In 1950 Del Martin had just been hired as an editor for a Seattle trade journal, Daily Construction Report, and she moved up to Washington from San Francisco. She was a stocky woman with thick black hair, who wore gabardine suits and open-toed high-heel shoes and carried a briefcase to work. She was twenty-nine years old and not at all unhappy to leave the city where she’d been born. She’d recently given up custody of her eight-year-old daughter to her ex-husband and his new wife because they’d convinced her that a child needed a normal home and the presence of both a mother and father.1 Martin would eventually become a fierce advocate for the rights of lesbian mothers2—but now she was still reeling from her painful decision. It was good to get away.
Phyllis Lyon, another displaced San Franciscan, was an associate editor at a sister trade journal, Pacific Builder and Engineer, which shared a suite of offices with Daily Construction Report. She’d never before seen a woman carrying a briefcase. It grabbed her attention right away. But she regarded herself as a straight lady—long haired and lipsticked—and was dating men (though she was already twenty-six years old and had never been married). Lyon lived close to the office of the two journals and offered to throw a little welcome-to-the-company party for her interesting new colleague. When Del Martin spent most of the evening in the kitchen talking to the guys and smoking cigars with them—they also tried to teach her how to tie a Windsor knot in a necktie—Lyon thought it a little curious.
But the two women became friends. They liked to go to the Seattle Press Club after work and sip martinis together. One evening over martinis the subject of homosexuality came up, and Martin expatiated like an expert. “How do you know so much about it?” a third woman in their party wanted to know. “Because I am one,” Martin told them. That truly grabbed Lyon’s attention. But nothing more came of it until 1952, when she invited Martin to her apartment for dinner and announced that she was leaving Seattle to go with her sister on an extensive road trip around America. Sitting together on the divan, they recalled later, Martin “made a half-pass”; Lyon “completed the other half.” That evening, they became lovers.3
They moved back to San Francisco the next year. In a city crammed with aspiring writers, it was virtually impossible in the fifties for women to get jobs in any kind of journalism. Martin took work as a bookkeeper for Mayflower Moving and Storage, and Lyon was hired as an office worker in an import-export company. In 1955 they bought a home in a neighborhood adjoining the Castro district, which was not yet the gay mecca it would become in the next decade. The modest little house was perched on a hill in the Noe Valley area. Out the living-room window was a sweeping, romantic view of downtown, Twin Peaks, and Telegraph Hill.
But their lives were lonely. They felt isolated.4 They couldn’t tell their parents about the bliss of their coupledom. Their parents were as ignorant and hostile toward homosexuals as was the rest of America. (“If a child is a homosexual, the parents are to blame,” Martin’s mother had opined already. “She looks like a queer,” Lyon’s father had already told his wife about his daughter’s housemate.5) Hoping to make friends, the two women started going to bohemian North Beach’s lesbian bars, “gay girls’ hangouts,” as such places were called:6 Mona’s, the Paper Doll, Miss Smith’s Tea Room (which never served tea). But they were ignored by the other gay girls, who all seemed to be in airtight cliques. And anyway, those girls were rougher and scruffier than the sorts of people Martin and Lyon wanted for friends. Even worse, Martin and Lyon had heard that homosexual bars could be raided. It wasn’t easy to relax if you thought a paddy wagon might pull up in front of the place any minute. Nor was it easy to relax when straight tourists invaded the bars to ogle the queers, as often happened.
But having no place but the bars to be at least in the proximity of other lesbians, that summer they ventured into still another “gay girls’ hangout”: Tommy’s on Broadway. They went with fear and trembling because an earlier iteration of Tommy’s, located a few blocks down, had been the site of a huge raid the year before. Yet the place was nicer than most: tables for two scattered around the perimeter; droll posters and photographs decorating the walls.7 The chatty gay male bartender made friendly conversation and introduced them to his partner, a female impersonator. Through them Martin and Lyon finally met another lesbian, Rose Bamberger, a short, brown-skinned woman who came from the Philippines and wanted to be known in those dangerous times as “Marie.”8 At the end of the summer, she telephoned Lyon and Martin to say that she and five other lesbians were tired of being gawked at by straights and worrying that they might be swept up in a bar raid. They were putting together a group, a secret lesbian society. Would Lyon and Martin like to be part of it? Of course they would. It was what they’d been looking for since they settled together in San Francisco.
