Barbara Gittings

#BarbaraGittings (July 31, 1932 – February 18, 2007): Born in #Vienna, where her father served as a U.S. diplomat, Gittings was raised #Catholic and considered becoming a nun. After the outbreak of WWII, her family settled in Delaware, where she remembered first hearing the word “homosexual” by a teacher who rejected her from the #NationalHonorSociety because her teacher “feared” that’s what Barbara was. During her studies at #NorthwesternUniversity, Gittings began exploring her own sexual orientation as she befriended another female student and rumors spread that they were lesbians (even though their relationship was strictly platonic). In her research, she found that all the scholarship about homosexuals was devoted to gay (white) men and she ended up disappointed feeling, “this is not about me. There is nothing here about love or happiness. There has to be something better.” After failing out of school, returning to school, and then leaving home to explore her sexuality, she would dress as a man and visit gay bars and clubs in #NewYorkCity, but stopped the practice after seeing a gay male friend getting beaten up after leaving a bar. In 1956, she traveled to California, met with the #DaughtersOfBilitis, and then moved back to New York in 1958 to start New York’s first chapter of Daughters of Bilitis (of which she was president from 1958-1961). From then, her political actions became bolder. In 1965, she marched in the first gay picket lines outside the #WhiteHouse, and from 1965-69 she co-led the #AnnualReminder – a series of pickets in front of #IndependenceHall in #Philadelphia. Throughout the 1970s she worked to lobby the American Library Association to include books that portrayed the LGBTQ+ community in a positive light and fought the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexual from the DSM as a mental disorder. She worked hard for the cause of LGBTQ+ rights until her death from breast cancer in 2007. #PrideMonth #LGBTQIA #LGBTQIAPride #Pride #LegendsOfPride #YouCannotEraseUs