Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
by Marcia Gallo
Carroll & Graff. 274 pages, $25.95
IN 1955, Rose Bamberger, a Filipina lesbian, brought together four couples to form a “secret society of lesbians” in San Francisco. She wanted to be able to dance, drink, and socialize without the fear of harassment or arrest that homosexuals risked at the bars. At the first meeting someone suggested that the group be called the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) (bil-EE-tis). An English translation of Pierre Louÿs’ 1894 book of poems, Les chansons de Bilitis, had been published that year, and it seemed an obscure, even highbrow, name for a subversive organization. An equally arcane name had been selected in 1950 for a “homophile” group that had been founded in Los Angeles: the Mattachine Society. Its founder, Harry Hay, was a member of the Communist Party and envisioned the Mattachine as a radical secret society for homosexual men. However, the conservative climate of Cold War America and Red-baiting by the L.A. press caused Mattachine to marginalize Hay by 1953.
While DOB was launched as a discreet lesbian social club, it struggled throughout its history with various polarities: secrecy vs. publicity, assimilationist vs. radical politics, and affiliation with male homosexual politics vs. the emerging feminist movement. These political conflicts are no less relevant today as the lgbtqi (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex) “community” continues to debate just how inclusive it should be of diverse identities—all those initials!—and how much political capital should be expended on assimilationist goals like gay marriage and military service. Marcia Gallo’s history of DOB is essential reading not just for the tremendous historical service of documenting a pioneering homosexual organization, but also because of its relevance for contemporary lgbtqi politics. While the DOB is not well known to younger queers, it is central to American LGB history. Therefore, Different Daughters is long overdue, and thanks to Gallo’s interviews with 37 former members, research in DOB archives, and a lively style, it is at once a scholarly and poignant history (and winner of a 2007 Lambda Literary award).
The founding members gleefully fashioned DOB as a sorority and selected colors, an insignia (a sapphire blue and gold triangle), and a motto (“Qui vive” or “On the alert”—appropriate for a secret society). DOB’s early mission was also to promote education on “sex variants.” Assimilation and respectability were critical to the early Daughters. In order to prevent charges of corruption of minors, a new member had to prove that she was over 21, and the rules stipulated that she had to be a “Gay girl of good moral character.” They were uneasy when three women arrived at an early meeting dressed in men’s clothes. The members soon decided to establish a dress code: slacks were allowed only if they were women’s slacks. It must be remembered that the 1950’s were an extremely oppressive time for homosexuals; gender variant individuals, in particular, were subjected to regular police harassment.
By 1956, the Mattachine Society and its spin-off, ONE, Inc., had bravely launched into fighting for homophile civil rights in California. Two of the founding members of DOB, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, inspired by this activist agenda, started pushing DOB to become more politically engaged. Lyon and Martin would go on to become two heroes of progressive political activism. In 2004, they were the first couple to get married at San Francisco City Hall after Mayor Gavin Newsom’s authorization of marriage licenses for same-sex couples (later overturned by the Supreme Court of California).
DOB began having biennial public national conventions in 1960. However, individual chapters were fairly small, with only twenty to thirty women at each meeting. DOB’s real public presence was its newsletter, The Ladder, which began publication in 1956. “Lisa Ben,” a typist at a Hollywood movie studio, had hand-produced a little gay newsletter from 1947 to 1948, Vice Versa: “America’s Gayest Magazine” (!). The Ladder, however, was the first widely distributed and publicly sold lesbian publication. At its peak its paid subscribers were fewer than a thousand, and its political influence was undoubtedly quite limited. However, as Gallo’s interviews point out, the value of The Ladder was as much symbolic as ideological. While lesbians might be fearful to buy it or subscribe, the important thing was that it was available at newsstands and bookstores in large cities. It was circulated among friends and made its way overseas. The Ladder was the national backbone of DOB and bared the group’s political struggles as the polite homophile era increasingly gave way to angrier gay liberation movement of the 60’s and 70’s.
The Ladder’s intelligent, literate essays and reviews displayed an ambitious range of lesbian and gay political opinion, cultural criticism, and even sociological analysis (much more so than today’s glossy gay magazines). Early DOB activist Florence Jaffy was a social scientist who believed that accurate sociological and psychological data on lesbians could shift the dominant pathologizing view in psychiatry. Shortly after psychologist Evelyn Hooker began publishing her groundbreaking articles on “normal” homosexual men, Jaffy conducted a survey of DOB members. In 1959, under the pseudonym Florence Conrad, she published an analysis of the results: “Some Facts About Lesbians.” She acknowledged that her sample was not necessarily representative of all U.S. lesbians; nonetheless, her data presented a far more wholesome image of lesbians than the one in the mainstream press. DOB respondents were highly educated, professional, predominantly white, and well-adjusted: fewer than a third had sought psychotherapy or were unhappy about their homosexuality. Furthermore, Jaffy facilitated other researchers’ access to DOB members in order to correct the existing literature’s reliance on clinical informants.
Jaffy’s trust in the liberating power of science was challenged in the mid-1960’s by Franklin Kameny in a series of articles debating the political value of science to homophile rights. Kameny was an astrophysicist who had been purged from his government job in 1957 because of his homosexuality. He founded the Washington chapter of the Mattachine in 1961. By the 1960’s, the tenor of political activism was shifting from polite accommodation to loud direct action thanks to the model of the black civil rights movement. Influenced by the “Black is Beautiful” rallying cry, Kameny coined the phrase “Gay is Good.” He forcefully announced in The Ladder (May 1965) that “emphasis on research has had its day!” As a scientist, he claimed that the existing literature was biased and poorly conducted. Homosexuals were the real experts on their own lives. “We are right,” he wrote. “We must demand our rights, boldly, not beg cringingly for mere privileges.” He made the disease model of homosexuality the target of Washington Mattachine activism, which would eventually result in the removal of homosexuality from the psychiatric nosology in 1973.