Four lesbian couples showed up at the home of Rose and her partner, Rosemary Sliepen, for that first meeting. What they wanted, they all agreed, was a safe space to meet and dance and share a drink, and maybe occasionally go bowling or horseback riding. They could get together weekly in each other’s homes. The group could be like a secret sorority, with colors (sapphire blue and gold), insignia (a triangle), motto (“Qui Vive”—Be Vigilant), a mission statement—articles of incorporation, even. Most of the women at the meeting were in their twenties; Lyon and Martin, both in their thirties, had gravitas. Martin was elected president. Lyon was elected secretary. The group should spend a few weeks drawing up a constitution and bylaws, Martin and Lyon suggested. They needed a name, too, of course—something that wouldn’t reveal too much about who they were. They rejected Amazons, Musketeers, Two.
The fourth meeting, a month later, was in the small Fillmore Street apartment of a couple who wanted to be called “Nancy” and “Priscilla.” (Nancy’s real name was Noni Frey. Her partner, “Priscilla,” was Mary, the lone Mexican American in the group.) “Nancy,” the biggest reader among them, though she worked in a factory, whipped out a book. It was a translation of collected works by the French author Pierre Louÿs, and it included a cycle of 143 poems called “Songs of Bilitis.” In 1894, when Louÿs first issued those poems, he’d claimed they’d been found by an archeologist on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, and that he, Louÿs, was merely their translator. They were written, he said, by a Greek courtesan, a contemporary of Sappho who, like the poet of Lesbos, had had romantic and sexual relations with both men and women. Louÿs’s forgery was revealed almost immediately, but the titillating poems had anyway been popular in his day, and from time to time, they were brought back into print.
Nancy was reading a 1951 edition. “Why don’t we call ourselves Daughters of Bilitis?” she suggested. None of the other seven women at the meeting had read the poems, but they liked the name. It sounded like a straight women’s organization—like the ultraconservative Daughters of the American Revolution or like the female auxiliary to the Shriners, called the Daughters of the Nile. And if some smart aleck recognized “Bilitis” from Pierre Louÿs’s poems, the women could always say they were a poetry club.9
The name Daughters of Bilitis was one of the very few things on which the eight founders agreed. When Martin and Lyon thought about it later, they decided the conflicts had been along class lines: The women who were blue-collar workers wanted a secret social club, like a sorority, with rites and rituals, open only to lesbians,10 but they definitely didn’t want dress regulations. To one early meeting, Nancy had invited four “very masculine-appearing types” whom she knew from the factory and from bars. The white-collar workers, particularly Martin and Lyon, were uncomfortable with that. They wanted an official dress code that declared, “If slacks are worn to a meeting, they must be women’s slacks.” They were soon thinking, too, that maybe the club’s purposes shouldn’t be limited to holding dances and chili feeds and going horseback riding. They’d found out about Mattachine a few months after Daughters of Bilitis started. The headquarters was right there in San Francisco. Maybe they could have public forums together with Mattachine. Maybe Daughters of Bilitis could publish a newsletter, too.
