On National Coming Out Day last Tuesday, the Gittings-Lahusen gay and lesbian book collection was donated to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library.
The collection contains approximately 1,000 titles dating from the late 1920s to the present day and represents a lifetime of collecting by two important gay rights activists, Barbara Gittings and her life partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen.
During the past 40 years, Gittings has been considered part of the reason why there has been a fundamental shift in thinking toward gay rights and the gay community. She organized the first gay rights protest at the White House in 1965, helped end the medical classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder and started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (First Lesbian Society).
This priceless collection was brought to the University of Massachusetts with the help of Anne L. Moore, Robert S. Cox and their friendship with Kay Tobin Lahusen. The Du Bois Library was a perfect fit for these books considering the large gay community present in both Amherst and Northampton.
Gittings began collecting the books following her coming out during her freshman year at Northwestern University in an effort to find as much material to help her understand her gay identity. Within this collection there is a great number of varied writings such as books by gay authors, gay-themed books by straight authors, personal accounts of gay experiences, sociological writings on gays, positive as well as negative writings about the gay community and several issues of The Ladder (a magazine published from 1956-1972) edited by Barbara Gittings.
The collection is home to the winner of the first Gay Book Award, "A Place For Us," a novel by Isabel Miller written in 1969. The books encourage a strong understanding of these diverse experiences that gay individuals have had with social change and the varied perspectives and approaches they have adopted in pursing it.
The head of the Special Collections and University Archives, Robert S. Cox, admires Gittings and the steps she took to fight for the equality of gays in society.
"Barbara Gittings is a legend in Philadelphia as well as in the gay community," he said. Cox also suggested the gay rights struggle "is part of a much larger struggle for social equality and social justice."
"Fighting for one in isolation does not get at the root problem. All of these social issues are related and must be addressed as a whole," he said.
"Through analyzing and studying the literature, historians and activists hope to learn more about what strategies have worked in the past in the struggle for gay equality. By looking to the past, they hope to learn from prior mistakes so that they may plan more effectively in the current and future struggle for gay equality."
The department of Special Collections and University Archives is in discussion with other groups and individuals in the Commonwealth to obtain other records and physical accounts of gay experience. So far, as informed by Cox, "the likelihood of acquiring more documents to add to the archives looks promising."
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