Del Martin: Gay rights campaigner

The flags at San Francisco's City Hall were lowered to half-mast to mark the death of Del Martin, the veteran lesbian rights pioneer who spent a lifetime campaigning for sexual freedoms.

Her crusade took her from the era of the 1950s – when a puritanically austere US law forbade women to wear men's clothes in certain circumstances – to the present day. This year, a few months before her death, she was legally able to enter into a civil partnership with her partner of more than 50 years. Her campaigns played a significant part in bringing about the change in social and legal attitudes which made that possible. In the 1950s a common view in the United States was that lesbianism was, in the language of the day, as degenerate and un-American as Communism.

It was in the early 1950s that Martin discovered both the love of her life and the issue of her life, meeting Phyllis Lyon and launching herself into campaigning that was vocal, public and unremitting. She set out her manifesto: "Nothing was ever accomplished by hiding in a dark corner," she said. "Why not discard the hermitage for the heritage that awaits any red-blooded American woman who dares to claim it?" That statement was made at a comparatively early stage of her campaigning, and in the decades that followed she never deviated from that philosophy.

Born Dorothy L. Taliaferro in San Francisco in 1921, she married James Martin at the age of 19, giving birth to a daughter but divorcingwithin a few years. A journalist, she met Lyon when they both worked on a trade journal in Seattle. Their move toSan Francisco was the prelude to a constant stream of work on women's organisations, committees, publications and books.

First, she was among a group of women who founded the Daughters of Bilitis, America's first social and political organisation for lesbians. She was the first president of the group, which developed branches in many states, running campaigns on homosexuality, law reform and other topics. Next came a monthly publication, The Ladder, which Martin and Lyon would both edit after launching it in 1960.

They went on to help found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which aimed at removing laws against homosexual behaviour and ending police harassment. She then helped set up groups such as the Lesbian Mothers Union, the San Francisco Women's Centres and the Bay Area Women Coalition. She was the first open lesbian to join the board of the National Organisation of Women.

In 1972 Martin and Lyon founded the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, the first gay political club in the US, promoting gay candidates in San Francisco. Martin also pressed, with eventual success, for American psychiatrists to declare that homosexuality was not a mental illness.

While she and Lyon were involved in numerous other groups, the 1970s saw them broadening their activities with a series of seminal books. Together they wrote Lesbian/Woman (1972), highly influential in its portrayal of lesbianism in a positive light. Martin's 1976 book Battered Wives highlighted domestic violence. She also immersed herself in a number of committees dealing with the issue, and with women's shelters.

As the decades passed and her early pioneering activities led on to an abundance of gay and lesbian groups, the pair assumed an iconic status, receiving numerous awards from organisations across the US and featuring as honoured guests at Gay Pride parades.

The two women twice entered into civil partnerships with each other. In 2004 they were the first lesbian couple to do so as San Francisco carried out more than 4,000 same-sex ceremonies. The celebrations were short-lived, however, as the California supreme court ruled the proceedings invalid. But a continuing campaign led to the overturning of the decision, and in June this year theirs was the first civil-partnership ceremony in San Francisco.

The two octogenarians made their vows to each other minutes after the new legal ruling came into effect. In a poignant moment, amid applause and cheers from friends and supporters, Lyon pushed Martin's wheelchair to their wedding cake. It was a fitting moment in that, as so often in their half-century relationship, it combined their private lives and public stances. It was to be the final act of Martin's long career. Lyon said in a farewell statement: "I am so lucky to have loved her. I am devastated but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed."

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, commended Martin's "grace, courage and commitment," declaring: "We would not have marriage equality in California if it weren't for Del and Phyllis."

David McKittrick

Dorothy L. Taliaferro, gay rights activist and writer: born San Francisco 5 May 1921; joint president, Daughters of Bilitis, 1955-63; married 1940 James Martin (one son; marriage dissolved 1944), registered civil partnership 2008 with Phyllis Lyon; died San Francisco 27 August 2008.