Those plans scared the others who’d signed on for a secret social club. Rose Bamberger and her partner pulled out first. Then Nancy and her partner pulled out, and Nancy started a club mostly for working-class lesbian mothers and their partners. (The literary Nancy called her new club Quatrefoil, inspired by James Barr’s 1950 novel about homosexual men.) A few more members joined DOB, which grew to twelve; and then shrank back to six. By the end of the first year, there were fifteen members, but of the original eight, only three remained.11
By then, they’d formulated their purpose: first of all, they would educate “the variant,” their euphemism for “lesbian,” “to enable her to understand herself and make her adjustment to society.” They’d advocate to her “a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society.” To educate her, they’d maintain a library; and they’d have public discussions in which “leading members of the legal, psychiatric, religious, and other professions” would address her (and would also lend seriousness and respectability to Daughters of Bilitis). It was a goal similar to that of post–Harry Hay Mattachine. DOB would also supply research subjects (“female variants”) to “duly authorized and responsible” psychologists, sociologists, and the like, so those “experts” could study them, as psychologist Evelyn Hooker had studied the men of Mattachine.12
Like Mattachine, too, Daughters of Bilitis pledged it would work to support changes in the penal code “as it pertains to the homosexual.”13 But that sort of battle wasn’t what Daughters of Bilitis did best. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon took personally another DOB aim, “to help the individual lesbian overcome isolation and fear.”14 Young lesbians in San Francisco usually lived in apartments. They had reason to fear not only that bars might be raided but also that neighbors might call the police if they saw bunches of short-haired women coming to visit. Before there was such a thing as LGBT community centers, the Lyon and Martin house high on a hill in Noe Valley became a sort of lesbian center.15
• • •
In 1956, to reach lesbians outside of San Francisco, the Daughters began publishing a magazine. They chose the name The Ladder to suggest the magazine’s purpose—to encourage the lesbian to strive to pull herself up the ladder of social tolerance; the magazine would show her how, too. But Martin and Lyon were very aware that putting out a lesbian magazine at a time when homosexuals were being witch hunted was a scary proposition. Simply receiving a copy of The Ladder could trigger panic. A Tacoma, Washington, woman had carelessly put her friend, a WAC, on the mailing list—and then had to write a hasty, pleading letter to Del Martin: “Please do all you can to keep the next issue from being sent to Marion Bales. There is a big investigation going on at Fort Lewis, and she is quite involved. It is very serious as every possible suspect may be ousted from the army . . . It would be very incriminating to have the magazine in her possession.”16
In that atmosphere of justified worry, Lyon decided that as editor she’d use the name “Ann Ferguson.” Her anonymity lasted for three issues. In the fourth Ladder she announced, “Ann Ferguson is dead!” and told readers her real name. She accused her “other self” of not having “practiced what I preached”17—but she knew she didn’t dare ask other lesbians to use their real names. Even with the protection of an alias most were nervous. Lesbians who feared they had too much to lose, such as those with professional jobs, seldom subscribed to The Ladder or joined DOB, even under a false name.18
Phyllis Lyon, desperate to bring readers to the magazine, promised that the mailing list would never “fall into the wrong hands.” “Your name is safe!” she wrote repeatedly in editorials.19 But that promise proved false. The FBI was contacted about Daughters of Bilitis by “a confidential source who has furnished reliable information in the past.” Whoever the woman was,20 she kept Bureau agents regularly apprised of all the organization’s doings. She also forwarded to the FBI copies of The Ladder. FBI agents read them cover to cover. “This is a group that is active in educating the public to accept the homosexual into society,” they reported in their memos.21 They also declared, with not an iota of evidence, that Daughters of Bilitis “appears to have been infiltrated by certain Communists.”22
The Bureau went into high gear in 1964, when, informed by “a member of the Cleveland chapter of Citizens for Decent Literature” that Daughters of Bilitis, which by now had a few small chapters on the East Coast and in Chicago, was planning a national convention in New York. Memos, classified “Secret” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, flew back and forth from the Cleveland office to the DC office to the New York office to the San Francisco office, as agents tracked convention plans. But intelligence faltered: FBI agents in New York reported that the Hotel New Yorker had refused to host the “Daughters of Beletis [sic] convention.”23 Where were the lesbians planning to go? Agents checked with the New York Convention Bureau, which reported “no knowledge as to where the Daughters of Belitus [sic] were to hold their convention.”24 All signs of the lesbian convention had vanished. Apparently neither FBI agents nor their informants read the New York Times, which covered in some detail the June 21–22 conference of “Homosexual Women” (as attendees were called in the Times headline). One hundred of them, the newspaper announced to anyone who had the twenty-five cents to buy it, were at a two-day meeting in New York’s Barbizon-Plaza Hotel.25 The FBI, oblivious to its agents’ fumbles, continued to keep track of DOB, as best it could, into the 1970s.
• • •
Despite its fixation, the Bureau really didn’t have much to worry about in Daughters of Bilitis. The founders had never had a romance with the Left. “We are not a political organization,” Phyllis Lyon assured DOB members and Ladder readers.26 There were never battles over “isms,” as there’d been among Mattachine members. Yet if Daughters avoided politics altogether, the group would be no more weighty than the dancing-dining-horsey sorority that Rose Bamberger and Nancy had wanted it to be. Martin and Lyon had envisioned a serious lesbian organization. But in those early years, they were ambivalent about politics.
