Barbara Gittings Way

In the heart of the Gayborhood, the block of Locust Street between 12th and 13th carries an honorary name: Barbara Gittings Way, dedicated on October 1, 2012, to the woman often called the Mother of the LGBT Civil Rights Movement. Gittings (1932-2007) spent five decades in the fight, much of it from Philadelphia. She edited The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication, in the mid-1960s, and stood beside Frank Kameny organizing the Annual Reminders — the July 4th pickets at Independence Hall from 1965 to 1969 that were the country's first sustained gay demonstrations. Her later campaigns changed daily life in quieter ways. She badgered the American Library Association into recognizing gay books — famously staffing a 'Hug a Homosexual' booth at its 1971 conference — so that isolated readers could find themselves on a shelf. And she was central to the campaign that pushed the American Psychiatric Association to strike homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973, the single change that rewrote what every institution could say about queer people. What you see today: a standard green street sign bearing her name, amid the Gayborhood's rainbow crosswalks and rainbow-tipped street signs — with Giovanni's Room, the country's oldest LGBTQ bookstore, a block away, and a companion 'Edie Windsor Way' sign nearby. Gittings also has a state historical marker at 21st and Locust. The sign is a small thing; the reason it exists is not.