Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era

Baumann, coordinator for the New York Public Library’s LGBT Initiative, brings together the photographs of two chroniclers of the 1960s and 1970s gay rights movement, Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies, in this moving collection that accompanies an upcoming exhibit at the New York Public Library. Baumann describes Lahusen’s photos as “working for rights-based inclusion” while Davies’s “called for the radical questioning of society as a whole.” The photos—candids taken in homes, at protests, at parties—document an evolution of activism (mostly in major cities on the East Coast), a burgeoning public pride, and a diverse group of figures: Barbara Gittings, Lahusen’s activist partner (and frequent subject) who participated in events including a 1965 march on the White House protesting federal bans on hiring gays and lesbians and a “Hug a Homosexual” booth at a 1971 American Library Association conference; Frank Kameny, the first openly gay candidate for Congress; and Martha P. Johnson, cofounder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and a protester at Stonewall. Baumann organizes the more than 100 photographs into four sections, each about a “mode of resistance”: visibility, love, pride, and protest. Baumann’s brief captions provide details about the actions and lives of the players that shaped history with their bravery. This collection provides important archival visuals to a still-underreported slice of history. (Mar.)