Gay Roxane - Love and Resistance Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era

LOVE AND RESISTANCE

LOVE AND RESISTANCE

OUT OF THE CLOSET
INTO THE STONEWALL ERA

Photographs by Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies

From the New York Public Library Archives

Edited by Jason Baumann

With an Introduction by Roxane Gay

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

NEW YORK LONDON

This book is dedicated to the activists depicted in these photographs, whose vision and courage changed our world, and to the staff of the New York Public Library, who have preserved this history for future generations.

T he photographs of Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies are among the great queer treasures of the New York Public Library. The library holds major collections of their work in its Manuscripts and Archives Division, which has one of the largest collections of LGBTQ and AIDS activist history in the United States. For me personally, Lahusens and Daviess photographs have been a guide to the characters, events, and movements in LGBTQ history in the 1960s and 70s. When I first started working on the librarys LGBTQ Initiative in 2008, my background was in LGBTQ literature and poetry. Though I had been a member of the AIDS activist organization ACT UP and a longtime member of the gay liberation movement the Radical Faeries, I didnt know that gay and lesbian activists had marched on the Pentagon in 1965 or that the lesbian activists with Lavender Menace had disrupted the National Organization for Womens conference in 1970. I didnt know about the dances at the Gay Activists Alliance Firehouse or the drag queen activism of Lee Brewster with the Queens Liberation Front either. Lahusens and Daviess photographs provided me with a map to a generation of LGBTQ activism. It has been an honor for my colleagues at the library and me to help preserve and share this history with researchers and the public.

Although their photographs are widely cited and reproduced in histories of LGBTQ politics and culture, little attention has been paid to Lahusen and Davies themselves. When we started the librarys LGBTQ Initiative, one of our first priorities was digitizing the entire archive of Lahusens and Daviess photographs. This has greatly expanded access to their work but hasnt always provided them with the recognition that they deserve. On the internet, images are often taken out of context and are presented without proper attribution. Besides which, like so many photographers, they preferred to be behind the camera and out of the spotlight.

In 2019, the library is holding an exhibition called Love and Resistance: Stonewall at 50 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and to give the public a look into the depth and breadth of our archives. This exhibit will document the growth of national political consciousness in LGBTQ communities in the 1960s leading up to the Stonewall Riots and the tremendous explosion of LGBTQ culture and activism in the 1970s. By featuring Lahusens and Daviess photographs along with political ephemera, posters, flyers, magazines, newspapers, and artifacts, we hope to illuminate the history of this period in context. This volume is an opportunity to focus just on the photographers achievements.

In this book we have attempted to bring Lahusens and Daviess photographs into conversation. At first glance, they might seem like an odd pairing. Lahusen came of age during the homophile activist movement of the 1960s. As one can see in her photographs of demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in 1965, a small but pioneering cadre of LGBTQ activists at that time courageously demanded a place at the table in society, often focusing on civil rights related to employment, including the right to serve in the military. She later aligned with the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which took a rights-based approach to LGBTQ activism in the 1970s, focusing on civil rights legislation and the right to privacy, in addition to community building. One of their main initiatives in New York in the 70s was working for the passage of antidiscrimination legislation. Both the homophile activists and GAA were reformist in character, fighting to make space for gays and lesbians in society. In contrast, Davies was in the thick of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the Radicalesbians, and Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which endeavored to embrace a wider range of feminist, Marxist, transgender, and antiracist perspectives. Instead of working for rights-based inclusion in existing institutions, the GLF called for the radical questioning of society as a whole, including the nuclear family and the government. They were calling for revolutionary cultural transformation.

Viewed in tandem, one can see that Lahusen and Davies each attempted to bring a new perspective to depictions of LGBTQ people. And they often provide complementary views of pivotal people and events. In fact, although these two political tendencies are often seen as opposing forces in gay liberation, through these photographers pictures one can see that there was tremendous crossover among these communities. For instance, Daviess pictures capture GLF, Radicalesbian, and STAR members at a rally for Intro 475, which was an early antidiscrimination bill in New York. And Lahusens photos document transgender activists like Sylvia Rivera and leather and fetish activists at gay liberation conferences. Both of them documented the early Christopher Street Liberation Day marches, so we can see those events through both of their eyes. Viewing their works in conversation offers us a deeper understanding of the web of LGBTQ liberation movements of the era, and of both of their ranges as documentary photographers and their values as individual activists.

KAY LAHUSEN WAS BORN IN CINCINNATI, Ohio, in 1930. She became involved in the homophile movement in 1961, when she joined the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national organization for lesbians in the United States. Founded in San Francisco in 1955, the Daughters of Bilitis served as a forum for lesbians to meet and discuss identity, politics, and literature. Like many other early LGBTQ rights groups at the time, they held social events and public forums about homosexuality; they also published a journal. Lahusen soon met activist Barbara Gittings, founder of the East Coast chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, who became her partner, in activism and in life. In 1964, Gittings was appointed editor of The Ladder, the groups magazine, and Lahusen became its art editor, working under the pseudonym Kay Tobin. Lahusen, who had owned a box camera as a child, had always been interested in photography. She quickly and thoroughly transformed the visual identity of The Ladder, which had previously featured line drawings and cartoons for covers and illustrations. Lahusen and her subjects took a leap and replaced the publications timid illustrations with bold photographs of actual living lesbians. Her photos depicted lesbians as happy, capable, vibrant human beings, often in couples, although at times they were pictured wearing sunglasses or photographed from behind to protect their anonymity. The lesbians in her pictures have lives, lovers, and careers. In the two years of her tenure as art editor of The Ladder, Lahusen and the other photographers she enlisted created a new image for lesbians in the United States, going beyond the tragic and lurid caricatures of psychiatry and pulp fiction.

In addition to their editorial and photographic work in the 1960s, Lahusen and Gittings participated in some of the most pioneering LGBTQ political demonstrations in the United States, marches for gay rights on the White House, the Pentagon, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which Lahusen documented for the emerging gay and lesbian press. After the Stonewall Riots in 1969, Lahusen was a professional photojournalist in the gay press, amassing an archive of almost a thousand photographs that are now in the New York Public Librarys collection.