The most active Daughters, like Martin and Lyon, as well as Kay Lahusen and Barbara Gittings on the East Coast, were increasingly pushing for more visibility. After 1964, Martin and Lyon devoted increasing energies to the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH), a coalition of homophiles and progressive religious leaders in San Francisco. The CRH sponsored public relations events, pickets, and large fundraisers. Its colorful 1965 New Year’s Day ball was disrupted by the police. Those arrested successfully challenged the heavy-handed police action in a major first victory for gay rights in the city. Some DOB board members were uncomfortable with affiliating with other organizations and with direct action tactics like picketing. In 1965, Del Shearer, founder of the Chicago DOB chapter and vice president of the national board, resigned from DOB because she felt direct action was premature. In 1966, Martin and Lyon also became inactive members of DOB after becoming frustrated by its lack of support for the CRH and public activism in general.
Barbara Gittings, who passed away in February 2007, was one of the movement’s greatest and most enduring pioneers. She founded the New York chapter of DOB in 1958 and was editor of The Ladder from 1963 to 1966. At the 1972 American Psychiatric Association meeting, Gittings and Kameny shared a panel with a masked gay psychiatrist, Dr. Anonymous (John E. Fryer), arguing for the depathologization of homosexuality. Gittings and her partner Lahusen felt their primary activist commitment was to homosexual rights in solidarity with gay men. As feminism grew in strength in the late 1960’s, DOB was torn between affiliation with the broader feminist cause or with gay rights. Mainstream feminism, however, did not welcome lesbians with open arms. The National Organization for Women’s founder, Betty Friedan, was notoriously hostile to lesbians and feared the “lavender menace” would taint the feminist cause. Lesbian feminists successfully challenged this; however, the separatist, anti-male rhetoric of some “Radicalesbians” would alienate DOB members like Gittings and Lahusen. Some DOB members complained about Gittings’ inclusion of male authors and the gay male perspective in The Ladder and she was fired as editor in 1966.
Conflict between activist members in individual chapters and the cautious national DOB board led to a radical reorganization proposal at the 1968 national meeting. Then DOB president Sherry Willer and her partner Marion Glass felt the bureaucracy of national DOB leadership impeded the individual city chapters from rapidly responding to local political needs. Their plan for autonomous chapters had to be shelved because of sparse attendance at the 1968 meeting in Denver (only twelve attendees). DOB was beginning to fracture. Some of its most active members were devoting their energies to a burgeoning roster of progressive causes and groups in the late 1960’s: black civil rights, feminism, the Gay Liberation Front, poverty, etc. Publication venues for women had also greatly expanded thanks to diverse feminist collectives.
In spring of 1970 The Ladder suffered a hostile takeover when its mailing list, production tools, and back copies were transferred from its San Francisco office to Sparks, Nevada, by its editor, Barbara Grier, and DOB president, Rita Laporte. They claimed they wanted to preserve the magazine in the face of DOB’s decline into increasingly fractious political infighting. They dropped the subtitle, “A Lesbian Review,” and shifted the magazine’s objectives to align it with the broader feminist cause. This new autonomy instead hastened its collapse, since it had relied on an anonymous DOB benefactress. This subsidy stopped after The Ladder cut its ties with DOB, and it ceased publication in 1972.
During the July 1970 DOB national convention, attendees agreed to decentralize the organization, giving autonomy to the local chapters as had been proposed two years earlier. The leaders of the Los Angeles chapter, Bo Siewert and Carole Sheperd, giddily announced that “Ancient by-laws were abolished, stuffy closet queens were dethroned and Bo and Carole paved the way to a new, young and thriving organization.” In addition to the political fracture lines, a generational gap was increasingly evident. By the mid-1970’s there were twenty small DOB chapters, some springing up for just a few years. The original San Francisco chapter evaporated in 1978, perhaps a result of its own success; by then there were so many other social venues and political organizations where lesbians were welcome. The Boston chapter, which had only started in 1969, was probably the last one to survive but eventually dissolved in 1995.
Discussing Gallo’s book with my friend and colleague, Paula Bennett, elicited powerful memories, since the Boston chapter had been her first refuge as a freshly out-of-the closet lesbian: “The book touches sore points for me, as I was involved with DOB from 1974 to 1980 and it was a very messy time and all I could think of toward the end is why the hell are we fighting each other when the enemy is out there! It really drove me nuts! So, ultimately, I quit too.”
In the half century since DOB was founded, the social and cultural experience of lesbians and gay men has changed radically. The original members could never have imagined that Sapphic love would have leapt from the pages of obscure French poetry to gigantic billboards promoting “The L-word.” Lesbians would finally gain the right to love and to marry (at least in Massachusetts). For this progress, we should all be thankful to the Daughters and to Marcia Gallo for bringing to life their tumultuous and inspiring history. Progressive activists, however, should also read Gallo’s narrative as a cautionary tale of political infighting leading to burnout, something we especially cannot afford in the years ahead.
Vernon Rosario is associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and the author of Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates.
