I am always filled with regret at the passing of someone I adored but never spent enough time with, only called when I needed something, and never told how much she was loved and admired. Such a person was Barbara Gittings, whom I met for the first time in 1999, long after she had blazed a trail for gay rights in the American Library Association, being one of the key activists who formed the Association’s Gay Task Force. She died February 18 at the age of 75 after a courageous battle with cancer.

Gittings

In the December 1999 issue, American Libraries published a three-page interview with Gittings. She sat for the interview at ALA’s Annual Conference in New Orleans, where she had come to see the task force become a full-fledged round table, now called the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. It seemed a fitting piece to publish in the last issue of the 20th century.

I approached Barbara Gittings cautiously, fearing the worst—that she would be humorless, strident, or priggish. As I reread the interview eight years later, I realize that it does not do justice to how untrue those characterizations turned out to be.

Barbara Gittings holds the Civil Liberties Achievement Award she received at PrideFest America at the Free Library of Philadelphia April 27, 1999, in recognition of her role as an organizer of ALA's Task Force on Gay Liberation and her efforts to open American libraries to gay and lesbian literature.

Gittings was an activist of the first order, but she was a professional activist. She understood what worked and what didn’t in the context of the American civil rights movement. The thing that impressed me most about her was the way she was able to combine a ferocious dedication to the cause with a cock-eyed optimism, kindness, and gentle sense of humor. The insults and resistance she endured while marching in public protests during the 1960s seemed only to have increased her resolve that people are basically good, that ignorance is the worst enemy of humanity, and that working with librarians was “my best experience of all.”

I remember very clearly that her enthusiasm was infectious and irrepressible. She was a person filled with a joy and vitality that no defeat could squelch. If she spoke of defeat, it was only of what she had learned from it and how she was then propelled to try even harder next time. The other thing that does not come through loudly enough in the interview is that Barbara Gittings was a person filled with and motivated by love and curiosity. She had that rare ability when she talked to you to make you feel that you were the most interesting and remarkable person in the world.

One piece of the interview that I left out of the published piece was the discussion we had over the new name of the ALA round table. I asked her if she didn’t think it was a little unwieldy. At first, I could not get her to disparage the title. It was just folks trying to be inclusive, she said. I countered by asking what was wrong with “gay”? Hadn’t Ellen DeGeneres just the year before shouted the famous words “I'm gay” into an airport microphone on her television show?

After a lot of laughing and coaxing, I finally did get Barbara Gittings to say that she thought “gay” was a perfectly wonderful word, a happy word to describe a whole sphere of sexual identity possibilities without resorting to the rather clinical choices of the ‘90s movers and shakers in the gay community.

There was a lot of discussion going on in those days about the word “gay,” with some purists arguing that they didn’t like to see the word appropriated by a political movement to mean something other than happy. In Gittings’s case, it was a specious argument, for it meant both. She had reached a conclusion early in her life—the kind of conclusion that made by enough people at the same time can lead to a sexual revolution—that there was nothing sick or evil about falling in love with a person of the same sex.

The last time I saw Barbara Gittings was in 2003, when she was awarded ALA’s highest honor, Honorary Membership, at the Annual Conference in Toronto. I had lunch with her and her beloved partner Kay Tobin Lahusen. They both pooh-poohed the SARS scare that had kept so many from attending. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Barbara said. Although she was already weakened and struggling with breast cancer, there was not a shred of self-pity or despair in her voice.

I wonder now, how to honor such a remarkable woman. Perhaps the best way is to remember the way she lived—fully, joyously, and on her own terms. In her own words:

Barbara Gittings and author Isabel Miller at the Task Force on Gay Liberation's "Hug a Homosexual" kissing booth at the 1971 ALA Annual Conference.

“For years I would haunt libraries and secondhand book shops trying to find stories to read about my people, and then I became active in other arenas of the gay rights movement, but I always kept an eye on the emerging literature. It was just coming up, very slowly, in the 1960s, just a tiny handful of books. It began to talk about homosexuals who were healthy and happy and wholesome and who had good lives. Then…I heard that a group of gay librarians had formed a caucus within the American Library Association and they were going to do something about the literature and the problems in the profession. That rang the bells for me—libraries, gay books!” She remembered the “Hug a Homosexual” booth the group set up at an ALA conference. “I had a great deal of fun,” she recalled, but a lot of the response was negative. “One librarian said, ‘I fail to see how the subject of homosexuality is relevant to libraries,” Gittings laughed. “And I like to say, well, I hope she got new glasses.”

