Queer History 491: Barbara Gittings - The Librarian Who Told the Shrinks to Go Fuck Themselves

In the dark fucking ages of American psychiatry, when homosexuality was classified as a mental illness and queer people were subjected to electroshock therapy, chemical castration, and lobotomies in the name of "treatment," Barbara Gittings stood up and said what needed to be said: "We're not sick, you assholes." Born in 1932 in Vienna, Austria, to American parents, Gittings didn't just challenge the psychiatric establishment's classification of homosexuality as pathology—she dismantled it piece by piece with the methodical precision of the librarian she was and the righteous fury of a woman who had spent her entire adult life watching her community be tortured by medical professionals who should have been helping them.

Gittings wasn't content to politely ask for acceptance or quietly hope that attitudes would change. She organized, she protested, she confronted the American Psychiatric Association directly, and she refused to let them continue pathologizing her existence without a fig…