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A picture, supposedly, is worth a thousand words. Ernestine Eckstein, one of the most important Black queer activists of the 20th century, had plenty of words to go along with a historic photograph. Her story forms a narrative which transcends the oppression of the Lavender Scare and put a Black lesbian at forefront of the mid-century “Homophile” movement.
Eckstein knew firsthand the barriers facing queer Americans with multiple and intersecting marginalizations. She became a leader of the queer women’s organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, at a time when the American fight for both Black civil rights and queer rights was reaching a fever pitch (and when the latter organizations were themselves at key inflection points). Eckstein’s own voice, and an enduring image, have sealed her place in this transformational period in American history.
The Wreckage
Born in 1941, Ernestine Eckstein’s future was shaped by the powerful forces changing the United States at the conclusion of World War II. The end of the second World War inaugurated a new “boom” era in American society which would lend its name to the resulting “Baby Boomer” generation.
Somewhat ironically, the aftermath of the global war and subsequent prosperity induced a sharp reversal of fortunes for America’s by-then burgeoning LGBT+ communities. The Industrial Revolution had first brought a critical mass of queer Americans together into growing cities for the first time, while the 1920s and 30s saw a particularly vibrant period of queer artistic and cultural achievement (the Harlem Renaissance as the prime example). Beyond the arts, rapid strides were made in the nascent fields of psychology and sociology which informed the scientific understanding of (if not yet popular attitudes toward) queer identities, led by figures like Dr. Alfred Kinsey[1] and Magnus Hirschfeld.[2]
But visibility for LGBT+ Americans fast became a vulnerability in the poisonous realm of post-WWII politics. The first major sign of trouble came in 1947 with a new Executive Order from President Truman. The order forbade employment or retention of employees who had engaged in “immoral or notoriously disgraceful conduct.” Although this so-called “Loyalty order” did not specify homosexual behavior, the State Department certainly interpreted it as a directive to observe possible queer individuals in its ranks.[3]
But the emerging Lavender Scare gained terrifying momentum when Senator Josephy McCarthy, of “Red Scare” fame, used his vast leverage in Congress to declare a personal and professional vendetta against queer federal employees. On February 20, 1950, just two weeks after the notorious Red Scare speech, McCarthy returned to the Senate floor to hurl accusations of homosexuality at two likely hapless civil servants, previously identified as possible Communists.
McCarthy did not stop there, but also offered his own pathology of homosexual individuals and their linkages to communism. Judith Adkins writes, “[a] top intelligence official had reportedly told [McCarthy] that ‘practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way.’ McCarthy implied that the men in these two cases were susceptible to Communist recruitment because as homosexuals they had what he called ‘peculiar mental twists’.”[4]
What followed was a multi-year targeted persecution of queer individuals throughout the US government – first led by the Wherry-Hill Committee, then the Hoey Committee which produced a nauseating final report, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.”[5] The report’s assertions were a laundry list of the queerphobic prejudices which had fueled the Lavender Scare: that queer individuals were morally weak, a profound security risk, mentally unwell and thus “not suitable for Government positions.”[6]
In 1953, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order #10450, “Security Requirements for Government Employment,” based on the Hoey Committee report’s recommendations. The order deemed queer Americans a security risk, forbidding their employment by the federal government or its partners.[7] The consequences of this queerphobic crusade would extend far beyond the federal government; modern estimates suggest that as many as 5,000 – 10,000 civil servants lost their careers amid the ravages of the Lavender Scare.[8] State and local governments followed the lead of the federal government as patrolling and persecution of known queer establishments and enclaves accelerated throughout the country.
The Homophile Movement
As the decade wore on, queer Americans were surviving under the strain of explicit and implicit persecution emanating from the highest sources of power in the land. These were bleak, frightening years where public outings could and did destroy lives, a sharp turnabout from the more hopeful and indulgent era of the Roaring 20s.
As is often the case in history, desperation produces necessity, which produces invention. The Homophile Movement had first emerged in Los Angeles with the birth of the Mattachine Society in July 1950, but the deepening crisis meant that queer activism would not be isolated to the West Coast. Regional and local chapters of the Mattachine Society would spring to life throughout the decade as persecution spurred these flickers of early public queer activism.[9]
These earliest iterations of the “Homophile Movement” have been accused (with some justification given later cleavages within the movements) of being assimilationist and apologetic in nature. A comprehensive framing of the debate around this issue is outside the bounds of this blog post, but there certainly were early tensions within the Homophile Movement between those who prioritized education and public acceptance of LGBT+ Americans, and those who prioritized more ambitious and systemic changes beyond an end to explicit persecution.
The Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW), for example, was founded by a fired federal employee, Frank Kameny, in 1961. Kameny’s views were more closely aligned with those of later activists in the movement, and his leadership of the MSW brought an explicitly proactive, belligerent edge which had been largely lost in the California organizations of the same name.
It is fair to acknowledge that different individuals and entities within the early, chaotic period of American queer activism had differing goals and means to various ends; none of those ends were inherently wrong or unimportant, especially given the Fire Alarm Fire situation which faced all queer Americans in the early 1950s. After all, activist movements invariably must respond to the cards which they are dealt, and then evolve alongside changing pressures, needs and resources.
But while the Mattachine Society and its offshoots were largely led by gay men, lesbian women had also begun their initial forays into activism.
Daughters of Bilitis
The influential lesbian activist organization, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), was over a decade old when Ernestine Eckstein would grace the cover of their publication in her now famous photograph.
Like the Mattachine Society, the DOB was founded in coastal California (this time San Francisco) in 1955, a few years after the Homophile Movement had been spurred to life by deepening repressive efforts. It was the inaugural lesbian group of its type in the United States, developed by a Filipina woman, Rosalie “Rose” Bamberger alongside her partner and a handful of other lesbian couples.[10] The DOB first functioned as a (much needed) safe space and social venue for lesbian women: like gay men, lesbian women in urban centers found themselves subject to intensive police harassment, arrest, and even intelligence community oversight.[11] These aggressions were compounded by the problems of misogyny and targeted violence against women.
But the Daughters, like the Mattachine Society in California, quickly experienced their own divergences: Bamberger, who had wanted to maintain it as a private lesbian social club, left the group when journalists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon pushed it toward an explicitly activist orientation.[12] The latter approach ultimately won out as more chapters opened in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Rhode Island within five years (Eckstein herself would be among those who would steer the Daughters into a more confrontational public role).
As the DOB pursued more direct activism for lesbian women, and the reach of the movement expanded through the country, its leaders realized that greater visibility and a coordinated communications program would abet their cause. Accordingly, the Daughters developed their own publication, The Ladder: A Lesbian Review, a year after their founding which was the first lesbian magazine with major distribution.[13] The magazine was usually arts and culture focused, with occasional political updates and discussion pieces on issues of interest for the increasingly national lesbian community. The Ladder would be published regularly until 1972 – but its most famous edition, in 1965, would feature a young Black lesbian activist who stepped into history with her cover image.
Early Activism
Ernestine Eckstein was born Ernestine Delois Eppenger in South Bend, Indiana in 1941.[14] Eckstein would later explain that she adopted a new surname as a means of personal and professional protection. Eckstein, who was engaged in Civil Rights activism from her earliest years, realized quickly that her involvement in such movements would not be without controversy or danger. She is quoted saying:
“I think it takes a lot of courage. And I think a lot of people who would do it will suffer because of it. But I think any movement needs a certain number of courageous martyrs. There’s no getting around it. That’s really the only thing that can be done, you have to come out and be strong enough to accept whatever consequences come.”[15]
In 1959, Eckstein enrolled at Indiana University where she would eventually graduate with a degree in journalism, as well as minors in Government and Russian.[16] Like many young adults exploring a world of new horizons, Eckstein took full advantage of the activities offered by her time as a Hoosier: she was a member of Tomahawk, a scholastic honorary society, a writer for the Indiana Daily Student (appropriate to her degree and her later activist career), and performed in the Singing Hoosiers.