In 1960 Del Martin read an article in the New York Post: “Elections and the Homosexual,” by Murray Kempton, future Pulitzer Prize winner and Left-leaning gadfly who’d modelled his journalistic style after H. L. Mencken. Kempton had proclaimed, not quite accurately, that right-wing politicians had stopped persecuting homosexuals because “some bright young man in Republican headquarters had dipped into the best-selling Kinsey Report,” and he’d put the word out that “there must be several million homosexuals of voting age.” That meant, Kempton said, it was almost as dangerous for the Republican Party to be considered the antihomosexual party as to be considered the anti-Negro or anti-Polish or anti-Jewish party.
Del Martin quoted Kempton’s article at length in The Ladder. People were finally noticing that a homosexual vote could influence elections, she exulted. “Let us do our utmost to make this a powerful factor,” she declared passionately. “We do have a voice in the affairs of the community and the nation. Let us make it a strong voice.”27
In the early years, she tried to rev up Ladder readers and DOB members. In her editorials, she protested raids on gay bars, urged revision of the vag-lewd and sodomy laws, and declared that homosexuals “are citizens of the United States, and as such are entitled to those civil rights set forth in the Constitution.”28 But the women who joined DOB wanted to stay out of the bars; and the vag-lewd laws and sodomy laws, it seemed to them, affected gay men, not lesbians. Martin backed off of militancy when it became apparent that most members were less interested in fighting for civil rights than in the Gab ’n’ Java meetings: “rap sessions” that she and Lyon hosted in their living room.
On the rare occasions that a Gab ’n’ Java session did turn to politics, it was only to disavow homosexual political action. Two years after Del Martin had beseeched homosexuals to “do our utmost” to make the homosexual vote powerful, she reported in The Ladder that it was agreed at a recent Gab ’n’ Java that lesbians should not vote for a candidate “simply because he was homosexual, or was sympathetic toward the problem.” Anyway, Gab ’n’ Java–goers opined, a homosexual voting bloc was “nonexistent.” And campaigns to try to create such a bloc, they said, would be “harmful.”29
• • •
Political action even more militant than suffrage was out of the question for DOB. In 1961 Dorr Legg proposed that a ONE Midwinter Institute,30 which brought together representatives of the homophile groups, be devoted to drawing up a “Homosexual Bill of Rights.” Legg, lanky and bland looking, was the business manager of ONE, a homophile magazine that grew out of LA Mattachine. He liked to call himself “one of the few radical Republicans in existence,”31 and would later be a founding member of the Log Cabin Republicans. Legg was also perhaps the most urbane and intellectual of the homophiles, and he was a far-sighted strategist too.32 A Homosexual Bill of Rights, Legg declared, would remind the American government that homosexuals were citizens too, and it would make demands: the right to full first-class citizenship, the right to be free from discriminatory statutes, the right to be free from police surveillance, the destruction of all government records on any citizen’s homosexual behavior, the right to equal treatment before the law, the right to custody of one’s own children, the right to adopt.33 It was the first time that homophiles had dared spell out in detail what civil rights for homosexuals might be. It was a daring and revolutionary proposal.
