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  • Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
  • Michella M. Marino
Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. By Marcia M. Gallo. New York: Seal Press, 2007. 274 pp. Softbound, $15.99.

When the Gittings-Lahusen Gay Book Collection opened at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst library, I found myself amidst a rare collection of old copies of The Ladder, a lesbian journal published by the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) beginning in October 1956. Although somewhat familiar with the Daughters of Bilitis, I was unable to fully process the importance of the journals until reading Marcia M. Gallo’s Different Daughters. Gallo is the first to provide both an interpretive and narrative history of the DOB lesbian organization through her use of extensive oral history interviews and The Ladder.

Gallo fills a void in lesbian historiography by providing a detailed history of the DOB where none previously existed and highlighting the group’s involvement in removing “the veil of secrecy that surrounded lesbians’ daily lives in mid-twentieth century America” (xxi). She undertook this daunting task because she was disappointed in what she was unable to locate in most libraries: “the story of a small group of ordinary lesbians who helped change the world” (x). Gallo’s study is not as smooth or engaging as the historical works by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis, and Lillian Faderman, whose authoritative lesbian classics draw heavily upon oral history sources. Gallo’s study, however, complements their work by showing how the DOB helped fuel the larger homophile movement through their legwork in the 1950s. Gallo focuses on the DOB’s instrumental leaders, which allows their stories and information to guide her narrative through the lesbian rights struggle.

Eight women founded the DOB in San Francisco in September 1955 as a way to meet and interact with other lesbians in a safe environment. The cofounders not only sought a protected social space to have fun but also met to promote “self-knowledge and self-acceptance; public education [of the homosexual]; involvement in research; and lobbying to change the laws criminalizing homosexuality. . .” (13). Gallo notes that the early DOB strove to conform to [End Page 296] “societal norms while trying to reform social policies and practices” (18) in order to destigmatize the lesbian image through respectability.

Gallo’s chronology shows how the 1960s political climate created a rift in the group between the older members who wanted to conform to societal norms and younger lesbians who believed individuals had a right to be different. Gallo is at her strongest when divulging the realities of a growing movement in changing political times along with the difficulties of large-scale organizing. She shows that, like the women’s movement, the lesbian movement was not ideologically uniform. One member wrote in The Ladder, “. . . I learned that homosexuals are homogeneous in nothing except their preference for their own sex. When one considers the geographical, racial, economic, intellectual, and social differences among the national members of D.O.B., what can be expected but sharp variations in interest and sympathy?” (145). Gallo conveys much of this tension between members through such issues as appropriate clothing, the types of useful lesbian fiction and nonfiction, and DOB’s involvement in scientific and social research. The defining conflict over The Ladder continuing as a solely lesbian journal versus a broader feminist journal would ultimately result in DOB’s loss of their prized publication in 1970, when the DOB’s president and editor staged an internal coup, severed ties with the DOB headquarters, and soon began publishing The Ladder as a feminist journal separate from the DOB. Natural tensions occurred within the DOB, which strained the organization, but the loss of its journal hastened its decentralization and downfall.

Different Daughters is clearly a book of “firsts,” within both the larger homophile movement and the DOB, as Gallo details the first broadcast of a self-identified lesbian on TV, the first time a San Francisco homophile group won a confrontation with local authorities, and the DOB members who were among the first lesbians...

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