RIP Del Martin

Lesbian rights pioneer activist dies at 87. She's memorialized in the Artefact for the Lesbian industry:

"On February 12, 2004, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon made history when they became the first same-sex couple to be legally married in the United States.

Recognized as founders of the lesbian rights movement, they had been together 51 years at the time of their San Francisco wedding. Martin was 83; Lyon, 79.

Their activism has spanned five decades, ranging from co-founding America’s first lesbian organization in 1955, to successfully changing, in coalition with others, California’s sex laws in the 1960s, to writing two highly influential books in the 1970s and playing a key role in the American Psychiatric Associations’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual, to serving as delegates to the 1995 White House Conference on Aging, to being featured in a 2002 documentary, No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.

“Martin and Lyon occupy a particularly important position as founding mothers of the modern glbtq movement, having participated in the movement's evolution from the timid first steps of the homophile organizations to the heady days of the gay and lesbian liberation to the achievement of more mainstream political clout.” (Tina Gianoulis, glbtq.com)"