Following in the footsteps of journalistic pioneer Barbara Gittings GLAAD honors Blades with award named for LGBTQ legend

By BRODY LEVESQUE

April 17, 1965 was a typical spring day in the nation’s capital. What was very much atypical however, was the presence of more than a dozen men and women, dressed in professional business attire, marching in a circle on the wide expanse of the sidewalk in front of the North facade of the White House holding protest signs that demanded equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Occurring a full four years before that hot muggy Greenwich Village night when all hell broke loose at the mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, thrusting the fight for gay and lesbian rights suddenly into the public spotlight by the mainstream media, a core group of dedicated gay rights activists was already engaged in pushing the message that homosexuals should have the same rights as every other American.

Frank Kameny, Elijah ‘Lige’ Clarke, Jack Nichols, Barbara Gittings, Kay Tobin Lahusen, Paul Kuntzler, Lilli Vincenz formed a dynamic group, part of Washington, D.C. chapter of the Mattachine Society (MSW) that Kameny and Nichols had co-founded on Nov. 15, 1961.

Beyond the messaging of that April protest at the White House, later including the first Fourth of July picket in 1965 in front of Independence Hall, co-organized with Craig Rodwell who was active in the Mattachine Society in New York City, four of them would go on to be pioneers in the nascent gay press.

The protests at Independence Hall would continue until 1969.

Nichols, Clarke, Gittings and Lahusen would create some of the earliest gay themed content, stories and columns in early gay national publications. Nichols with his partner Clarke, wrote the column “The Homosexual Citizen” for Screw magazine, a pornographic ‘straight’ tabloid publication in 1968.

Gittings and Lahusen were engaged in early gay journalism. Lahusen’s photographs of lesbians appeared on the cover of The Ladder as Gittings worked as its editor. The Ladder, published by the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), was the first national lesbian magazine.

In the summer of 1969, Nichols, Clarke, Gittings and Lahusen would create GAY, the first weekly newspaper for gay people in the United States distributed on newsstands underwritten by Screw magazine’s publisher and founder, Al Goldstein.

There was also her partnering with Kameny, as they waged a multi-year campaign pushing the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness.

In the August 1964 issue of The Ladder, Gittings’ editorial blasted a medical report that described homosexuality as a disease, writing that it treated lesbians like her more as “curious specimens” than as humans.

In 1971, some seven years later at the annual meeting of the APA, Gittings, Kameny and fellow gay activists stormed the meeting and Kameny seized the microphone, demanding to be heard. In a write-up celebrating that first Fourth of July picket in 1965 in front of Independence Hall 50 years later in 2015, the author noted:

“For the APA’s annual meeting in 1972, Kameny and Gittings organized a panel on homosexuality. When no gay psychiatrist would serve on it openly for fear of losing his medical license and patients, Gittings recruited Dr. H. Anonymous (John E. Fryer, M.D.), who appeared masked and using a voice modulator. Gittings, Kameny and Dr. Anonymous asserted that the disease was not homosexuality, but toxic homophobia. Consequently, the APA formed a committee to determine whether there was scientific evidence to support their conclusion.

In 1973, with Gittings and Kameny present by invitation, the APA announced its removal of the classification. Kameny described it as the day “we were cured en masse by the psychiatrists.” At the time, the “cures” for homosexuality included electric shock therapy, institutionalization and lobotomy. With the APA’s retraction, the gay rights movement was no longer encumbered by the label and its consequences.”

Since her days as editor of the Ladder and assisting Kameny, Nichols, and Lilli Vincenz creating content and writing stories for the MSW newsletter, Gittings continued to write about lesbians, the movement, and the never ending fight to be recognized as citizens with full civil rights.

Gittings also successfully crusaded to promote gay literature and eliminate discrimination in the nation’s libraries.

The author of the chronicling of the 50 year celebration of that July 1965 protest writes: “She volunteered with the Gay Task Force of the American Library Association, the first gay caucus in a professional organization. Although she was not a librarian, she soon became the group’s coordinator—a position she held for 16 years. Gittings edited the Task Force’s bibliography and wrote “Gays in Library Land,” a history of the group. The American Library Association awarded her a lifetime membership.”

Looking back now, nearly 60 years after her editorial blasting medical reports that described homosexuality as a disease, the landscape of now LGBTQ media while dramatically different primarily due to the internet and digital journalism, the same fundamental needs to cover the unique stories of the LGBTQ community, and with the contemporary attacks on the transgender community are just as great as when Nichols, Clarke, Lahusen and she toiled away in that cramped office space in New York City publishing ‘Gay.’

Today’s Gen Z, Millennials and Gen Xers are the beneficiaries of Gittings’ and the early LGBTQ media pioneers’ work. The world they reside in, while still fraught with incredible undertones of homophobia and blatant transphobic bigotry, have a sense of freedom built on the foundations of journalism Gittings and her colleagues were devoted to.

Gay activist Michael Bedwell in a March 9, 2020 post wrote: “Kay Tobin Lahusen called me yesterday to alert me to Barbara’s inclusion in “TIME” magazine’s 100 Women of the Year project. They commissioned 89 new “TIME” mock covers to commemorate 89 women who should have been on the magazine’s covers over its near century of existence. The remaining 11 are existing real covers of women who had been named Person of the Year.

Gittings ‘cover’ used a 1964 photo by Kay rendered by Ser- bian artist Ivana Besevic, and incorporates the motto “Gay Is Good” coined in 1968 by Barbara & Kay’s close friend and mentor Frank Kameny, the father of the modern gay rights movement. The accompanying text by Time’s San Francisco Bureau Chief Katy Steinmetz reads:

“The Stonewall riots have become the focal point of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, but they didn’t start it. The groundwork was laid in the previous decade by activists like Barbara Gittings, who understood that before marginalized people can prevail, they must understand that they are worthy and that they are not alone.

In an era when it was dangerous to be out, Gittings edited the Ladder, a periodical published by the nation’s first known lesbian-rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, creating a sense of national identity and providing a platform for resistance. In the August 1964 issue, her editorial blasted a medical report that described homosexuality as a disease, writing that it treated lesbians like her more as “curious specimens” than as humans.

Gittings would go on to be instrumental in getting the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness and in getting libraries to carry gay literature. Whether she was wielding a pen or a protest sign, the militant advocate had a simple message: when society said that being gay was an abomination, Gittings said that gay was good.

The journalistic legacy Gittings left for those of us who work in LGBTQ media is unchanged from her days: Tell the stories of LGBTQ people and in light of today’s campaign by far-right conservatives and others to ban our books, marginalize our LGBTQ kids, and erase our trans siblings and remind everyone when society claims that being LGBTQ is an abomination, that no, actually, “gay IS good.”

For the Los Angeles Blade and the Washington Blade, GLAAD’s 2023 prestigious Barbara Gittings Award for Excellence in LGBTQ Media is not only an honor, but a commitment to continue her legacy.