Confirmed speakers:
Barbara Gittings
Barbara Gittings has been a volunteer worker for Gay rights since 1958, when she founded the first East Coast chapter of Daughters of Bilitis. She edited DOB's national Lesbian magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966. She marched in the first Gay picket lines in the 1960s, at the White House and at Independence Hall.
During the 1970s she was active in the American Psychiatric Association, running Gay exhibits at APA conferences that showed Gay people as healthy and normal, and furthering the drive to have homosexuality dropped from the official list of mental disorders. She arranged for "Dr. H. Anonymous," a masked Gay psychiatrist, to appear on a panel at an APA conference to tell his colleagues why he couldn't be honest in his own profession.
Though she is not a librarian, Barbara found a home in the Gay group that formed in 1970 in the American Library Association, the first Gay caucus in a professional association. For the next 16 years she headed the group and campaigned to get positive Gay/Lesbian materials into libraries and out to users, and to end discrimination against Gays as library workers and patrons. "It was the most fun and satisfaction I've had in my career as a Gay activist!" she says. In 2003 the American Library Association rewarded her with its highest honor, lifetime honorary membership.
Frank Kameny
Born in 1925, the son of middle-class Jewish New Yorkers, Frank Kameny was a pioneer in the gay rights movement in America during the 1960s.
He and friend Jack Nichols, a longtime leader in the gay civil rights movement, established the Mattachine Society of Washington, a homophile group that had started in the 1950s in Los Angeles. The group's first meeting, held on November 15, 1961, drew about 12 men and women who elected Kameny as the new group's president.
Unlike many other gay leaders of the time, Kameny embraced direct action along the lines of the black civil rights movement. He believed that gay people should fight a "down-to-earth, grass-roots, sometimes tooth-and-nail" battle.
Under Kameny's leadership, the group charged to the forefront of the nascent gay rights movement. The Mattachine Society of Washington attempted to reform the government's exclusionary policies toward homosexuals in federal employment and successfully lobbied the ACLU to take up the cause.
Following the Stonewall riots, the D.C. Mattachine was eclipsed by newer gay groups. Although his leadership waned, Kameny's activism continued. In 1971, he ran as an out gay man to be D.C.'s non-voting delegate to Congress. He garnered only 1.6 percent of the vote, but the campaign showed that gay people would turn out to vote as a bloc. For his pioneering efforts, Kameny is considered one of the fathers of the gay rights movement.
Elizabeth Kerekere
Elizabeth Kerekere comes from the Ngati Oneone and Te Aitanga a Mahaki tribes and has been a Maori (indigenous) activist since age 13. With the return home of Te Maori (exhibition of Maori artifacts), which toured the USA in 1986, Elizabeth joined the movement for museums to present Maori as a living culture. From 1989 Elizabeth contributed to the planning and design of the new national museum, Te Papa. Elizabeth became deputy chair of the Museums Association of Aotearoa New Zealand and coordinated the national network of Kaitiaki Maori – Maori working in museums, galleries, libraries and archives. For 24 years, Elizabeth has been active in Lesbian and Gay communities. This included a nine year presidency of the Amazon Softball Club, the longest surviving LGBTQ organization in the country and being Co-Chair, Outreach Committee of the International Federation of Gay Games. As President of Team Wellington, she proudly led a 55% female/40% indigenous contingent to Sydney 2002. In February 2006, Elizabeth married her partner of 14 years, Alofa Aiono, under New Zealand's new Civil Union Act.
Andreas Pretzel
Since 1992 Andreas Pretzel has been a researcher at the Research Unit for the History of Sexual Science run by the Magnus Hirschfeld Society, Berlin. He has led and guided many research projects on the persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust and the fate of persecuted postwar homosexuals, sponsored among others by the international Pink Triangle Coalition and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
He has published and edited books about those topics, has served as curator of exhibitions in the Gay Museum in Berlin and has been involved in many activities of remembrance. He participated in the creation of the new permanent exhibitions in the former Concentration Camp at Sachsenhausen near Berlin and was appointed as an expert to the jury of the planned "Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime" which will be established as a national monument in Berlin.
Pretzel is one of the co-founders of the "Initiative Queer Nations" which aims to establish an institute for the study of homosexualities in the past and present, in remembrance of the famous institute of Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, destroyed by the Nazis.