Queer is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender. Originally meaning 'strange' or 'peculiar', queer came to be used pejoratively against LGBT people in the late 19th century. Beginning in the late 1980s, queer activists, such as the members of Queer Nation, began to reclaim the word as a deliberately provocative and politically radical alternative to the more assimilationist branches of the LGBT community.
Radical Faeries are a loosely affiliated worldwide network and countercultural movement seeking to redefine queer consciousness through secular spirituality. Sometimes deemed a form of modern Paganism, the movement also adopts elements from anarchism and environmentalism. Rejecting hetero-imitation, the Radical Faerie movement began during the 1970s sexual revolution among gay men in the United States.
Laurence David Kramer was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London, where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love (1969) and received an Academy Award nomination for his work.
Faggot, often shortened to fag in American usage, is a term, usually considered a slur, used to refer to gay men. In American youth culture around the turn of the 21st century, its meaning extended as a broader reaching insult more related to masculinity and group power structure.
Lesbian pulp fiction is a genre of lesbian literature that refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel or pulp magazine with overtly lesbian themes and content. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 1960s by many of the same paperback publishing houses as other genres of fiction, including westerns, romances, and detective fiction. Because very little other literature was available for and about lesbians at this time, quite often these books were the only reference the public had for modeling what lesbians were. English professor Stephanie Foote commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to the rise of organized feminism: "Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. The more they are read, the more they are valued, and the more they are read, the closer the relationship between the very act of circulation and reading and the construction of a lesbian community becomes…. Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone." Joan Nestle refers to lesbian pulp fiction as “survival literature.” Lesbian pulp fiction provided representation for lesbian identities, brought a surge of awareness to lesbians, and created space for lesbian organizing leading up to Stonewall.
Faggots is a 1978 novel by Larry Kramer. It is a satirical portrayal of 1970s New York's very visible gay community in a time before AIDS. The novel's portrayal of promiscuous sex and recreational drug use provoked controversy and was condemned by some elements within the gay community.
Emanuel Xavier, is an American poet, spoken word artist, author, editor, and LGBTQ activist born and raised in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn. Associated with the East Village, Manhattan arts scene in New York City, he emerged from the ball culture scene and the Nuyorican movement to become a successful poet, writer and advocate for gay youth programs and Latino gay literature.
RFD is a reader-written quarterly magazine celebrating queer diversity. Founded in 1974 as a publication for gay country-living and alternative lifestyles, the magazine has been edited by different communities in various locations since its inception; it is currently published in New England. While predating the Radical Faeries, the magazine and the movement have long been associated. Notable writers featured in RFD include the poet Essex Hemphill.
Michael Thomas Ford is an American author of primarily gay-themed literature. He is best known for his "My Queer Life" series of comedic essay collections and for his award-winning novels Last Summer, Looking for It, Full Circle, Changing Tides, and What We Remember.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is an American author and activist. She is the author of two memoirs and three novels, and the editor of six nonfiction anthologies.
Chris Bartlett is an American gay activist, feminist, educator, and researcher who lives in Philadelphia, PA, and is the executive director of the William Way Community Center.
Arthur Scott Evans was an early gay rights advocate and author, best known for his 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Politically active in New York City in the 1960s and early 1970s, he and his partner began a homestead in Washington state in 1972, then later moved to San Francisco where he became a fixture in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. In his later years, Evans remained politically active and continued as a translator and academic. His 1997 book Critique of Patriarchal Reason argued that misogyny had influenced "objective" fields such as logic and physics.
Larry Mitchell was an American author and publisher. He was the founder of Calamus Books - an early small press devoted to gay male literature - and the author of fiction dealing with the gay male experience in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.
Felix Bernstein is a performance artist, video artist, writer, and cultural critic. Bernstein was born in New York City to poet Charles Bernstein and artist Susan Bee, and attended Bard College, graduating in 2013.
Andrew Durbin is an American poet, novelist, and editor. As of 2019, he has served as editor-in-chief of Frieze. Prior to his position at Frieze, he co-founded Company Gallery, served as the Talks Curator at the Poetry Project, and served as a co-editor at Wonder press. Durbin is the author of two novels and several chapbooks. He lives and works in London.
Morgan Bassichis is an American comedic performer and writer, living and working in New York City.
TM Davy is a New York-based painter. Davy paints and draws in the style of social realism and portraiture, recognizable for his keen sense of light and color depicting both the human and non-human.
Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
The Effeminists was a political and social advocacy group composed primarily of gay men in the 1970s who concerned themselves with allying the gay liberation movement with women and the feminist movement at the time. The group was borne out of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), when some members expressed disagreement with the ways in which women were being treated by the gay liberation movement.
The Terminal Bar is a 1982 novel by Larry Mitchell. It was published by Mitchell's own literary press, Calamus Books, and received mixed reception in the gay press. It was among the first novels that dealt with HIV/AIDS in the United States.
