If we don’t do it, it won’t get done
Leah Whitman-Salkin
How could the work of making books—from research to writing to pitching to editing to design to printing to publishing to launching to getting press and into bookstores—be less lonely, less self-contained, less pressured and daunting? That is, more communal, more supportive and shared, more FUN.
Can we assume that there is abundance in the world, all the resources are out there, we are just meant to believe they aren’t or our access to them is restricted, or budgets make them seem impossible?
Can we activate ourselves, communally, to support each other as we move through various parallel projects?
On Thursday, May 2, we’ll meet to discuss these questions and more. We will do so with intention: to create—a la anarcho-socialist LGBTQI+ community newsletters and bulletin boards of the past, classifieds, and personal ads—an ongoing, sustainable community resource sheet, initiated here and with the hope that there is future.
The event is free and open to all, with prior registration.
Gay Revolution Networker, Vol. I No. 2
New York: Gay Revolution Network/Gay Revolution Publicity Project, 1972.
Striking early gay liberation broadside from a largely unrecorded group highlighting the issue of mafia control over gay social spaces and compiling gay organizations along with their meeting and contact information, including the Queens Liberation Front and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
The paper was published by the Gay Revolution Network, a project of the Gay Revolution Publicity Project, likely a short-lived splinter group formed during the height of the movement’s fracturing. In the paper, the group describes themselves as a “dynamic network of small groups organized to collectively deal with specific work projects or organizational functions.” The militancy of the proposed strategy for separating the gay community from Mafia operated businesses and that it was very likely printed at the gay anarchist print shop Come!Unity suggests its origins in the left wing of the early gay liberation movement.
The list on verso compiles queer organizations along with their respective addresses, phone numbers, and meeting schedules. Notably, the list includes several important early trans groups including Lee Brewster’s Queens Liberation Front and “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries ℅ Marcia” as well as the Gay Women’s Liberation Front, Mental Patients Liberation Project, the Gay Switchboard, and more.
The production of another issue of the Gay Revolution Networker has been attributed to Juan Carlos Vidal and Nestor Latronico; though this issue is uncredited, Vidal and Latronico were likely involved. The founders of Third World Gay Revolution, which grew out of the Gay Liberation Front, and poster printers for the Young Lords Party, Vidal and Latronico were significant figures in Black and Latinx queer organizing in the period, and particularly in the Spanish-speaking queer communities of New York. They began organizing in their native Argentina before immigrating to New York in 1969, and would also go on to found the organization Latin Gay Revolution.
An invaluable resource for its contemporaries and for researchers now, documenting the blossoming of radical LGBTQ organizations in the early 1970s, including notable and under-documented organizations such as STAR, Queens Liberation Front, and the Third World Gay Revolution.
Courtesy of Fugitive Materials.
Gay Revolution Networker, Vol. I No. 2
New York: Gay Revolution Network/Gay Revolution Publicity Project, 1972.
Courtesy of Fugitive Materials.
NY Lesbian Community
New York: np, ca. 1977.
Resource sheet listing services, organizations, cultural centers, and interest groups for the New York lesbian community. With over 63 listings, the sheet constitutes a substantial document outlining the contours of the extensive lesbian community in New York in the late-1970s, reproduced and made visible by the bars, bookstores, service organizations, interest groups, restaurants, and political organizations listed here.
Courtesy of Fugitive Materials.
NY Lesbian Community
New York: np, ca. 1977.
Courtesy of Fugitive Materials.
REALLOCATING $ AS A RESOURCE
New York: Come!Unity Press, 1970.
Superbly printed flyer listing many of the radical left organizations, publications, unions, funds, and affinity groups active in New York at the time - many now defunct, and a number still active. Groups include the Peoples Yellow Pages, WBAI (the local Pacifica affiliate), the filmmakers at Paper Tiger, the Attica Brigade at Queens College, Gowanus Community News, the IWW, and many more.
On the verso, a member of the press writes about the importance of free media and people’s institutions, likening them to public utilities. Through this collective organizing, “maybe we have lessened our dependency on the death machine.” An exceptional example of the printing style and politics of the gay anarchists at Come!Unity Press.
Courtesy of Fugitive Materials.