—Leonard Kniffel, American Libraries editor in chief.

Having listened to many years worth of ALA Council debates, I experienced a sudden attack of déjà vu during the discussion at the Midwinter Meeting in Seattle over the relationship of the Association for Library Service to Children and the Boy Scouts of America. On one side we have ALA’s social-responsibility activists scolding the division for having anything to do with an organization they believe is homophobic and shows religious bias; on the other side we have committed members who believe they have followed the rules regarding relationships with outside organizations that do not toe ALA’s moral line. They both seem to agree that the BSA’s practices are not in keeping with the values of the American Library Association, but on one side we have an impulse to boycott, on the other an impulse to inform.

As CentenniAL blogmeister and American Libraries Editorial Assistant Greg Landgraf has already observed on this blog, when it comes to controversial topics, nothing can compete with homosexuality. The controversy over the July/August 1992 cover took us all by surprise.

I was then managing editor, trying to produce a scintillating wrap-up of the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco. In those days, for whatever reason, we did not use stock photographs or the photographs taken by the official conference photographer in American Libraries; we took our own. Amateurish as they may have been, they were at least exclusive. It just so happened that the Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade that year occurred smack in the middle of the ALA conference. The Gay and Lesbian Task Force (this was before “Bisexual” and “Transgendered” were added to the moniker) had spread the word that a contingent would be marching in the parade.

At the appointed hour, I dashed over to the designated meeting spot, jumped into the street in front of the group and snapped a few photos. Several people were holding a blue and white sign that said “Gay and Lesbian Task Force, American Library Association” and featured two pairs of library-symbol figures holding hands.

When we got back to the office, the staff laid out all the best photographs we had taken on a table in a conference room at ALA Headquarters. We knew we wanted to find something from the conference that could go on the July/August cover, something that would represent San Francisco, that would be newsy, and that would say something about the spirit of the conference.

“I think this is the best one we’ve got,” then-editor Tom Gaughan said during the meeting, much to my surprise. Tom was always quick to conclude that while he could take a camera apart and put it back together again, I, who am a complete dunce when it comes to anything mechanical, always took better photographs. I was pleased—but not because a controversial photo would be on the cover, rather that it was a photo that I had taken. For the life of me, I do not remember any discussion about the possibility that the cover might raise eyebrows. Tom seemed to be of a mind that we had passed the time when anyone would object to anything simply because it said “gay and lesbian” on it. Poor naïve Tom, naïve us.

The response to that cover was immediate and sharply divided between those who wanted to “puke” and those who applauded and called us “courageous.” We received many letters and phone calls, more from the pukers than the supporters. We published 15 letters, spread over the next three issues. Readers began to feel they had to take sides. One reader called it a “happy, celebratory photograph,” while another saw it as an example of ALA’s “ceaseless advocacy of social issues.” Tom Gaughan wrote an editorial in the September issue (and gleefully reran the controversial cover to accompany it) in which he talked about the many phone calls he had received complaining about the cover. Some callers wondered about how humiliating it must be for the families of the people who appeared in the photo. “The fear and loathing in their voices was more eloquent than their words,” Tom wrote.

In the months that followed, I recall one of ALA’s great leaders saying in a public forum that she thought American Libraries had showed poor judgment in putting the photo on the cover. Her objection perplexed me at the time—since I recalled a Council session on some other topic in which she loudly proclaimed that she was a lesbian—but I now understand that she was objecting not to the gayness but to the fact that the cover appeared “unprofessional” to her.

Delighted as I am that in those days we created an interesting controversy, I do look back on the cover and realize that is was “unprofessional” in many ways. It was an amateur photograph (a horizontal that we turned into a vertical), and, as Greg Landgraf has pointed out, it was gratuitous in the sense that there was no editorial content inside the issue that supported its presence on the cover. We didn’t say a word about the parade or the round table in our coverage of the conference.

