By 1959 there were chapters of the DOB in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Rhode Island along with the original chapter in San Francisco.

She reported the first DOB chapter in Australia in 1969 and attempts to form chapters in New Zealand and Scandinavia.

The DOB began publishing a magazine titled The Ladder in 1956 ; inside the front cover of every issue was their mission statement, the first of which stated was " Education of the variant ".

They both acted as president and editor of The Ladder until 1963, and remained involved in the DOB until joining the National Organization for Women ( NOW ) as the first lesbian couple to do so.

In 1960, letters from readers in The Ladder appeared that expressed exasperation with the emphasis on conformity in the DOB.

Because The Ladder was the primary method of communication from the leadership of the DOB to its individual chapters, the editor position was extremely influential in the group.

Gittings, as editor of The Ladder, encouraged others to do the same, and their activism became controversial in the leadership of the DOB.

In 1970, convinced that the DOB was falling apart and The Ladder must be saved, Barbara Grier worked with DOB president Rita LaPorte to take the subscriber list from the DOB headquarters in San Francisco to Reno and expand the magazine further.

Despite assurances from The Ladder to subscribers that these names would be kept confidential, Rita LaPorte took the list of 3, 800 names from DOB headquarters and the printers without telling anyone but Grier.

Grier also effectively ended The Ladder, despite her plans for the magazine to run on advertising ( something The Ladder had not previously had ) and subscriptions, when the $ 3, 000 checks from " Pennsylvania ", written to the DOB, stopped coming.

He was dubbed an " honorary lesbian " at a DOB party.

He worked with the hackers known as DOB ( Dirk-Otto Brezinski ), Pengo ( Hans Heinrich Hübner ), and Urmel ( Markus Hess ), and was involved in selling hacked information from US military computers to the KGB.

The Daughters of Bilitis (), also called the DOB or the Daughters, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States.

Even the FBI was curious enough to attend meetings to report in 1959, " The purpose of the DOB is to educate the public to accept the Lesbian homosexual into society.

In 1960, the DOB held their first convention in San Francisco, which was so successful that they held one every two years until 1968.

One of Gitting's priorities was aligning the DOB with the East Coast Homophile Organizations ( ECHO ), a coalition of other social and political clubs for gays and lesbians.

The Homophile Movement was influenced by the successful activism of the Civil Rights Movement ( in 1960 the DOB's national president was Cleo Bonner, an African-American ), and higher profile members of the DOB such as Barbara Gittings, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon began to picket the White House, the State Department, and other federal buildings in 1965 and 1966 with members of the Mattachine Society.

DOB leaders disliked Kameny and the decisions Gittings was making for the magazine and she was " let go " as editor in 1966.

Historian Martin Meeker points to the 1966 DOB convention that was a 10-day affair joining the DOB with the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations ( NACHO ) as the turning point where women's issues in the DOB began to have more importance to its members than gay issues.

It was the largest convention DOB had yet organized, publicized in mass media all over San Francisco, attended by a large panel of nationally-known speakers, and many of the presentations focused on topics that were exclusively male-centered.

Longtime DOB member Helen Sandoz, who had taken over editing it after an interim period after Barbara Gittings left, was so burdened by the responsibilities that it was affecting her relationship.

Grier edited the magazine from Kansas City and was a relative newcomer to the workings of the DOB, despite contributing to the magazine since 1957.

However, the impact of the fourteen-year run of the DOB on the lives of women was described by historian Martin Meeker: " The DOB succeeded in linking hundreds of lesbians across the country with one another and gathering them into a distinctly modern communication network that was mediated through print and, consequently, imagination, rather than sight, sound, smell, and touch.

Although the eight women who created the DOB initially came together to be able to have a safe place to dance, as the DOB grew they developed similar goals to the Mattachine, and urged their members to assimilate into general society.

Kameny wrote that homosexuals were no different from heterosexuals, often aiming his efforts at mental health professionals, some of whom attended Mattachine and DOB meetings telling members they were abnormal.

As the DOB gained members, their focus shifted to providing support to women who were afraid to come out.

Early DOB members felt they had to follow two contradictory approaches: trying to recruit interested potential members and being secretive.

Barbara Gittings recalled years later of an instance when, in preparation for a national convention, members of the DOB persuaded a woman who had worn men's clothing all her life, " to deck herself out in as ' feminine ' a manner as she could ... Everyone rejoiced over this as though some great victory had been accomplished ... Today we would be horrified at anyone who thought this kind of evangelism had a legitimate purpose.

Two hundred women attended the conference, as did the San Francisco police, who came to check if any of the DOB members were wearing men's clothes.

The DOB also gave awards to men who were allied with them, whom they called " Sons of Bilitis ", or SOBs, including their lawyer, photographer, and members of the Mattachine Society who assisted them with the convention.

The DOB never had the number of members comparable to the Mattachine Society's.

" Pennsylvania " wrote $ 3, 000 checks to different DOB members, who in turn signed them over to the organization.

Feeling as if their issues were not being addressed by homophile organizations, many members of the DOB began to say that lesbians had more in common with heterosexual women than men.

Soon after forming, the DOB wrote a mission statement that addressed the most significant problem Martin and Lyon had faced as a couple: the complete lack of information about female homosexuality in what historian Martin Meeker termed, " the most fundamental journey a lesbian has to make.

They urged the DOB to join the organization as well, but a previous rule precluding the DOB from joining separate organizations ( set in place primarily to ensure it would not join organizations that sympathized with Communist aims ) precluded it from doing so.

A November 1966 essay by DOB president Shirley Willer pointed out the differences in problems faced by gay men and lesbians: gay men dealt more with police harassment, entrapment, solicitation, sex in public places, and until recently few women were being arrested for cross-dressing.

Grier severed ties with DOB leadership and in doing so took away the Daughters ' primary method of communication from the national organization to its individual chapters.

Several other cases have also been reported of severe peripheral vasoconstriction following overdose with Bromo-DragonFLY, and a similar case is also known from DOB.

Several years earlier, DOB founders Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon similarly relegated sexual acts as unnecessary in determining what a lesbian is, by providing their definition: " a woman whose primary erotic, psychological, emotional and social interest is in a member of her own sex, even though that interest may not be overtly expressed ".

Soon after, several women in San Francisco met in their living rooms to form the Daughters of Bilitis ( DOB ) for lesbians.

The DOB educated them about their rights, and about gay history.

This also led to their relationship as husband and wife and parents to four children, daughters India ( DOB 07 / 08 / 1995 ), Dante ( DOB 12 / 23 / 1997 ) and River ( DOB 11 / 18 / 1999 ), and son Rain ( DOB 01 / 19 / 2004 ).