Daughters of Bilitis breakfast (left-to-right: Del Martin, Josie, Jan, Marge, Bev Hickok, Phyllis Ly

Daughters of Bilitis breakfast (left-to-right: Del Martin, Josie, Jan, Marge, Bev Hickok, Phyllis Lyon), San Francisco, California 1959. Photo from BoxTurtleBulletin.com, c/o GLBT History Museum. On October 19, 1955, sixty-one years ago today, a small group of lesbians in San Francisco held the first official meeting of the Daughters of Bilitis (DoB), the first organization dedicated to advancing the civil and political rights of lesbians in the United States. The founding members, including Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, Rose Bamberger, Noni Frey, Rosemary Sliepen, and Marcia Foster, were couples that met through mutual friends and initially had little in the way of a plan for the new organization. Lyon later said of Bamberger’s original plan that, “she wanted it to be in people’s homes and she wanted it to be so we’d be able to dance…You couldn’t dance in the bars in those days. And she loved to dance. That was the whole idea behind it.” The name, Daughters of Bilitis, refers to Pierre Louys’ work “Songs of Bilitis,” an epic body of essentially lesbian erotic poetry; the group decided to pronounce it Bill-EE-tis because Bill-EYE-tis sounded too much like a disease. From there, DoB grew into the most important organization for lesbian rights in the early homophile movement: chapters from the national body participated in the earliest gay rights demonstrations at, among other places, the White House and Independence Hall; DoB produced pioneers including Lyon and Martin, Barbara Gittings, Kay Tobin, Ernestine Eckstein, and Jeanne Cordova; and the organization created the first monthly newsletter for American lesbians, “The Ladder,” which many referred to as “a lifeline.” DoB remained active until 1970, and “The Ladder” survived until 1972. For more, please see “Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement,” by Marcia Gallo. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #QueerHistoryMatters #HavePrideInHistory #DaughtersOfBilitis (at San Francisco, California) -- source link
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