# Daughters of Bilitis Founded on **September 21, 1955** in San Francisco by **Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon** with six other women, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was the **first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States**. The name was borrowed from Pierre Louÿs's *Songs of Bilitis*, a 19th-century book of erotic poetry about a fictional contemporary of Sappho — deliberately obscure enough that prospective members could discuss "Bilitis" in public without outing themselves. ## Original Mission DOB initially formed as a **private social alternative to lesbian bars**, which were under constant police surveillance and raids. Within two years the founders had shifted to explicit political work — civil rights advocacy, public education, and the publication of *The Ladder* (1956–1972), the first nationally distributed American lesbian magazine. ## Tactics and Significance DOB pioneered: - **The mailing-list model** of organizing geographically dispersed queer people in an era before public gay community existed in most cities - **The legitimacy-through-research strategy** — DOB participated in studies by sympathetic psychologists (notably **Evelyn Hooker**, whose 1957 paper "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual" was foundational to the 1973 American Psychiatric Association declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness) - **The first lesbian civil-rights litigation** — DOB-affiliated lawyers brought early test cases on employment, housing, and child-custody discrimination Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon themselves became civil-rights icons of an extraordinary durability: they were the first same-sex couple legally married in California on **June 16, 2008**, after the California Supreme Court's *In re Marriage Cases* decision — 53 years after founding DOB. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Mattachine Society]] - [[Resistance Hub]]