Rest in Power Kay Tobin Lahusen.
Welcome to #Pride month 2021
RantWoman is shamelessly reprinting an obituary from the Blind Pride email list including references to books available in accessible format through BARD/ NLS or through Bookshare. RantWoman has not checked about Amazon or Audible.
RantWoman will also add a couple links but invites readers to use their search engines as well.
The short version: Ms. Lahusen was a photographer who in the 1960's persuaded a number of lesbians to appear publicly on the cover of one of The Ladder, a pioneering lesbian publication. Ms. Lahusen, her partner Barbara Giddings also played pivotal roles in getting the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental health disorders. This is a live with integrity gay liberation issue; it is also a mental health / disabilities issue in that removing Homosexuality from the DSM goes a long way to end the historical pathologization of same-gender relationships. Anyone who wants to take the liberties people today enjoy for granted needs to remember that these changes have all occurred in RantWoman's lifetime.
Note: At the end of this obituary, some general histories
available from NLS and Bookshare.
Kay Tobin Lahusen, Gay Rights Activist and Photographer, Dies at 91
By Daniel E. Slotnik
Published May 27, 2021
She and her partner, Barbara Gittings, were on the front lines long before Stonewall, and Ms. Lahusen photographed protests during the movement's earliest days.
Updated May 28, 2021, 4:05 p.m. ET
Kay Tobin Lahusen, a prominent gay rights activist whose photographs documented the movement's earliest days and depicted lesbians who were out when they were virtually absent from popular culture, died on Wednesday in West Chester, Pa. She was 91.
Her death in a hospital was confirmed by Malcolm Lazin, a longtime friend and the executive director of the Equality Forum, an L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights group.
Ms. Lahusen and her longtime partner, Barbara Gittings, were at the forefront of the lesbian rights movement, determined to make whom they loved a source of pride rather than shame.
They were early members of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization, and soon spoke out about their sexuality and their demands for equality at a time when gay rights groups were less vocal. In the 1960s, they helped organize protests at a National Council of Churches meeting, the Pentagon and the White House well before the Stonewall uprisingin Greenwich Village in 1969, a pivotal event for the gay rights movement.
They helped lesbians realize that they were not alone by producing The
Ladder, a newsletter published by the Daughters that was the first
nationally distributed lesbian journal in the United States.
Ms. Gittings was The Ladder's editor, and Ms. Lahusen became an important
contributor, writing under the surname Tobin, which she had picked out of
the phone book, she said, because it was easy to pronounce, unlike Lahusen
(pronounced la-HOOZ-en). She also photographed many of the earliest gay
rights protests, providing important documentation of a period when many gay
people chose to remain in the closet.
Ms. Lahusen persuaded women to have their pictures taken for the cover of
the lesbian journal The Ladder. Among them was Ernestine Eckstein, an
African American lesbian activist who picketed the White House for gay
rights in 1965.
"Occasionally somebody would bring a camera to a picket, but I was the only
one who went at it in a sustained way," Ms. Lahusen said in an interview for
this obituary in 2019.
Some of her protest photographs appeared in The Ladder's inside pages; with
few gay people wanting their faces to appear in a magazine, let alone on the
cover, the journal's covers were given over to illustrations. "I said, 'What
we really need are some live lesbians,' and we couldn't find any," Ms.
Lahusen said.
By the mid-1960s, however, Ms. Lahusen had persuaded some women to pose for
cover portraits, among them Ernestine Eckstein, an African American lesbian
activist who picketed the White House for gay rights in 1965, and Lilli
Vincenz, who was discharged from the Women's Army Corps after she was outed.
In a 1993 interview, Ms. Lahusen described her goal then as "taking our
minority out from under wraps, and what you might call the normalization of
gay."
As the 1960s wore on, Ms. Lahusen and Ms. Gittings came to believe that the
Daughters of Bilitis' approach was too conciliatory, that it was more
focused on signaling respectability than fighting for equal rights. "It was
all aimed at reforming laggard lesbians," she said.
They began to work outside the organization, finding common cause with gay
rights activists like Franklin Kameny.
Ms. Lahusen helped Mr. Kameny and Ms. Gittings lobby the American
Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental
illnesses, in part by persuading a practicing psychiatrist to testify about
being gay at the organization's national convention in Dallas in 1972. The
psychiatrist, Dr. John E. Fryer, addressed the association under the name
Dr. H. Anonymous, wearing a mask and a wig so that he would not face
professional repercussions.
