Product Code Database
Katherine Lahusen (also known as Kay Tobin; January 5, 1930 – May 26, 2021) was an American photographer, writer and gay rights activist. She was the first openly lesbian American photojournalism.Riordan, Kevin (Fall 2001). "Together they sparked a movement: Gay Pioneers Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen reflect on their 40-year political—and personal—partnership". Visions Today; pp. 17–19, 38 Under Lahusen's art direction, photographs of appeared on the cover of The Ladder for the first time. It was one of many projects she undertook with partner Barbara Gittings, who was then The Ladders editor. As an activist, Lahusen was involved with the founding of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in 1970 and the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). She contributed writing and photographs to a New York–based Gay Newsweekly and Come Out!, and co-authored two books: The Gay Crusaders in 1972 with Randy Wicker (under her pen name Kay Tobin) and Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, collecting their photographs with Diana Davies in 2019.
Several covers showed various women willing to pose in profile, or in sunglasses, but by the mid-1960s Lahusen was able to persuade some women to have their faces shown on the cover, including Lilli Vincenz, who had been discharged from the military when she was outed, and Ernestine Eckstein, an African American lesbian activist who picketed the White House in 1965. By the end of Gittings' period as editor, Lahusen remembered there was a waiting list of women who wanted to be full-face on the cover of the magazine. She wrote articles in The Ladder under the name Kay Tobin, a name she picked out of the phone book, and which she found was easier for people to pronounce.
Lahusen photographed Gittings and other people who picketed federal buildings and Independence Hall in the mid- to late- 1960s. She contributed photographs and articles to a Manhattan newspaper called Gay Newsweekly, and worked in New York City's Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, the first bookstore devoted to better literature on gay themes, and to disseminating materials that promoted a gay political agenda. She worked with Gittings in the gay caucus of the American Library Association, and photographed thousands of activists, marches, and events in the 1960s and 1970s. Frank Kameny and Jack Nichols and many other gay activists became her subjects.
Lahusen participated in activism via organizing as well as art. In the 1960s she held and photographed "Annual Reminder" pickets in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the Fourth of July. In 1970, Lahusen was part of the founding of the original Gay Activists Alliance, and in 1972 worked to push the American Psychological Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As part of the latter, she also photographed John E. Fryer wearing the disguise he donned to protect his reputation when he addressed the APA convention as a gay psychiatrist. Homosexuality was dropped as a diagnosis the following year. Recalling her work from the perspective of 2021, Kevin Jennings, head of Lambda Legal, said, "It is impossible to overstate Kay’s importance in the struggle for LGBT rights and dignity."
In 2007, all of Lahusen's photos and writings and Gittings' papers and writings were donated to the New York Public Library. press release, April 25, 2007; retrieved December 26, 2007. Lahusen and Gittings were together for 46 years when Gittings died of breast cancer on February 18, 2007, aged 74. Lahusen was working on collecting her photographs for a photography scrapbook on the history of the gay rights movement when Gittings' illness put the plans on hold. In 2015, she collaborated with Tracy Baim who wrote a biography of Gittings called Barbara Gittings, gay pioneer, illustrated with Lahusen’s photographs. The same year, Lahusen appeared on the podium at a Philadelphia event celebrating both the history and future of gay rights, soon after the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. In 2019, she and Diana Davies published Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, collecting their photographs. A review in The Guardian described the collection as "priceless pictures of LGBTQ pioneers".
Until shortly before her death, Lahusen resided in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, in an assisted living facility. She died at Chester County Hospital, Pennsylvania, on May 26, 2021, after a brief illness. She was 91. A plot of land at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., next to the burial place of Gittings has been allotted to Lahusen. The ashes of both will be interred inside a stone bench engraved with the motto they helped popularize: "Gay is good."
|
|
