Having no one to talk to about the issues that were consuming her, she decided to read as much as she could on the topic. She found very little, and much of what she found described homosexuals as "deviants", "perverts", and "abnormal" in medical books and texts on abnormal psychology, or odd generalizations that stated homosexuals were unable to whistle, or that their favorite color was green. She found all the information focused on homosexual men. She recalled in a 2001 interview, "I thought, this is not about me. There is nothing here about love or happiness. There has to be something better". Her research took up so much of her time at Northwestern that she ended up failing out of the school. Gittings found a purpose during this time, saying, "My mission was not to get a general education but to find out about myself and what my life would be like. So I stopped going to classes and started going to the library. There were no organizations to turn to in those days only libraries were safe, although the information contained was dismal."