Ms. Lahusen photographed him, fully costumed, with Ms. Gittings and Mr.
Kameny. The next year the association removed homosexuality from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.
Ms. Lahusen's photographs offer a rare visual record of the gay rights
movement's earliest days. Many of them are now in the New York Public
Library's archive and were a major part of the 2019 exhibition "Love &
Resistance: Stonewall 50," which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the
uprising.
Marcia M. Gallo, a social movement historian and the author of "Different
Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian
Rights Movement" (2006), described Ms. Lahusen in an interview as "one of
the key foundational organizers and chroniclers of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement
from the '60s on."
Ms. Gallo said that Ms. Lahusen had been eager to speak about the earliest
days of the movement, and that she and Ms. Gittings had organized a gay
lunch-table group at the care facility where they lived in Kennett Square,
Pa.
"She was organizing into her 90s," Ms. Gallo said.
Katherine Lahusen was born on Jan. 5, 1930, in Cincinnati. She was adopted
soon afterward by her grandparents George and Katherine (Walker) Lahusen.
Her grandfather sold cable for a steel company; her grandmother was a
homemaker.
Katherine first realized that she was attracted to women when she was barely
a teenager, developing crushes on actresses like Katharine Hepburn. It was
the 1940s, and many Americans viewed gay people as deviants. But Ms. Lahusen
refused to internalize society's prejudices.
"I decided that I was right and the world was wrong and that there couldn't
be anything wrong with this kind of love," she was quoted as saying in
"Different Daughters."
She went to a private elementary school and graduated from Withrow High
School in Cincinnati in 1948. She followed a girlfriend to Ohio State
University, where she majored in English and planned to become a teacher.
Ms. Lahusen graduated in 1952 and moved in with her girlfriend. But the
girlfriend soon had second thoughts about their relationship.
"She believed that we couldn't have a good life together," Ms. Lahusen said.
"She wanted to have a white picket fence and a hubby, and she wanted to have
children."
Ms. Lahusen moved to Boston in the mid-1950s and took a job there as a
researcher at The Christian Science Monitor while struggling to find a
companion. She learned of the psychiatrist Richard C. Robertiello, who had
written the book "Voyage From Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female
Homosexual" (1959).
"I thought, 'I don't want to be cured, but I do want to find out how to meet
other lesbians,'" Ms. Lahusen recalled in 2019. "I had the impression there
were others in Paris, but I didn't know any locally."
She made an appointment with Dr. Robertiello, who showed her a copy of The
Ladder. She wrote to the publication and in time met Ms. Gittings, who had
founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis in 1958.
Ms. Gittings became her partner, and they lived together for decades in
Philadelphia, where an apartment they shared early on was honored with a
historic marker in 2016.
Ms. Gittings and Ms. Lahusen supported their activism by working different
jobs, Ms. Lahusen as a waitress and in a music store. In 1972 she and Randy
Wicker published "The Gay Crusaders," one of the first collections of
interviews with prominent gay rights figures.
Ms. Gittings died in 2007, before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex
marriage in 2015.
No immediate family members survive.
Ms. Lahusen said she was overjoyed by how far gay rights had come, but she
cautioned young activists against complacency.
"I think some of these advances, as wonderful as they are, are being taken
for granted, even now," she said. "They need to be codified into law."
Correction: May 28, 2021
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to a 1993 interview
with Ms. Lahusen. Although it appears on the website OutHistory.org, it was
not done for the website; it was done by the historian Marc Stein for his
University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. dissertation.
Note: For more LGBTQ history, see the following books from NLS:
Bayer, Ronald. Homosexuality, and American psychiatry: the politics of
diagnosis.
DB17136 Read by Hal Tenny. 9 hours, 8 minutes.
An objective and gripping investigation into the changing attitudes
regarding homosexuality in American psychiatry. Examines conflicting
politics and ideologies as well as scientific aspects of homosexuality and
chronicles how homosexuality changed from being regarded as a mental illness
in 1952 to being considered no disorder at all by the psychiatric profession
in 1973. 1987.
Faderman, Lillian. The gay revolution: the story of the struggle.
DB84312 Read by Jeremy Gage; 29 hours, 9 minutes.
