carefully sorted into the different eras of Gittings’ long career, and then meticulously captioned with names, dates, associations. They are truly worth a thousands words. One of the radical steps that Giddings took when she began to edit The Ladder was to feature real faces of real lesbians on the cover. Fortunately, Baim includes several pages of these archival covers, and they speak volumes about the courage of both editor and subjects.
 
This same kind of courage is also evident in the photos of those early marches at the Pentagon and the White House. There was no rainbow flag. It was all gray flannel suits and shirtwaist dresses with sensible shoes. These picketers were dressing for the jobs they were not allowed to hold.
 
In many ways, the book is like a family album. Thumbing through it, some names jump out, like "Sylvia Rivera" or "Vito Russo." So that’s what they looked like…  And other times the faces jump out.. Oh, look, there’s Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and Karla Jay!

As the pages and eras scroll past, the photos become less crowded, quieter, more domestic. Another side of Gittings emerges. Here she is performing with the Philadelphia Chamber Chorus… and here she is announcing the purchase of a house… and sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee. One of my favorites is a photo of her with Lahusen posing on the front steps of Gittings’ mother’s house. Both women are holding stuffed dinosaurs and laughing. Here’s the story: In the 1970’s, a new wave of LGBT activists swept into the movement, and, as new waves are wont to do, they immediately set about eliminating the “old wave." They labeled Gittings and Lahusen “establishment accommodationists”… or just “dinosaurs.” Not fazed in the least, Gittings and her partner rolled with the punches, and began to show up to meetings with stuffed dinosaurs under their arms.

And this brings me to one of the most memorable aspects of this book… the stories. Gittings was a valiant foot soldier, logging her hours at the mimeograph machine and the mailing parties, and logging her miles in the picket lines… but she was also a brilliant, creative strategist with a wicked sense of humor. She knew how to turn her enemy’s homophobia against him. One of the most unforgettable examples was an action she planned at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association annual convention. After years of lobbying, she and her fellow activists were finally allowed to present a panel titled, “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals?—A Dialogue.” The plan was to put two national, LGBT rights activists,  Gittings and Frank Kameny,  on the panel with two heterosexual, but sympathetic psychiatrists. It was Gittings’ partner who noted that something was missing: Where was the gay or lesbian psychiatrist? The simplest answer was “in the closet.” Being professionally out at that time could actually put one at risk of losing their license.
 
But once Gittings had a vision for an action, she was unstoppable. She located a psychiatrist willing to appear in disguise—and what a disguise! He wore a tuxedo three sizes too large and a huge, full-head, rubber mask of Richard Nixon. His appearance was grotesque, and so was the reality to which he was responding. The panel was an overwhelming success, no small influence on the removal of homosexuality the following year from the APA clinical roster of mental diseases.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is filled with stories, often in Gittings’ own words, as Baim has incorporated excerpts from interviews as well as Gittings’ writings. The stories of her childhood, and especially of her long and rocky road to acceptance of her “difference” make for wonderful reading. It always inspires me when I discover that these super women who changed the world had to wrestle with the same demons that plague us lesser mortals.
 
Gittings is family, and her personal photo album is part of our heritage, too. Her journey, like that of a first generation immigrant, is embedded in our second-, third-, and fourth-generation lesbian DNA. Her traumas are in our bone marrow, and her victories are the legacies on which we build.

Thank you, Tracy Baim, for this meticulously researched, sparkling biography of Barbara Gittings!

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is available in both a black-and-white-photo edition and a color-photo edition!