If you'll hold my hand we'll chase your dream across the sky
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up & away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Balloon...
Up, up, & away...
Jimmy Webb
1967
I have never been in a hot air balloon. It is one of the many things on the list of things I want to experience before I go. I sense that I need to start checking off that list. Tell me, have you ever been up in a balloon?
I was thinking about lesbians today, (& who of us does not?), preparing for the post below. I have been dumbstruck by the lack of attention this story got in the mainstream press. Americans love a Hero Story, & yet I have seen no accounts in our country’s press of this story.
They were doing one of those things that lesbians do better than most of us- Camping. Hege Dalen & her spouse Toril Hansen were camping on an island when the couple were among the first responders to assist victims following the shooting massacre in Norway last week, when a Right Wing Christian gunman- Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting rampage at a youth camp on Utoya island.
Dalen & Hansen made 4 trips back forth in their small boat, picking up injured, bloodied & scared young people.
Dalen & Hansen were near Utöyan having dinner on the opposite shore across from the ill-fated campsite, when they began to hear gunfire & screaming on the island.
Dalen: “We were eating. Then shooting & then the awful screaming. We saw how the young people ran in panic into the lake.”
The couple immediately took action & pushed the boat into Lake Tyrifjorden. Dalen & Hansen drove the boat to the island, picked up from the water victims in shock in, the young wounded, & transported them to the opposite shore to the mainland, all the while there were bullets flying overhead. They returned to the island 4 times. The couple were able to rescue 40 young people from the killer.
Heroes like Dalen & Hansen need to be part of the story when reported in the press. The Right Wingers call gay people many degrading names, but a HOMO HERO is a term that they just might choke on.
During an era when very few gay people dared come out in private, much less in public, Barbara Gittings was a vocal & visible figure in the fledgling fight for gay rights.
In the late 1950s, she founded the NYC chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national organization for lesbians, even though she lived in Philadelphia. In the 1960s, she took part in early gay rights demonstrations at the White House & Liberty Square in Philadelphia. In the early 1970s, she helped lobby the American Psychiatric Association to change its stance on homosexuality; in 1973, the APA invalidated the definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder.
Gittings also strove to make information about gay men & lesbians more widely available in libraries. Though not a librarian by training, she was for many years the head of the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force; she coordinated & edited the association’s comprehensive bibliography of literature by & about gay people.
Gittings felt keenly aware of the need for such a bibliography as a young woman, when she scoured local libraries, seeking, but seldom seeing, something that would help her understand her own life.
Gittings was born on July 31, 1932, in Vienna, where her father was a member of the United States diplomatic corps. Returning to the United States when Barbara was young. When she was a teenager, her father caught her reading The Well of Loneliness, the 1928 novel of lesbian love by the English writer Radclyffe Hall. He told her, via a letter, to burn the book. Gittings father mailed the letter, when he could not bring himself to speak to her.
Gittings studied theatre at Northwestern, but she was increasingly distracted by the need to learn as much as she could about homosexuality. She haunted the libraries of Chicago, unearthing little that was relevant & nothing that was encouraging.
Gittings: "I had to find bits & pieces under headings like ‘sexual perversion’, ‘invert, or ‘sexual aberration’ in books on abnormal psychology. I kept thinking, ‘It’s me they’re writing about, but it doesn’t feel like me at all.’"
She left Northwestern after her freshman year, & for decades she supported her activism with clerical jobs. In 1958, commuting from her home in Philadelphia, Gittings started the NYC chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, which was founded in San Francisco in 1955; she later edited the organization’s national newsletter- The Ladder. In 1965, she took part in one of the first gay rights pickets of the White House, in an effort to end discrimination against gay people in federal employment.
Gittings received many awards, among them honorary membership in the American Library Association. The Free Library of Philadelphia named its gay & lesbian collection for her, & the NY Public Library acquired the papers of Ms. Gittings & her partner Kay Tobin Lahusen, which chronicle more than half a century in the gay rights movement.
She appeared in the documentaries Out of the Past, Gay Pioneers, Before Stonewall & After Stonewall.
Gittings died of cancer in her home on February 2007 at 74 years old.
Lahusen: “Before Barbara died, we went jointly into an assisted-living facility here, Our last bit of activism was to come out in the newsletter of our assisted-living facility.”
Gittings front & center in 1966. Photo by her partner.
Brick buildings, apartment blocks, an overly large Mercedes-Benz logo which sits atop one of the apartment blocks, a star from one of the Kremlin towers, and the ubiquitous onion domes of the Kremlin churches - must be Moscow!