Daughters of Bilitis abhorred it. Even before the institute meeting, Del Martin mocked the notion of a Homosexual Bill of Rights in an all-caps editorial: “We Can Only Ask—How Far Out Does The Homosexual Want To Go? How Ludicrous Can We Get? Such A ‘Bill Of Rights’ Is Unnecessary, Irrelevant, And Likely To Set The Homophile Movement Back Into Oblivion.”34
Jaye Bell, the national president of DOB, agreed. Bell (nicknamed Shorty because she was close to six feet tall), had plenty of reason to be angry about her second-class citizenship. She’d been dishonorably discharged from the military as a lesbian—before she even knew she was a lesbian.35 But militancy troubled Bell. She waited for the institute’s evening banquet before seizing the microphone. Her organization would “officially dissociate” itself from any Homosexual Bill of Rights, she announced, because the bill “demanded that people have the attitudes we prescribe for them.” DOB’s approach was to educate people to have the right attitudes; to help psychologists and other experts undertake scientific studies of homosexuals that would tell the straight world that homosexuals weren’t monsters. That was the only way to change the position of the homosexuals. “One cannot demand or legislate attitudes,” she lectured Legg and his supporters.36
“Homosexual Bill of Rights Sizzles and Fizzles,” a Ladder headline gloated.37
• • •
May 1960, the first Daughters of Bilitis National Conference: The organizers were exhilarated to see over one hundred lesbians gathered in the Vista Room of San Francisco’s genteel Hotel Whitcomb, waiting to be addressed by a psychiatric authority, a minister, a legal expert, and a high representative of the law. On the morning panel called “Why the Lesbian?” the psychiatric authority, Dr. Norman Reider, told his listeners that the answer lay in “psycho-pathology and developmental psychology.” The luncheon speaker, Reverend Fordyce Eastburn, Episcopal chaplain at St. Luke’s Hospital, addressed the question “Can the Practicing Homosexual Be Accepted by the Church?” by admitting that during his twenty-six years in the ministry, he’d met only one homosexual. But his paucity of real knowledge didn’t stop him from spouting his views: homosexuals were afflicted with a disorder of nature. They must stay away from their sources of temptation, and they should take therapy and attempt to make a heterosexual adjustment to life. “The minister served up our damnation with our dessert,” one DOB member lamented.38 Yet there were no shouts of “Bigot!” and no overturning of lunch tables.
In the early afternoon, the eager DOB conventioneers were told by the staff council of the ACLU that his progressive organization “found nothing unconstitutional in the federal government’s security risk program,” which persecuted homosexual employees.39 The late-afternoon speaker was Sidney Feinberg, the bombastic and bullying head of the North Coast Area office of the Alcoholic Beverage Control—the same Sidney Feinberg who’d announced the year before that he’d “put a dozen undercover agents to work to root out homosexual bars.”40 If the DOB organizers had fantasized that he’d magically transformed in the last year, they were roundly disappointed. Feinberg proclaimed that homosexual bars were under surveillance because law enforcement authorities had a responsibility “to keep their eyes on the criminal elements in society.”41
One hundred–plus lesbians sat listening to the string of insults, but consistent with DOB’s policy of decorum, “The audience rumbled but had the good sense not to erupt.”42
Despite insults from the experts, DOB continued on its course. Del Martin insisted in 1962 that DOB was not formed as “a crusade” to change laws. What DOB was about was helping the lesbian “make her adjustments to self and society.” It was about giving the lesbian “knowledge of herself” by encouraging researchers to study her, so she could “move into the world at large as a more secure, self-assured, and productive citizen.” It was about helping her climb a ladder. It was not about antagonizing the public with “the beating of the drums—and gums.”43
But the following year, 1963, The Ladder got a new editor. To Martin’s and Lyon’s discomfort and even fury, she scorned DOB’s notions about climbing ladders, using lesbians as research guinea pigs, and stifling beating drums and gums. She helped shift the homophile movement in a whole new direction.
Barbara Gittings was a bright young woman with a mellifluous voice and beautiful diction. She was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1932, the daughter of a US diplomat of Social Register forebearers, who brought his family back to the United States at the dawn of World War II. Big-boned, pale, serious, and serious looking, Barbara Gittings had been troubled before she entered Northwestern University as a freshman in 1949: she suspected she was homosexual and knew only that that was something one was not supposed to be. She spent her freshman year looking in the card catalog under “abnormal” and “perversion” and then haunting the library stacks, determined to find out what the taboo was all about. She was so busy searching for answers, she forgot to go to her classes and flunked out at the end of the year.
Gittings returned home to Delaware, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her family what had happened. When her father caught her reading The Well of Loneliness, he wrote her (though they were living in the same house) an unpleasant letter demanding that she burn the book. Burn was underlined because, he wrote, any other way of getting rid of the book might mean that someone else could find it and be infected. She hid the book; and she saved the money she earned in a clerical job so that she’d be able to leave home.
