American activist Barbara Gittings was BOTD in 1932. Born in Vienna, Austria, where her father was a diplomat for the United States government, she was raised in Vienna and Montreal. At the outbreak of World War Two, her family returned to the United States, settling in Wilmington, Delaware. She studied at Northwestern University, struggling with isolation over her homosexuality, and dropped out before graduation, moving to San Francisco in 1956. She befriended lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who invited her to start a chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis in New York City. She founded the chapter in 1958, serving as its first president and editing the magazine The Ladder, initially cautioning members not to upset heterosexual society. Discouraged by her inability to find psychologists willing to speak positively about homosexuality, she joined forces with Mattachine Society activist Frank Kameny, who at the time was advocating for homosexuality to be declassified as a mental illness. With Kameny, she protested federal government discrimination against gay employees and led an Annual Reminder protest on Independence Day for several years. In 1967, they appeared in hearings held by the Department of Defence, discrediting “expert witnesses” who claimed gay people could be converted to heterosexuality. In 1970, she appeared on TV talk show The Phil Donohue Show, becoming one of the first self-identifying lesbians to appear on American television. She worked extensively with the American Library Association throughout the 1970s, promoting the distribution of positive literature about homosexuality in public libraries. In 1973, she and Kameny successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illness. Later in life, Gittings was honoured for her groundbreaking activist work. Described as the Rosa Parks of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, she appeared in a number of documentaries about her activist work, including Gay Pioneers and Before Stonewall. Gittings was in a long term relationship with Kay Tobin Lahusen for 46 years until her death in 2007, aged 74. In 2019, she was posthumously inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Memorial in New York. The American Library Association and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) have named literary awards in Gittings’ honour.