But Eckstein also began her career in the cause of Black liberation almost immediately after heading off to school: she would later say that, “I will get in a picket line, but in a different city.”[17] She was true to her word and joined the NAACP Bloomington chapter while still an undergraduate and was often among the few or only women in a visible, public role for the organization’s activities.[18]
But what about Eckstein’s queer identity? For many young adults today, the college years are often a time of exposure, awareness and self-discovery; they certainly were for many of Eckstein’s co-eds who attended various campuses throughout the tumultuous 1960s. Eckstein would later describe coming to a sexual awakening as a lesbian after her collegiate years, but expressed having a sense of who she already was before:
“I had never known about homosexuality, I’d never thought about it, it’s funny, because I’d always had a very strong attraction to women. But I’d never known anyone who was homosexual, not in grade school or high school or in college. Never heard the word mentioned. And I wasn’t a dumb kid, you know, but this was a kind of blank that had never been filled in by anything — reading, experience, anything — until after I came to New York when I was twenty-two. I look back and I wonder’. I didn’t know there were other people who felt the same way I did.”[19]
“Denial of Equality…”
The epiphany ultimately came for Eckstein, as it has for many queer individuals (the author included) when someone finally gave her the language to describe herself: gay.
In 1963, Eckstein moved to New York City, then a hotbed of queer activism and of course, the home of the Mattachine Society of New York and a chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. She describes in one of her surviving interviews how a fellow Indianian gay male friend explained homosexuality to her, for the first time in her life – leading Eckstein to an astounding self-realization.[20]
Eckstein soon dived into queer activism with the same alacrity she had brought to her Black civil rights activism. In fact, she saw the two inextricably connected:
“The homosexual has to call attention to the fact that he’s been unjustly acted upon on. This is what the Negro did. Demonstrations, as far as I’m concerned, are one of the very first steps toward changing society. I would like to see in the homophile movement more people who can think. Movements should be intended, I feel, to erase labels, whether ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’. I’d like to find a way of getting all classes of homosexuals involved together in the movement.”[21]
The New York Mattachine Society was her first stop, but ultimately Eckstein would become the Vice President of the Daughters of Bilitis through their local chapter in 1964. By 1965, at just 24 years old, Eckstein was on the frontlines of the Homophile Movement. That summer, she took part in what would become a four-year tradition at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the “Annual Reminders”.[22] These gay and lesbian-led protests, organized with the help of the Mattachine Society of Washington, were intended to draw public attention to the mistreatment and marginalizations experienced every day by queer Americans at the height of the Lavender Scare era.
So Eckstein’s first famous photo op came to be: a young Black woman (the only Black woman present that day) marching in a pair of white, unmistakably mod sunglasses, bearing a sign: “Denial of Equality of Opportunity is Immoral.”
The Ladder
Now firmly entrenched in the Homophile Movement and the DOB, Eckstein was prepared to take her activism further, both in its scope and ambition, but also her own personal visibility.
The Ladder had already been in circulation for a decade when Eckstein joined the Daughters, and had long served as the organization’s primary arm of public outreach. But a Black lesbian had never graced the magazine’s cover. Eckstein’s decision to become the very first in June, 1966 was thus a watershed moment for the Daughters and the wider Homophile Movement: it was an acknowledgment that the various civil rights struggles throughout America were inherently interwoven (as Eckstein herself had long believed).
In her interview for the featured article, Eckstein anticipated the future of these movements and “called for a progressive activism that included equality for trans people, anticipating the umbrella of LGBTQ+ solidarity.”[23] She likewise emphasized the gains made by the Black Civil Rights Movement, the power of its organization and how its leadership had leveraged ambitious goals to push their movement forward as a potent political force.[24]
Importantly, the Stonewall Riots (where Black transgender woman Marsha P. Johnson would take a starring leadership role) were still three years away. Eckstein’s increasingly visible role as a Black queer woman was thus a turning point and guidepost for the developing shape of American queer activism.
Go West
Despite Eckstein’s rising profile within the Daughters and the Homophile Movement, Eckstein herself was already outgrowing her first queer affiliations by the later half of the decade. Journalist Eric Marcus, who has researched Eckstein’s role in American queer historical activism, said of her in a podcast episode in 2019:
“[Eckstein] left the movement because she felt it wasn’t moving fast enough. She dropped out of the movement in the late ’60s. I know she was very frustrated. From what I’ve discovered recently, she was very frustrated with the movement – that it was too tentative. She was young. She was in her mid-20s. She brought all of her experience from the black civil rights movement with an awareness that the gay movement was nowhere near where the black civil rights movement was, so they couldn’t use the exact same tactics. But she really wished that they would be more aggressive.”[25]
By 1968, Eckstein had been involved with the DOB for four years; in that time, she had refreshed the organization and turned its focus toward outward political activism and intersectional advocacy. At the same time, the New York chapter (and probably several of its members) were either unable or unwilling to countenance Eckstein’s expansive vision for the organization going forward.
