Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Franchell "Frenchie" Davis is an American Broadway performer and a soul, dance/electronica, and pop singer. She came to public attention in 2003 as a contestant on the singing competition show American Idol. Davis began performing in Rent on Broadway soon afterward, and was a member of the cast for four years. In 2011, Davis reached the top 8 on the first season of singing competition The Voice.
Gayle S. Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist, best known for her pioneering work in feminist theory and queer studies.
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.
Michelle Tea is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and has identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.
Diane Anderson-Minshall is an American journalist and author best known for writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects. She is the first female CEO of Pride Media. She is also the editorial director of The Advocate and Chill magazines, the editor-in-chief of HIV Plus magazine, while still contributing editor to OutTraveler. Diane co-authored the 2014 memoir Queerly Beloved about her relationship with her husband Jacob Anderson-Minshall throughout his gender transition.
Jennifer Camper is a cartoonist and graphic artist whose work is inspired by her own experiences as a Lebanese-American lesbian. Her work has been included in various outlets such as newspapers and magazines since the 1980s, as well as in exhibits in Europe and the United States. Furthermore, Camper is the creator and founding director of the biennial Queers and Comics conference.
Julia Michelle Serano is an American writer, musician, spoken-word performer, transgender and bisexual activist, and biologist. She is known for her transfeminist books, such as Whipping Girl (2007), Excluded (2013), and Outspoken (2016). She is also a public speaker who has given many talks at universities and conferences. Her writing is frequently featured in queer, feminist, and popular culture magazines.
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+(LGBTQ+)music is music that focuses on the experiences of gender and sexual minorities as a product of the broad gay liberation movement.
Sikivu Hutchinson is an American author, playwright, director, and musician. Her multi-genre work explores feminism, gender justice, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, humanism and atheism. She is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (2020); White Nights, Black Paradise (2015); Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (2013); Moral Combat: Black Atheists; Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011); and Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (2003). Her plays include "White Nights, Black Paradise", "Rock 'n' Roll Heretic" and "Narcolepsy, Inc.". "Rock 'n' Roll Heretic" was among the 2023 Lambda Literary award LGBTQ Drama finalists. Moral Combat is the first book on atheism to be published by an African-American woman. In 2013 she was named Secular Woman of the year and was awarded Foundation Beyond Belief's 2015 Humanist Innovator award. She was also a recipient of Harvard's 2020 Humanist of the Year award.
Mia Nakano is an American photographer, filmmaker, educator, printer, activist, a founding editor of Hyphen magazine, and Project Director of the Visibility Project.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.
Myriam Gurba Serrano is an American author, editor, and visual artist. She is best known for her true crime memoir, Mean, and her review, in Tropics of Meta, of American Dirt. She is a co-founder of the grassroots campaign #DignidadLiteraria which seeks to provide "greater inclusion of Chicanx and Latinx authors, editors, and executives, and to combat the exclusion and erasure of Latinx and Chicanx literature within the publishing industry in the USA.”
In the United States, LGBT youth of colour are marginalized adolescents in the LGBT community. Social issues include homelessness; cyberbullying; physical, verbal and sexual abuse; suicide; drug addiction; street violence; immigration surveillance; engagement in high-risk sexual activity; self-harm, and depression. The rights of LGBT youth of colour are reportedly not addressed in discussions of sexuality and race in the larger context of LGBT rights.
Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. She is a former member of the tART Collective and the Corpus VI Collective.
Kimberley McLeod is an American writer, activist and businesswoman. She is best known as the creator of Elixher, a media platform and online magazine focused on Black LGBTQ women that operated 2011-2017.
Rebekah Weatherspoon is an American author and romance novelist. Her books often feature heroines who are Black, plus-size, disabled, and/or LGBTQ. She founded the website WOC in Romance. Weatherspoon received a 2017 Lambda Literary Award for her novel Soul to Keep and was an honoree at the inaugural Ripped Bodice Awards for Excellence in Romance Fiction for Xeni.
Chardine Taylor-Stone is a British feminist activist, writer and musician. In December 2015 Taylor-Stone founded Stop Rainbow Racism to campaign against the performance of ‘Black face’ at LGBTQ+ Venues. The campaign began in response to a performance by Drag queen Charlie Hides at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Taylor-Stone was the drummer for the band Big Joanie, started in 2013. On 5 October 2023, the band announced that Taylor-Stone had left, replaced by an interim drummer for their European tour that month.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is an American writer and professor, best known for her debut novel Big Girl (2022). Her short story collection Blue Talk & Love received the 2018 Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging LGBTQ writers from Lambda Literary. Sullivan is currently an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African-American poetry, Black queer and feminist literature, and creative writing.
