The concept of "lesbian rights" was nonexistent in buttoned-up 1950s America. But that didn't stop Barbara Gittings.

She founded the New York chapter of America's first lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in 1958 when she was 26 years old. In the 1960s she worked closely with Frank Kameny in the on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of LGBTQ+ people by the United States Government.

Perhaps the greatest legacy Gittings left behind is the American Library Association's bibliography of literature about gays and lesbians, one of the first collections of its kind.