Barbara Love, Lesbian Author And Activist, Dies Age 85

Barbara Love, a feminist activist who fought for gay rights and for lesbians in the women’s movement early days, died on November 13 in the Bronx. She was 85.

Donna Smith, her wife, said the cause was complications of leukemia and Parkinson’s disease, The New York Times reported.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Barbara Joan Love was born on February 27, 1937, in Ridgewood, N.J. Her father, Egon, was a prosperous Danish-born hosiery manufacturer. Barbara wanted to join his company, but he didn’t think women were qualified to run a business. Her mother, Lois Ashley Love, was a homemaker.

Barbara and her two brothers grew up in “upper-middle-class comfort,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir, There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist, with a maid and a chauffeur, and Sunday dinners at the country club.

In her early 20s, she broke political ranks and registered as a Democrat, the first one in her family to do so for generations. In high school, she was a competitive swimmer and won state championships. She studied journalism at Syracuse University, graduating in 1959.

Raised in New Jersey, Ms. Love came of age as a closeted young woman in Greenwich Village who visited the city’s Mafia-run lesbian bars, which were often raided by the police. “We’re like cockroaches,” she said of her fellow lesbians of the era. “We only come out at night.”

A girlfriend asked Ms. Love to change her feminine looks by cutting her hair and dressing more masculine. After their car broke down one evening, a group of male thugs who had stopped to help attacked her, seeing her masculine appearance.

In those pre-Stonewall days, you could be fired if your employer discovered you were gay. Your parents might no longer welcome you home. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness.

But New York City was also a fertile landscape for the newly-empowered gay rights movement and the women’s movement, and for the many consciousness-raising groups that contributed to both.

Barbara Love participated in the Colgate Dump-In, at which activists poured Colgate-Palmolive products into a toilet that they’d set up at the company’s headquarters on Park Avenue to protest its treatment of women on the assembly line. They also staged a demonstration in front of The New York Times’s classified advertising office to protest gender segregation in the paper’s “Help Wanted” ads; The Times soon changed that practice.

She was also among a group of lesbians who fought to be recognized by the National Organization for Women. NOW’s president, Betty Friedan, had derided lesbian feminists as “the Lavender Menace,” seemingly internalizing the bias of the mainstream press and popular culture by seeing the concerns of lesbians as a threat to the political aims of the movement.

So Ms. Love, the author Rita Mae Brown, and others who had formed a consciousness-raising group of lesbian feminists took action. They made T-shirts with the phrase “The Lavender Menace” and wore them to NOW’s Second Congress to Unite Women, a meeting held in the spring of 1970 in New York City.

Ms. Love’s experiences encouraged her to write Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism with Sidney Abbott, her partner at the time. The book is a compassionate exploration of lesbian life in the not-so-recent past. “A maze of pseudonyms, gay bars, arbitrary role-playing, petty and grand deception,” as Carolyn See wrote in a review for The Los Angeles Times, “shadowed by the constant fear of being fired from jobs, spurned by parents, doomed to a life of almost total isolation.”

In 1971, Ms. Love was one of the founders of Identity House, a walk-in counselling center for gay people, at first housed in the basement of a church in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The experience made Ms. Love want to be therapist, and in 1975 she earned a master’s degree in psychology from the New School for Social Research, though she ultimately didn’t pursue a career in the field.

With Morty Manford, a gay activist and an assistant New York State attorney general, she was a founder of Parents of Gays, a group that evolved into PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), an especially powerful organization during the AIDS crisis. They recognized that it wasn’t just gay people who were isolated from society; their parents suffered, too.

She also had a long career as an editor of trade publications, from an early job with The New York Lumber Trade Journal to Supermarketing and Folio, which covered the magazine industry. For a few years in the late 1960s, she worked as a censor at CBS, making sure that no miniskirts appeared on the network’s soap operas and that if a script called for a man to be in a single woman’s apartment at night, he had to be shown leaving it. The producers, she recalled, called her “the Black Death.”

She was the editor of Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975, a who’s who of the movement containing the biographies of more than 2,000 women. A collaborative project, it was nearly a decade in the making.

“Barbara was a within-the-system hard-working feminist,” Phyllis Chesler, the feminist activist, psychologist and author, said in an email. “Barbara came from a wealthy, Republican family, and was a competitive athlete, and thus, although she was ‘different,’ always carried herself with great confidence.”

She is survived by her brother, Anthony, and her stepsister, Ellamae Cobb.

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