Barbara Gittings (July 31, 1932 – February 18, 2007) was an American LGBTQ activist. She started the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1958, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people in the United States government, the largest employer of the country at the time. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, especially its Task Force on Gay Liberation, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in the early 1970s.
She was awarded an American Library Association Honorary Membership, and the ALA named an annual award for the best LGBTQ novel the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. GLAAD also named an activist award for her.