An award-winning scholar of LGBT issues tackles a history of the modern
struggle for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights in America. With
interviews and in-depth research, covers everything from the witch hunts of
the 1950s, the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic, to
twenty-first-century campaigns for marriage equality. 2015.
Bronski, Michael. A queer history of the United States.
DBC00573 Read by Camille Blanchette. 14 hours, 28 minutes.
Using numerous primary documents and literature, as well as social
histories, takes the reader through the centuries -- from Columbus' arrival
and the brutal treatment the Native peoples received, through the American
Revolution's radical challenging of sex and gender roles -- to the violent,
and liberating, 19th century -- and the transformative social justice
movements of the 20th. A Queer History of the United States is not so much
about queer history as it is about all American history -- and why it should
matter to both LGBT people and heterosexuals alike. Winner of The Lambda
Literary Award and Stonewall Book Award. 2011.
Cervini, Eric. The deviant's war: the homosexual vs. the United States of
America.
DB99703 Read by Vikas Adam. 15 hours, 36 minutes.
An account of the subsequent court case after Frank Kameny, a federal
employee, was fired in 1957 for being homosexual. The author follows
Kameny's work to put together his case against the government's
classification of gay men and women as "sexual perverts," drawing on
firsthand accounts, FBI records, and personal documents. Commercial
audiobook. 2020.
Note: For more on LGBTQ American history, see the following from Bookshare:
A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History #1)
by Michael Bronski
Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction. The first book to cover
the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from
pre-1492 to the present. In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth
Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism,
and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the
early 1800s, changed her name to "Publick Universal Friend," refused to use
pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in
upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous
Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including
a well-publicized "female marriage." And in the late 1920s, Augustus
Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP's magazine the
Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few
moments of queer history that Michael Bronski highlights in this
groundbreaking book. Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, this
book is more than a "who's who" of queer history: it is a book that
radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon
primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, noted scholar and
activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s, and has written a testament to
how the LGBT experience has profoundly shaped our country, culture, and
history. The book abounds with startling examples of unknown or often
ignored aspects of American history -- the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in
the colonies, the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil
War, the impact of new technologies on LGBT life in the nineteenth century,
and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for
the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Most
striking, Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of
social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all
sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex. Resisting these
efforts, same-sex desire flourished and helped make America what it is
today. At heart, A Queer History of the United States is simply about
American history. It is a book that will matter both to LGBT people and
heterosexuals. This engrossing and revelatory history will make readers
appreciate just how queer America really is.
Copyright: 2011
ISBN: 9780807044667 ISBN: 9780807044391
A Queer History of the United States for Young People (ReVisioning American
History for Young People #1)
by Michael Bronski
Queer history didn't start with Stonewall. This book explores how LGBTQ
people have always been a part of our national identity, contributing to the
country and culture for over 400 years. It is crucial for lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer youth to know their history. But this
history is not easy to find since it's rarely taught in schools or
commemorated in other ways. A Queer History of the United States for Young
People corrects this and demonstrates that LGBTQ people have long been vital
to shaping our understanding of what America is today. Through engrossing
narratives, letters, drawings, poems, and more, the book encourages young
readers, of all identities, to feel pride at the accomplishments of the
LGBTQ people who came before them and to use history as a guide to the
future. Here we meet: Indigenous tribes who embraced same-sex relationships
and a multiplicity of gender identities; Emily Dickinson, brilliant
nineteenth-century poet who wrote about her desire for women; Gladys
Bentley, Harlem blues singer who challenged restrictive cross-dressing laws
in the 1920s; Bayard Rustin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s close friend,
civil rights organizer, and an openly gay man; Sylvia Rivera, cofounder of
STAR, the first transgender activist group in the US in 1970; Kiyoshi
Kuromiya, civil rights and antiwar activist who fought for people living
with AIDS; Jamie Nabozny, activist who took his LGBTQ school bullying case
to the Supreme Court; Aidan DeStefano, teen who brought a federal court case
for trans-inclusive bathroom policies; And many more! With over 60
illustrations and photos, a glossary, and a corresponding curriculum, this
book will be vital for teachers who want to introduce a new perspective to
America's story.
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780807056134
Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.
by Jonathan Ned Katz
This is the updated version of the most authoritative, scholarly and
accurate history of gays and lesbians in the United States. The book
includes original source documents, extensive footnotes and bibliographies.
