Kay Lahusen

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 photojournalist. Under Lahusen's art direction, photographs of lesbians 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.

Early life Katherine Lahusen was born on January 5, 1930, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was brought up by her grandparents, George and Katherine (Walker) Lahusen. She developed her interest in photography as a child. "Even as a kid I liked using a little box camera and pushing it and trying to get something artsy out of it", she recalled.

Career Lahusen spent the next six years in Boston working in the reference library of The Christian Science Monitor. After a psychiatrist specializing in gay clients showed her a copy of the lesbian magazine The Ladder (published by the Daughters of Bilitis), she reached out to the organization They became a couple and Lahusen moved to Philadelphia to be with Gittings. 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.

Later life In the 1980s Lahusen became involved in real estate, and placed ads in gay papers. She also organized agents to get them to march in the New York City Pride March. and the Wilmington Institute Library in Delaware.

In 2007, all of Lahusen's photos and writings and Gittings' papers and writings were donated to the New York Public Library. 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. In 2019, she and Diana Davies published Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, collecting their photographs.

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." Two episodes from the podcast Making Gay History feature Lahusen and Gittings, and a bonus episode of that podcast is about Lahusen's monthly dinner meetings with other gay people.

Books

The Gay Crusaders, as Kay Tobin, with Randy Wicker (1972) Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, collecting their photographs, with Diana Davies (2019)