The Barbara Gittings Gay & Lesbian Collection:
Honoring a Pioneer in the Nation’s Public Libraries
By Jack Nichols
n
America’s East Coast Barbara Gittings was the first true lesbian and gay
activist. She joined the fledgling movement in 1958 and, shortly
afterwards, with the unflagging assistance of the great love of her
life, Kay Tobin Lahusen, she emerged as one of its most articulate
representatives.
Throughout the decades, Barbara and Kay (as they’re affectionately
knownto all who’ve been privileged to work with them) helped initiate
and uphold a strategic militancy that was crucial to the American
movement’s earliest growth. She was in the forefront of the battle
against now-discredited psychiatric theorizing. She stood on the
ramparts in the earliest picketing demonstrations.
Barbara founded the first East Coast chapter of the Daughters of
Bilitis, the nation’s original lesbian group. She became the editor of
America’s first lesbian movement magazine, The Ladder. Among her
primary motives had been to make the process of coming out easier for
closeted, distressed women and men .
Until her discovery in a library of certain liberating books and her
subsequent collaboration with other movement pioneers, Barbara had
experienced—as a young woman—a troubling but unwarranted feeling of
isolation that still makes many unduly anxious today.
Thereafter, she dedicated her life to making sure that later
generations could know, as she’d been quick to discover, that they’re
not alone and that same-sex love is fully on par with and not different
in kind from heterosexuality.
She was determined to hoist the iron curtain of lesbian and gay
invisibility, and in this, Barbara has succeeded, perhaps, beyond her
own most hope-filled dreams.
With her beloved Kay at her side, Barbara Gittings now looks back on
43 colorful, satisfying years of an activist’s life, a life successfully
spent in key service to a much-needed, ongoing revolution in the conduct
of human love. Few pioneers on history’s stage have lived, as Barbara
has, to see their visions materialize with such an astounding rapidity.
It is entirely fitting, therefore, that a committee of 25 persons
gathered recently to help raise funds for the Barbara Gittings Gay and
Lesbian Collection at the Independence Branch of the Free Library of
Philadelphia. It was through library books, after all, that Barbara had
liberated herself in the socially repressive 1950s.
At a critical time beginning during the opening years of the 1970s,
she was coordinator of the Gay Task Force of the American Library
Association, assisting the Association in the choosing of the best
liberation literature available.
Today, her pioneering efforts have earned Barbara a much-deserved
honor: the naming after her at the Independence Branch of the Free
Library of Philadelphia, of a gay and lesbian collection that is housed,
appropriately, within the very shadow of Independence Hall.
In conjunction with Philadelphia’s William Way Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
and Transgender Community Center, committee chair Jim Bryson has raised
nearly $15,000 of the $35,000 that is needed. A direct mail campaign has
been launched soliciting donations.
Contributions for this lesbian and gay collection can be sent to:
Development Office
Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation
1901 Vine Street
Philadlephia, Pennsylvania 19103
Contributors should indicate that the donation is to be used for the
Gittings Collection at the Independence Branch.
Contributors must be assured they’re giving to a worthy cause, say
those pioneers who know without a doubt that the living Barbara Gittings
is our national treasure.
I wouldrecommend, therefore, that there be a nation-wide
reenactment—establishing similar Barbara Gittings Gay and Lesbian
Collections in public libraries from coast to coast.
Philadelphia, where Barbara has lived most of her life, is setting an
example, honoring this amazing, indefatigable woman whose entire life
has been dedicated to helping others. The least we can do, in fact, is
to thank her in a meaningful way, honoring her name wherever library
collections of gay and lesbian books exist.
Jack Nichols is the author of The Gay Agenda: Talking Back
to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus Books, 1996) Of Men’s Liberation: A New
Definition of Masculinity (Penguin Books, 1975) and of Welcome to Fire Island:
Visions of Cherry Grove andThe Pines (St. Martin’s Press, 1976)
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of peculiar worms Story
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How
a prominent Republican congressman compromised the United States military
by conducting a wrongful effort to increase the number of Republican votes
in Florida Story
n
America’s East Coast Barbara Gittings was the first true lesbian and gay
activist. She joined the fledgling movement in 1958 and, shortly
afterwards, with the unflagging assistance of the great love of her
life, Kay Tobin Lahusen, she emerged as one of its most articulate
representatives.