The book discusses the changing views of the scientific and religious
communities. The book describes the impressions of early European explorers
who encountered homosexuality among the Native American cultures. Other
major subjects include women passing as men, a history of liberation and a
history of love, and Walt Whitman's correspondence with John Addington
Symonds.
Copyright: 1992
ISBN: 9780452010925
Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990: An
Oral History
by Eric Marcus
When this book was first published in 1992, the acclaimed oral historian
Studs Terkel called it, "One of the definitive works on gay life." Novelist
Armistead Maupin said that author "Eric Marcus not only writes with grace
and clarity but makes it look so easy -- the ultimate measure of historian
and novelist alike." Now, for the first time, the original complete edition
of Making History is available in e-book. Through his engaging oral
histories, Eric Marcus traces the unfolding of LGBTQ civil rights effort
from a group of small, independent underground organizations and
publications into a national movement, covering the years from 1945 to 1990.
Here are the stories of its remarkable pioneers: a diverse group of nearly
fifty Americans, who hail from all corners of the nation. From the period in
history when homosexuals were routinely beaten by police to the day when gay
rights leaders were first invited to the White House, this is the story of
an against-all-odds struggle that has succeeded in bringing about changes in
American society that were once unimaginable.
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 9780062848260
The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America
by Eric Cervini
From a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, the secret history of
the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall. In 1957,
Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in
Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The
Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of
humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him,
was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though,
Kameny fought back. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI
records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's
War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of
Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to
protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the
forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New
Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of
America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking,
byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal;
sex; love; and ultimately victory. New York Times bestseller and Book Review
editor's choice.
Copyright: 2020
ISBN: 9780374721565
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
by Lillian Faderman
The sweeping story of the modern struggle for gay, lesbian, and trans rights
-- from the 1950s to the present -- based on amazing interviews with
politicians, military figures, legal activists, and members of the entire
LGBT community who face these challenges every day. The fight for gay,
lesbian, and trans civil rights -- the years of outrageous injustice, the
early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the
dreams of the gay rights pioneers -- is the most important civil rights
issue of the present day. Based on rigorous research and more than 150
interviews, Faderman tells this unfinished story not through dry facts but
through dramatic accounts of passionate struggles, with all the sweep,
depth, and intricacies only an award-winning activist, scholar, and novelist
like Lillian Faderman can evoke. The book begins in the 1950s, when law
classified gays and lesbians as criminals, the psychiatric profession saw
them as mentally ill, the churches saw them as sinners, and society
victimized them with irrational hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few
brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary
changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the
1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated
but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for
the right to marriage equality. In the words of the eyewitnesses who were
there through the most critical events, this book paints a nuanced portrait
of the LGBT civil rights movement.
Copyright: 2015
ISBN: 9781451694130
Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
by Vern L Bullough
Explore the early history of the gay rights movement! In the words of editor
Vern L. Bullough: "Although there was no single leader in the gay and
lesbian community who achieved the fame and reputation of Martin Luther
King, there were a large number of activists who put their careers and
reputations on the line. It was a motley crew of radicals and reformers,
drawn together by the cause in spite of personality and philosophical
differences. Their stories are told in the following pages." This book
illuminates the lives of the courageous individuals involved in the early
struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights in the United States. Authored by
those who knew them (often activists themselves), the concise biographies in
this volume examine the lives of pre-1969 barrier breakers like Harry Hay,
Henry Gerber, Alfred Kinsey, Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Jim Kepner, Jack
Nichols, Christine Jorgensen, Jose Sarria, Barbara Grier, Frank Kameny, and
40 more. To anyone with an interest in the history of the gay/lesbian rights
movements in the United States, these names will be familiar, but did you
know that in addition to their groundbreaking activism: Prescott Townsend
was a Boston Brahman? Dorr Legg was a Log Cabin Republican? Harry Hay was at
one time a member of the Communist party? Jim Kepner was a boy preacher?
Troy Perry was removed from the ministry of his church for homosexuality --
and then founded the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church? Reed Erickson -- a transsexual millionaire who gave millions to the cause -- kept a pet leopard called Henry? Barbara Gittings set up a kissing booth at the American Library Association convention and urged attendees to kiss a gay or lesbian!? Before Stonewall is a perfect ancillary text for any gay/lesbian studies course, but more to the point, no one interested in these heroic figures and the movements they ignited should be without this book, which received an honorable mention in the 2004 Stonewall Book Awards.
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 9781317766278
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