Gittings escaped to Philadelphia. There she found work as a music store clerk, lived in a rooming house, and subsisted on boiled eggs and plain cooked vegetables, which she fixed on a hot plate. Disguised as a boy, she hitchhiked every weekend to Greenwich Village, where she’d discovered the “gay girls” bar scene. Gittings didn’t drink, so she’d sip ice water all evening, pretending it was gin on the rocks. She became “Sonny” because the habitués were calling themselves either butch or femme, and she felt silly in long hair and makeup; but she felt almost as silly being “Sonny.” And worse, she could find no one in the bars who shared her interest in social issues or literature or medieval, Renaissance, and baroque music. About this time, she discovered Donald Webster Cory’s 1951 book, The Homosexual in America. It was Cory’s book that made her think that homosexuals ought to be defining themselves as a legitimate minority; they ought to start demanding rights, just as other minorities were doing.44
Her conception of how that might be done was vague, but her determination was robust. Soon after reading The Homosexual in America, she wrote to Donald Cory,45 asking where the organized homosexuals were. He referred her to ONE magazine in Los Angeles, and on her vacation from the music store in the summer of 1956, she hurried west. Through ONE, she found her way to Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin in San Francisco, and they invited her to a Daughters of Bilitis meeting the same day she arrived, rucksack still on her back.46
Gittings walked into the comfortable San Francisco home where the meeting was being held and saw a dozen to fifteen women sitting together in the living room of a nice house rather than in a Mafia-owned, liquor-permeated bar. She heard them planning the first issue of a lesbian magazine that would be called The Ladder and would come out that fall. She thought, for a while anyway, that she’d come home, even though she was critical of their abstruse and unpronounceable name, Daughters of Bilitis. The bespectacled twenty-six-year-old in her travel-stained sleeveless dress47 told the members that their name hid the organization’s identity behind a reference to a not-very-good book about an ancient fictional character who was not even lesbian but bisexual.48
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were quick to see that the outspoken newbie wasn’t a typical recruit. Here was an unusually well-read, energetic young person who was looking for a way to combine her intense personal interest in the “homosexual condition” with a cause that would allow her to focus her considerable energies. They saw that she was someone “who was willing to take the bit and run a little.”49 They suggested she start a Daughters of Bilitis group in New York. Gittings was living in Philadelphia, but New York sounded like the sensible choice to her, too.
She found that New York already had a Mattachine Society, started in 1955 by two men: Cuban-born chemist Tony Segura, who’d also been fired up by Cory’s book,50 and psychologist Sam Morford, who’d learned of California’s Mattachine through fellow psychologist Evelyn Hooker. In a small loft building on Sixth Avenue, in one of their postage-stamp-sized offices, Mattachine Society New York made space for the little group that Gittings pulled together.51 Starting in 1958, she was taking the bus twice a month from Philadelphia to New York—she’d stopped hitchhiking by now—to run the first East Coast chapter of Daughters of Bilitis.
From the beginning, Gittings was bothered by DOB’s stated goal to “educate” the lesbian to “adjust” to society, as though the lesbian were an unruly child that needed correction—“a scolding-teacher approach,” she thought.52 She hated The Ladder’s use of the term “sexual variant,” as though lesbian needed a euphemism. She was against providing the “experts” with lesbian guinea pigs. And she became dismayed that “experts,” usually straight people, were being invited to speak at DOB meetings about the “problems” of homosexuality. None of what DOB was doing had much to do with Donald Webster Cory’s electrifying exhortation that homosexuals must demand their civil rights. But she hadn’t any idea how to lead Daughters of Bilitis in a more meaningful direction, yet.
• • •
Del Martin had been editing The Ladder since Jaye Bell replaced her as DOB president in July 1960. After two and a half years, Martin thought it time to hand over her mantle. Barbara Gittings was the most literary person Martin knew, but Gittings was busy. At a picnic she organized in Rhode Island to try to get a DOB chapter started in the “Hope” state, she’d met Kay Tobin,53 a petite redhead with whom she could share her passion for books, music, and homophile politics. Their promising relationship was less than two years old, and they were learning to live together. Also, Gittings was working full-time in a Philadelphia architectural firm, running its mailroom and mimeograph machine to make a living. She’d guessed that if you wanted to edit a magazine well, the editing would have to be your full-time job. “Okay,” she finally told Martin, “I’ll do it for a few months, until you find someone who can take it over permanently.”