Ironically, in the 1950s, the conservatism of the Los Angeles Mattachine Society had pushed figures like Frank Kameny (whose story I’ve covered here, and who was among Eckstein’s correspondents) to found Homophile groups on the East Coast. But soon after she resigned from the Daughters, Eckstein wound her way back to sunny California and their city of origin – San Francisco.[26] There, she took on roles within Black feminist organizations, notably Black Women Organized For Action (BWOA). She seems to have remained involved in this and similar organizations from the early 70s until her passing in 1992.
Picture It
Much less is known about Eckstein during the second half of her life; after gaining such rapid public visibility while only in her 20s, perhaps Eckstein ultimately found herself more suited to internal, operational and logistical work within her activism as she grew older.
Whatever the reason for the sudden dearth in her historical record thereafter, Eckstein was nevertheless the literal and figurative picture of an American liberation movement in its earliest years. Her visage and voice reflected her unique experiences as a Black queer woman who had faced multiple, interlayered marginalizations throughout her life. Those experiences led her to pursue an ambitious, arguably dangerous mode of activism which came with very real risks to her person and livelihood.
In all of these roles, Eckstein laid the foundations for a movement which could turn the chapter on a terrifying period of American queer history. While it is easy (and reasonable) to point to the 1969 Stonewall Riots as the turning point, the work of earlier activists like Eckstein cannot be ignored. Nor should their roles be underwritten or understated by history, even amid modern continuations of the old internecine debates. Every step forward for liberation is a ground that had not been claimed before: from that perspective, Eckstein walked a vast distance for everyone in the communities she fought for.
[1] Rachel Wimpee and Teresa Iacobelli, “Funding a Sexual Revolution: The Kinsey Reports,” Rockefeller Archive Center, January 9, 2020, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/funding-a-sexual-revolution-the-kinsey-reports/.
[2] Gabrielle Bryan-Quamina, “Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science,” Science Museum Group, February 29, 2024, https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/magnus-hirschfeld-and-the-institute-for-sexual-science/.
[3] Naoko Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (2012): 729, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44376170.
[4] Judith Adkins, “’These People Are Frightened to Death’ Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare,” Prologue Magazine, Summer 2016, Vol. 48, No. 2 (publication of the National Archives), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html.
[5] The report can be read in full here, but the author urges caution in reviewing this material.
[6] Adkins, ibid.
[7] The Executive Order can be read in full here.
[8] Kay M. Lim and Julie Kracov, “The lavender scare: How the federal government purged gay employees,” CBS News, June 9, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-lavender-scare-how-the-federal-government-purged-gay-employees/.
[9] Simon Hall, “Americanism, Un-Americanism, and the Gay Rights Movement,” Journal of American Studies 47, no. 4 (2013), pg. 1111, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24485877.
[10] The Library of Congress (Research Guides), “The Daughters of Bilitis,” accessed February 7, 2026, https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/before-stonewall/daughters-of-bilitis.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Sara E. Cohen, “How the Daughters of Bilitis Organized for Lesbian Rights,” Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, February 28, 2023, https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/how-daughters-bilitis-organized-lesbian-rights.
[13] New York Public Library, “The Ladder: A Lesbian Review,” accessed February 7, 2026, https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/seen-assertion/item/10944.
[14] Westport Library, “Ernestine Eckstein,” last updated January 29, 2026, https://westportlibrary.libguides.com/ErnestineEckstein.
[15] Archival transcripts of a surviving 1965 interview with Eckstein, published in 2019 by Eric Marcus, is available here: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/736268853.
[16] Victoria A. Brownworth, “Black History Month: Ernestine Eckstein,” Philadelphia Gay News, February 9, 2022, https://epgn.com/2022/02/09/black-history-month-ernestine-eckstein/.
[17] Westport Library, ibid.
[18] Brownworth, ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] JD Glass. “Out, Black, and proud: Ernestine Eckstein fought for us before Stonewall,” Advocate, February 11, 2023, https://www.advocate.com/history/out-black-and-proud-ernestine-eckstein-fought-for-us-before-stonewall.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Brownworth, ibid.
[23] Nat Pyper, “Ernestine Eckstein,” accessed February 7, 2026, https://www.librarystack.org/ernestine-eckstein/.
[24] Brownworth, ibid.
[25] See Footnote 15.
[26] Glass, ibid.