Will Roscoe (February 8, 1955) is an American activist, scholar, and author based in San Francisco, California.
Will Roscoe was born on February 8, 1955. He grew up in Missoula, Montana.
Roscoe helped found the Lambda Alliance at the University of Montana, that state's first LGBT organization in 1975. [1] He served as an intern at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1976, and the following year he formed the Oregon Gay Alliance, a statewide coalition of LGBT groups.
After relocating to San Francisco in 1978, he organized a successful campaign to obtain United Way membership for the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, the first LGBT social service agency in the nation to receive that status. He subsequently worked with Harvey Milk in the "No on 6" campaign against the Briggs Initiative. After attending the first Radical Faerie gathering in Arizona in 1979, he became colleagues with Harry Hay, co-founding Nomenus, which operates an LGBT retreat center in southern Oregon. [2] In 1995 he edited and published a selection of writings by Hay, who was also a foundational figure of the gay men's liberation movement. Roscoe also worked closely with the group Gay American Indians (GAI) on issues around the meaning of the term "berdache". [3]
Roscoe was awarded the Margaret Mead Award for his first book, The Zuni Man-Woman; [4] it also won the Lambda Literary Award for gay men's nonfiction. [5]
In 2003, he received a Monette-Horwitz Achievement Award for research and scholarship combating homophobia. [6]
His book Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love received a Lambda Literary Award in 2005. [7]
The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was an early national gay rights organization in the United States, preceded by several covert and open organizations, such as Chicago's Society for Human Rights. Communist and labor activist Harry Hay formed the group with a collection of male friends in Los Angeles to protect and improve the rights of gay men. Branches formed in other cities, and by 1961 the Society had splintered into regional groups.
Henry Hay Jr. was an American gay rights activist, communist, and labor advocate. He cofounded the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States, as well as the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated gay spiritual movement. Hay has been described as "the Founder of the Modern Gay Movement" and "the father of gay liberation".
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place in the year 1979.
Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ+ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ+ literature. The awards were instituted in 1989.
Paul Landry Monette was an American author, poet, and activist best known for his books about gay relationships.
Alyson Books, formerly known as Alyson Publications, was a book publishing house which specialized in LGBT fiction and non-fiction. Former publisher Don Weise described it as "the world's oldest and largest publisher of LGBT literature" and "the home of award-winning books in the areas of memoir, history, humor, commercial fiction, mystery, and erotica, among many others".
Subject–SUBJECT consciousness is a concept articulated by Harry Hay, representing the valuable mindset in same-sex relationships, emerging from the inherent similarities of the partners.
The Society for Human Rights was an American gay-rights organization established in Chicago in 1924. Society founder Henry Gerber was inspired to create it by the work of German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and by the organisation Bund für Menschenrecht by Friedrich Radszuweit and Karl Schulz in Berlin. It was the first recognized gay rights organization in the United States, having received a charter from the state of Illinois, and produced the first American publication for homosexuals, Friendship and Freedom. A few months after being chartered, the group ceased to exist in the wake of the arrest of several of the Society's members. Despite its short existence and small size, the Society has been recognized as a precursor to the modern gay liberation movement.
Martin Bauml Duberman is an American historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist. Duberman is Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York City.
Lillian Faderman is an American historian whose books on lesbian history and LGBT history have earned critical praise and awards. The New York Times named three of her books on its "Notable Books of the Year" list. In addition, The Guardian named her book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, one of the Top 10 Books of Radical History. She was a professor of English at California State University, Fresno, which bestowed her emeritus status, and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She retired from academe in 2007. Faderman has been referred to as "the mother of lesbian history" for her groundbreaking research and writings on lesbian culture, literature, and history.
John Lyon Burnside III was an American inventor and gay rights activist, known for inventing the teleidoscope, darkfield kaleidoscope, and the Symmetricon. Because he rediscovered the math behind kaleidoscope optics, makers of optically correct kaleidoscopes sold in the United States paid him royalties for decades. Burnside was the life partner of Harry Hay from 1962 until Hay's death in 2002. Burnside was living in San Francisco, at the time of his death on September 14, 2008, from complications of brain cancer.
Allan Bérubé was a gay American historian, activist, independent scholar, self-described "community-based" researcher and college drop-out, and award-winning author, best known for his research and writing about homosexual members of the American Armed Forces during World War II. He also wrote essays about the intersection of class and race in gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, working-class family, his French-Canadian roots, and about his experience of anti-AIDS activism.
Toby Johnson is an American novelist and writer in the field of gay spirituality.
Neil Miller is an American journalist and nonfiction writer, best known for his books on LGBTQ history and culture. His writing career started in 1975 and ranged through at least 2010. Two of his six books won Lambda Literary Awards.
Claude J. Summers is an American literary scholar, and the William E. Stirton Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. A native of Galvez, Louisiana, he was the third child of Burg Martin Summers and Theo Coy Causey. He was educated in the public schools of Ascension Parish, graduating from Gonzales High School in 1962. He has long credited two teachers at Gonzales High School—Diana Sevario Welch and Sherry Rushing—for inspiring his interest in academic achievement.
James "John" Finley Gruber was an American teacher and early LGBT rights activist.
Winston Leyland is a British-American author and editor. Called "one of the seminal figures in gay publishing" by the San Francisco Sentinel, he was originally ordained a Catholic priest and later graduated from UCLA. He worked for the Los Angeles Times and Gay Sunshine, serving as editor for the latter when it was rebranded as the Gay Sunshine Journal. Under his direction, the Journal was praised by Allen Ginsberg for "its presentation of literary history hitherto kept in the closet by the academies." In 1975, Leyland founded Gay Sunshine Press, the oldest LGBT publishing house in the United States, followed by Leyland Publications in 1984. The two imprints combined have published more than 135 books, and are known for their translations of gay-themed European and Asian literature into English, including works by Vladimir Makanin, Yukio Mishima, and Nikolai Gogol. Leyland also published written erotica, such as Mike Shearer's Great American Gay Porno Novel and collections of reader-supplied true sexual stories edited by Boyd McDonald.
Stuart Timmons was an American journalist, activist, historian, and award-winning author specializing in LGBT history based in Los Angeles, California. He was the author of The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement and the co-author of Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians with Lillian Faderman.
Mark Thompson was an American journalist and author. He was a senior editor for The Advocate and the author of several books about LGBT culture. He received the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation in 2008.
The Homosexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual is a 1982 book about LGBT rights in the United States by the gay rights activist Dennis Altman, in which the author discusses the emergence of gay people as a minority group. The book received positive reviews, crediting Altman with providing a useful discussion of gay people in the United States.