But a few months into her editorship, she attended a conference of the new East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Its founder, and main speaker at the conference, was Frank Kameny, the head of Washington, DC’s Mattachine. Gittings thought him the most brilliant theoretician of homosexual rights she’d ever heard or met or read. Finally, she had a blueprint for how to begin doing what she’d dreamed of doing since she’d read The Homosexual in America.54 Now that she had something to say, she would stay on as editor of The Ladder, Gittings decided. She quit her paying job and lived on a small trust fund: she’d been right that the unpaid editorship was a full-time position.
Under Gittings’s editorship, The Ladder was transformed inside and out. In place of the insipid art that usually graced the cover, Gittings had her partner, Tobin, who was an amateur photographer, persuade real live lesbians to be cover girls. Not only would it be a publishing breakthrough, but also readers would be inspired to see actual healthy, happy-looking homosexual women.55 She and Tobin wanted to portray the diversity of lesbians, too—though there were practically no images of racial diversity even in straight magazines in the early sixties. The November 1964 cover was of a pretty Indonesian woman, Ger van Braam, who’d been writing stories for The Ladder. The June 1966 cover was a headshot of the affable-looking vice president of the New York chapter of DOB, Ernestine Eckstein, a black woman; and the article that opened that issue was an eight-page interview with Eckstein. It was the first time an out lesbian of color was featured in any magazine.56
Gittings and Tobin also agreed it would be good to get rid of the title The Ladder. They hopefully proposed more weighty names: Dialogue, Catalyst, Vanguard, Counterpoint.57 But the DOB powers made clear their attachment to the old title. Gittings bypassed them by adding to the cover a bold subtitle, A Lesbian Review, hoping it would offset what she considered the patronizing, mealymouthed name they’d stuck her with. A Lesbian Review, she thought, was a proud proclamation of what the magazine was really about, and it was an announcement to the world that lesbian was not unspeakable. With each issue, the words A Lesbian Review got larger while the words The Ladder got smaller.
She ran into trouble pretty quickly. Martin and Lyon insisted that if the word Lesbian was going to be on the cover, “For Sale to Adults Only” needed to be there too. “That’s offensive! It implies lesbian is salacious,” Gittings protested. She called Kenneth Zwerin, DOB’s pro bono lawyer and an ex-president of San Francisco Mattachine, to ask whether an adults-only warning was necessary. “If the contents are obscene, putting ‘For Sale to Adults Only’ won’t save you from being prosecuted,” Zwerin told her. “And if they’re not obscene, you don’t need the warning.”58 His professional opinion did not allay the DOB leadership’s nervousness. “For Sale to Adults Only” remained.
Even more important than the changes Gittings made to The Ladder’s covers were the changes she made to the content. She continued to run lesbian book reviews as well as poetry and fiction; but the political shrewdness of articles soared. Her opinion pieces hit hard at the experts that the Daughters had so revered. For example, she declared of a New York Academy of Medicine report characterizing homosexuality as a preventable and treatable illness: “It’s a reminder of the sly, desperate trend to enforce conformity by a ‘sick’ label for anything deviant.”59 In the name of DOB, she sent the Academy of Medicine a letter, reprinted in the same issue of The Ladder, calling the authorities to task for their failure to substantiate their claims that homosexuality is an illness, and bringing to their attention the fact that there were other “experts,” such as psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who disagreed with their careless assertion that homosexuals were sick.60
Gittings also opened a forum in The Ladder for her militant mentor, Frank Kameny. “Cringing meekness has taken its toll among homosexuals,” he admonished the readers, who’d never before encountered the likes of his boldness. It is time for homosexuals to stop being “gentlemanly and ladylike,” he rebuked them. They must move from “endless talk to firm, vigorous action.”61 Gittings gave room in the magazine, too, to a lengthy leaflet, written by Kameny, who was organizing homosexuals to picket the White House, the Civil Service Commission, the Department of Defense, the United Nations, and Independence Hall: “Homosexual American citizens have appealed repeatedly to their federal government for redress for their grievances,” the leaflet announced. To Gab ’n’ Java’s annoyance, Kameny and his group demanded redress. “The Homosexual American citizen asks from his government what the founding fathers asked from the British government of their day: reasonable, constructive, meaningful action, taken in good faith.”62
