Why Barbara Gittings mattered

by Chris Bartlett

Barbara Gittings, the incredible world-changing gay civil rights activist and visionary, died on February 18th of this year. For those of you who don't know of her, she was one of the key international leaders of the gay liberation movement, and started her work in 1958, as one of a few hundred such leaders internationally.

Her death leaves a few deep questions for each of us to answer: What have we lost in her death, and what parts of her spirit, vision, and action can continue to live on in our communities and among us individually?

The pace of LGBT liberation has been so quick in the past few decades that we sometimes forget just how different things were even a few decades ago. In the 1960s and 70s, bar goers sometimes waited in the shadows across the street from a bar or nightclub until no foot or car traffic was visible, and then would dash into the bar so as not to be seen. Psychiatrists terrorized lesbian and gay people with electroshock or pressure towards heterosexual marriage. Outside of our own few gay bookstores, it was difficult in the early 1970s to find the very few published gay and lesbian-friendly books. Movies like "Cruising" portrayed us as diseased, murderous, or generally crazy. LGBT people of all stripes were open targets for queerbashers, who included "upright citizens" and often the police. Finally, sodomy laws lent legal weight to the entire project of systematic heterosexism.

Barbara Gittings, through wisdom, collaboration with others, and sheer force of will, took that world, confronted it in its meanness and discrimination, and shook it up with the force of a Gandhi or a Roosevelt (Eleanor, of course). She is a true testament to the ability of one person (helped by a host of allies) to bring about such change. I want to suggest some of her lessons for us in continuing her powerful work:

i. Have vision: From a young age, she knew there was something wrong with a world that made gay people invisible. Our ongoing work should build on her foundation: Who remains invisible? How can we confront that? Examples abound: more work in the schools, health insurance access for transgender people, efforts to build and celebrate the visibility of LGBT elders.

ii. Be kind and decent: A number of recent eulogies stated sentiments like, "I often disagreed with Barbara, but I always respected her and enjoyed her company". Barbara knew how to work collaboratively with people even if she did not agree with them 100%, or even 25%, and you could tell that she enjoyed activism because she enjoyed the people who were part of it. Her example calls each of us to do our work with decency and kindness, especially when we disagree.

iii. Embrace your opponents and hidden allies: She could speak in front of any audience and speak in a way so that she could be heard. She understood that much of the success of gay liberation would come from finding a vocabulary that could be understood by those who were confused, misled, or even hostile.

iv. Think for the long-term: She had the courage to think decades ahead. When she imagined a world with gay-affirming psychologists, or libraries filled with lesbian novels, or a world of visible LGBT people, she had the optimism to believe those things would happen, slowly, inexorably, in her lifetime. And they largely did. She had the strength of will to imagine what seemed, at the time, unimaginable.

So one lesson for us is to work on the visions that seem unimaginable to us:

A world without right-wing hatred.

A world of complete inclusiveness for trans people.

An end to the AIDS epidemic.

The election of a lesbian president or gay mayor.

Add your unimaginable dream to the list. We can't let our tremendous political successes lull us into believing that there are no more unimaginable dreams. When we have identified them, we need to work with the same unstoppable energy that Barbara Gittings showed throughout her lifetime to make the dreams reality. And we need to create those realities with the same skill, kindness and wisdom that she embodied.



Chris Bartlett is a gay men's health community organizer in Philadelphia. He directed the SafeGuards Gay Men's Health Project for ten years, and is currently the lead consultant for the LGBT Community Assessment in Philadelphia, a project that gathers data about LGBT communities in order to make recommendations regarding community organizing, health, housing, and economic development.

He was featured as a friendly rectal microbicide advocate on LifeLube here.