Barbara Gittings
American librarian, LGBT rights activist (1932–2007)
Barbara Gittings (July 31, 1932 – February 18, 2007) was an American LGBTQ activist. She started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1958, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people in the United States government, the largest employer of the country at the time. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, especially its Task Force on Gay Liberation, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in the early 1970s.
She was awarded an American Library Association Honorary Membership, and the ALA named an annual award for the best LGBTQ novel the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. GLAAD also named an activist award for her.
Early life and education
Barbara Gittings was born to Elizabeth (née Brooks) Gittings and John Sterett Gittings Jr. in Vienna, Austria, where her father was serving as a United States diplomat. Barbara Gittings and her siblings attended Catholic schools in Montreal. At one point in her childhood, she considered becoming a nun.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q468860. VIAF identifies the subject as 73454853. The Library of Congress control number is no97012992. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 2007, 1958 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara Gittings” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.