newsletter, The Ladder, in October 1956. It became the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the U.S. and was distributed to a closely guarded list of subscribers, due to rational fear of exposing. Barbara Gittings was editor for The Ladder from 1963 to 1968 when she passed her editorship to Barbara Grier, who greatly expanded it until the publication met its end in 1972 due to lack of funding. 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. The group also held conferences every two years from 1960 to 1968. As a national organization, the DOB folded in 1970, although some local chapters still continue. During its fourteen years, DOB became a tool of education for lesbians, gay men, researchers, and mental health professionals. Mattachine Society The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was one of the earliest homophile/homosexual organizations in the United States, probably second only to Chicago's Society for Human Rights (1924). Harry Hay and a group of Los Angeles male friends formed the group to protect and improve the rights of homosexuals. Because of concerns for secrecy and the founders' leftist ideology, they adopted the cell organization being used by the Communist Party of the United States. In the anti-Communist atmosphere of the 1950s, the Society's growing membership replaced the group's early Communist model with a more traditional ameliorative civil-rights leadership style and agenda. Then, as branches formed in other cities, the Society splintered in regional groups by 1961. Formed in Los Angeles in 1950 as the International Bachelors Fraternal Order for Peace and Social Dignity, by William Dale Jennings, along with his companions, it rapidly began to influence gay surroundings. The Mattachine founders attempted to use their personal experience as gay men to redefine the meaning of gay people and their culture in the United States, along with intervening in social life in general.It later adopted the name The Mattachine Society in reference to the society Mattachine, a French medieval masque group that supposedly traveled broadly using entertainment to point out social injustice. The name symbolized the fact that gays were a masked people, who lived in anonymity and underprivileged. The society began sponsoring discussion groups in 1951, which provided lesbian and gay men an ability to openly share feelings and experiences, also fear and internal disagreements. For many, this