Kay Lahusen

Kay Lahusen (born January 5, 1930), also known as Kay Tobin Lahusen or Kay Tobin, is the first openly gay American woman photojournalist. Lahusen's photographs of lesbians appeared on several of the covers of The Ladder from 1964 to 1966 while her partner, Barbara Gittings, was the editor. Lahusen helped with the founding of the original Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in 1970, she contributed to a New York-based weekly newspaper named Gay Newsweekly, and co-authored The Gay Crusaders with Randy Wicker. She adopted the surname "Tobin" as a pseudonym for a period of time, but apparently never legally changed her name.

Katherine Lahusen was born to George H. and Katherine W. Lahusen in 1930, and brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. 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. She discovered while in college that she had romantic feelings for a woman and she had a relationship with her for six years, but after the woman left "in order to marry and have a normal life", Lahusen was devastated by the loss.

Lahusen spent the next six years in Boston working in the reference library of The Christian Science Monitor. She met Barbara Brooks Gittings in 1961 at a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in Rhode Island. They became a couple and Lahusen moved to Philadelphia to be with Gittings. When Gittings took over The Ladder in 1963, Lahusen made it a priority to improve the quality of art on the covers. Where previously there were simple line drawings, characterized by Lahusen as "pretty bland, little cats, insipid human figures," Lahusen began to add photographs of real lesbians on the cover beginning in September 1964. The first showed two women from the back, on a beach looking out to sea. But Lahusen really wanted to add full-face portraits of lesbians. "If you go around as if you don't dare show your face, it sends forth a terrible message", Lahusen remembered.

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