In a letter published in the November issue, Cal Gough identified himself as one of the people on the cover and noted, “Gays and lesbians are not going to disappear from professional associations, or disappear from libraries, or disappear from families and communities everywhere—no matter how many magazines we’re kept off the cover of or how many other ways some people try to deny, trivialize, or erase our existence.” Apparently, the cover had not humiliated him. If you are reading, Cal, I invite you any of the other dozen or so members whose faces are visible on that infamous cover, to add your recollections about how it affected your professional life—or didn’t.

So would I do it again if it were my choice to make? In the context of its time, absolutely. Today? Only with a better photograph. Personally, I’m on the look out for a nice shot of a Boy Scout leader shaking hands with a transgendered librarian.

—Leonard Kniffel, Editor in Chief, American Libraries

In early 2001, while I was an editor at (of all things) a woodworking magazine, a reader took me to task for reporting on what we were still terming the economic "slowdown."

"All you media people want bad things to happen just so you'll have something to write about," he accused. An interesting theory, I guess, although patently untrue: Hard times affect magazines too, and editors don't like watching co-workers get sacked and wondering if they'll be next any more than anyone else.

For American Libraries and the Association, the July/August 1992 issue had plenty of tumult, and therefore plenty to write about: Will Manley had been fired by the Wilson Library Bulletin (he would start his column in AL shortly after that), and several other WLB columnists had resigned in protest; ALA Executive Director Linda Crismond had resigned without warning or explanation that spring; and an earthquake had near Los Angeles while Annual was taking place in San Francisco.

And yet, the biggest controversy of the issue, and probably of any issue since, was a single photo of an event the magazine didn't even write about.

The ALA's Gay and Lesbian Task Force marched in San Francisco's Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day Parade, which happened to take place during Annual, and AL ran a photo of the group as the July/August cover.

Yikes.

AL Editor Tom Gaughan related some of the phone calls he received in response to the cover in his September editorial. One caller said he didn't want neighbors to see the magazine in his mailbox. Another said it threatened efforts to recruit people to the profession. Gaughan also reported on one member demanding immediate cancellation of her membership, and noted that "Some staff were disturbed by the fear and anger that they heard."

There were letters on the subject as well. "I was very displeased by the front cover displaying gay and lesbian librarians marching down Market Street in Downtown San Francisco; as a matter of fact I wanted to puke!" one reader wrote, while another praised "ALA's ongoing commitment to defending the rights of all people."

Puke? Really?

Fast-forward to October, when the stream of letters continued. One writer was "offended" at the picture on the cover, two were appalled by the "advocacy of social issues," one was pleased by the "happy, celebratory photograph," and several more touched on the issue while addressing "ALA's liberal agenda."

The issue peaked in November, with 12 more letters on the subject. This month's crop yielded a backlash to the backlash, as two-thirds of the letters were complimentary. One argued that the cover "made me proud to be part of an organization willing to take such a bold stand against prejudice"; another wrote that "It's amazing to me that anyone could feel much outrage at what was, after all, a single cover among hundreds of others over the years featuring photographs of heterosexual librarians."

But the angry letters, as they always seem to be, are more fun. One assured the editor that "homophobia" is misnamed: "We are not afraid of them.... We think homosexuality is WRONG—W-R-O-N-G." Another declared that "I am disgusted, appalled, and nauseated to see my professional association supporting a sexually perverse movement.... San Francisco reminds me of Biblical Sodom, which God destroyed because of its sin in this same area."

Today's reaction
I can't imagine that the reaction to a similar cover today would be so vitriolic. The "it's not a library issue" argument that some letter-writers made might apply, depending on precisely how the issue was framed; if so, that would likely have the most weight. After 15 years of increasing tolerance and visibility of homosexuals in society, I don't think a photo of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table (the Gay and Lesbian Task Force's successor) would still make anyone want to puke.

On the other hand, I'm young, I live in a major city, and contact with people who are gay is a more-or-less daily occurrence, so I may have a biased view. What do you think? Comments are open; if the floodgates open, you can be assured we'll come back to this topic again.

See page 2 of this post for scans of all the letters published in response to the July/August 1992 cover.

—Greg Landgraf, Editorial Assistant, American Libraries

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