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Trott, Jr., Ph.D. Licensed Clinical Psychologist — Doctorate I68 Bottery Street, Burlington, Vermont 05401 802.862.0836 ctrott@together.net °{%-°<%°{%t=-°%¢*°fi%-i—“r°{%»“-*°%~’P°%°?<}¢é°{% theme of Pride for this month’s issue of our fine newspaper, I at first thought to search out some lesbian who had been present at the Stonewall Inn the night of the infamous raid. Rumor has it that several were there, but they seem apparitional at best. All the better, I thought, when I couldn’t find a specific woman to write about. It was hardly the beginning of the Gay Rights movement after all, it was hardly the first gay In order to contribute to the . bar raid, it was not even the first time the patrons of a raided bar fought back (a raid on what was termed a “molly house” in London in1725 was met with “determined and violent resist- ance” . The lesbian rights movement has its roots in the women’s movement, which first gained real momentum in the mid-1800s. Unfortunately, the beginning women’s movement had no room for “immoral _ women” — unmarried mothers, divorcees or homosexuals — and the more radical factions broke away early on. Some leaders such as Anna Rtiling and Emma Goldman wanted to join forces with the gay men’s groups which began forming in Germany in the late 1800s, and spoke ardently in favor of gay rights. In 1953 two women, Phyllis Lyons and Del Martin, founded the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian group, in San Francisco. They took the name from a French novel by Pierre Louy which included some les- bian love poems. The member- ship ofthe Daughters of Bilitis remained small, less than a dozen, until they began to pro- duce a newsletter called The Ladder, edited by Phyllis Lyons, who, for the first three issues, used a pseudonym. Women from all over discovered The Ladder and turned to the DOB in despera- tion. These women were living in complete isolation with no idea why they felt as they did, or that there was anyone else like them. In the 1950s, the U.S. was still largely rural, and it was easy for a girl growing up in a town of a thousand people to have no idea that what she was feeling was even possible let alone common. “Every one of them felt like she was the only voice cry- ing out in the wilderness,” Billye Talmadge, an early mem- ber, remarked in a 1990s inter- view. The newsletter attracted many new members, and the DOB fomied chapters in other U.S. cities and even one in Australia. . DOB gave lesbians information that would help them navigate through a homo- phobic world. Many gay people thought that being homosexual was a crime, but it was only cer- tain sexual acts that were crimes. So the DOB let their members know that they should not plead guilty just because they were arrested in a gay bar. Also, the term ‘homosexual’ legally referred to a gay man, so the DOB suggested that a les- bian say no ifa policeman or court official asked whether she was a homosexual. ‘ One of the main mis- sions of the DOB was to pro- vide gay women with a meeting place other than the’ bars. The bars could be a dangerous proposition: they were continu-- ally raided, and the names of those arrested were put into the newspaper, alerting families and employers, often with serious consequences. Billye Talmadge hosted ‘gab ‘n’ javas’- in her home I where she would introduce a topic and keep the conversation going. One’ topic was “how to make a butch into a dolly. It was about how to accommodate to a given situation. You have to remember how dangerous the world was then.” Assimilation was an important ideal to the Daughters of Bilitis. America in the 19505 was a dangerous place to stick out. There were no legal protec- tions to fend off discrimination and almost no acceptance among those who were not gay. The May 1966 issue of The Ladder featured an article on how to “select the most hetero- sexual answers” on personality tests used by potential employ- ers. In 1956 Barbara Gittings attended her first DOB business meeting. She was amazed to find herself in a room — in_a house, not a bar — with a dozen other lesbians. She had made her way to California on a vacation searching out the gay movement. Two years later, Del and Phyllis asked her to start a chapter in New York, even though she was living in Fhiladelphia. “I guess they had sized me up as someone who would take the bit and run a lit- tle,” Gittings said in a later interview. “They were right.” By the 1960s, Gittings and her partner, Kay Lahusen, who had also helped found the New York chapter of the DOB, were tired of the assimilationist position taken by the DOB and the gay movement as a whole. A friend of theirs, Frank Kameny, put forward a new direction for the gay movement: gays should no longer fade into the woodwork, no longer wait for the researchers and psychol- ogists to give them a clean bill of mental health; it was time for the gay movement to declare itself gay and proud. A The Daughters of Bilitis could not go with this Many gay people thought that being homosexual was a crime, but it was only certain sexual fits that were crimes. view. They had been working with the psychologists and researchers to prove that homo- sexuals were as well—adjusted as straight people, and they wanted to continue this track. Gittings was then the editor of The Ladder, butbetween her dissat- isfaction with the organization and the distance '— she was on the East Coast, the publication in California — she eventually ended that role and broke away from the Daughters of Bilitis. The Daughters of Bilitis are essentially defunct now. The Stonewall Riots marked an important turning point for the gay movement and the early groups, Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, did not survive the shift . in thinking from pre- to post- Stonewall. It is important to remember that without these first groups, founded by incredi- bly brave women and men, there would not have been fuel for the Stonewall riots, for the Gay Liberation Front, for the gay marriage >