To prod her readers along, Gittings also ran a Cross-Currents column, in which she reported on homosexuals who were principals in court cases that the homophiles had thought could never be fought—such as Bruce Scott, a homosexual man who’d been denied employment by the Civil Service Commission and had filed suit in the US District Court.63 Gittings reveled in such legal confrontations, in making political demands, in action. Almost as a direct rebuke to the Gab ’n’ Java–goers who’d claimed that a homosexual voting bloc was “nonexistent” and that to try to create one would be “harmful,” a headline by her partner Kay Tobin declared in a 1965 Ladder, “Homosexual Voting Bloc Puts Pizzazz in Politics.”64
The coup de grace to the relationship between Gittings and the DOB founders came over issues of picketing. Gittings and Tobin worked at Kameny’s side in organizing the pickets, and the three of them hoped to increase the numbers of protestors through ECHO, the coalition of organizations Kameny had started in order to bring homophile groups together for joint action. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who kept seats on DOB’s governing board, soon informed Gittings that Daughters of Bilitis was withdrawing from ECHO: “The bone of contention is over picketing programs,” they wrote Gittings with indignation. DOB would never engage in direct action, they said, unless “there were support and involvement from the larger community [that is, from heterosexuals].”65 Kameny jumped into the fray with rhetoric that, as usual, pulled no punches: “This is arrant nonsense. When one has reached the stage where picketing is backed by the larger community, such picketing is no longer necessary,” he wrote Martin and Lyon and their governing board. “The entire force and thrust of picketing is as a protest on issues not yet supported or backed by the larger community.”66
The relationship between Gittings and the DOB leadership had become irreparable. Despite the growth in circulation and distribution of the magazine under Gittings,67 Martin and Lyon were waiting for an excuse to axe her. They got it in the months before the 1966 national DOB convention—she was missing deadlines,68 she wasn’t providing enough lead time for publicizing the convention.69 Martin and Lyon’s governing board fired Gittings just after the August 1966 issue went to press.
At the height of McCarthy-era persecution, the founders of Daughters of Bilitis couldn’t dream there’d be a time when lesbians would demand serious civil rights. Daughters of Bilitis existed mostly “to help the individual lesbian overcome the isolation and fear that are her worst enemy.”70 That goal wasn’t hugely different from what Rose Bamberger had envisioned in 1955, when she called Lyon and Martin to ask if they’d like to join six other women to start a lesbian social group. Nor did Daughters of Bilitis ever have more than a few hundred members, including those in the small chapters of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Fanwood, New Jersey.71 Its value, however, ought not be underestimated. Through its magazine, The Ladder, it reached lesbians in the most unlikely places. It gave them comfort at a time when no one else would. Its existence had a ripple effect that kept going long after the organization died.
Lesbian activist Robin Tyler tells the story of herself when she was seventeen-year-old Arlene Chernick, born in Winnipeg, Canada, whose large Mennonite population set the tone of the city. She’d had crushes on girls for as long as she could remember, but without a name to put to her feelings she worried that she was a singular species. Then in 1959 Arlene happened into a small secondhand bookstore and there, inexplicably—in the social wilds of Canada—was a copy of The Ladder. The magazine told her that there was a name for her feelings, and that it didn’t matter if people said those feelings were wrong, as long as they were right for her. That message was exactly what she needed, at a time when she really needed it. It beckoned her to the big cities of the United States, where she could live as a lesbian more easily. When she finally got to San Francisco, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were there at the airport to greet her. They welcomed and cossetted her, just as they had the many other lesbians whose lives had been changed by their organization and magazine.72
In 1979, twenty years after she’d discovered The Ladder, Robin Tyler, a well-known lesbian activist by then, called for the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.73 It drew a hundred thousand people. In 1987 she was the rally producer of the second March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which drew over six hundred thousand people. She was also a producer of the rally of the third march in 1993. That one drew almost a million.