Kay Tobin Lahusen (1930–2021)

Three years after Stonewall, a couple of queer journalists, veterans of the movement themselves, set out to do chapter-length in-depth interviews with fifteen prominent lesbian and gay activists around the USA. The subjects included people like Phyllis Lyon and her partner Del Martin, founders of the pioneering San Francisco lesbian organisation, Daughters of Bilitis; Troy Perry, who set up the Metropolitan Community Church; Jack Nichols, first editor of The Advocate; Barbara Gittings, Kay show more Lahusen’s partner and the editor of the lesbian journal The Ladder and Frank Kameny, who fought his dismissal from the Civil Service right up to the Supreme Court and founded the Washington DC Mattachine Society.

We hear from the interviewees about the problems facing lesbians and gay men at this moment when the gay community was still struggling to get its voice heard in public. Discrimination in employment (especially in government and the military) and housing, “sodomy” laws that were still on the books, if not often enforced, in many states, the damaging consensus still prevalent in the psychiatric profession that homosexuality should be treated as a disease, exclusion from marriage or partnership benefits, vilification by most churches, and so on. Plus the perennial difficulty of getting men (gay or otherwise) to listen to what lesbians had to say. Scary to think how many of those problems are still not entirely resolved (at least in the USA) fifty years on…

As well as getting them to talk about their work as activists, Lahusen and Wicker asked their subjects about their backgrounds and coming-out experiences, and about their everyday lives now — partners, homes, day-jobs and so on. Clearly a big part of the project was to provide role-models and paths into the gay community for closeted readers, and perhaps also to make any straight people who picked this up out of curiosity reflect how these are just normal people like the rest of us. show less

A good introduction to a dozen liberation activists. Far from complete, it does provide insight into the evolving movement.