BGSQDBureau of General Services—Queer Division
BGSQD
The narratives in the film, From Trauma to Activism unpacks our history with stories from audacious pathfinders and academics, gay liberationists and transgender militants, dykes and lesbian separatists, feminists and radical fairies, queers and queens.
These trailblazers came out-of-the-closet: suffering familial estrangement and shunning; risking their livelihood; and chanced harm during hostile demonstrations. Determined to transform the world by living openly despite reprisals, they were committed to social change and making the planet a more just and safer place. They formulated a daring politics with insights about human existence; trans-and gender identity; and sexual orientation that has inspired generations of post-Stonewall Rebellion activists and change-agents; academics and historians; and artists, filmmakers, and writers.
Trauma and activism appear to be in contradistinction—the former defined by elusivity and concealment, being hidden and out-of-sight; and the latter by action, out-in-the-open, in public. However, the evolution of activism for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) people begins with, and is inseparable from, psychological reclamation and regeneration.
After the film, Dansky will discuss saving our history through the project OUTSpoken: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers, conducting interviews from New York City to Portland; Durham to Los Angeles; from the rural communities of Columbia County, New York, to San Francisco; and globally via Skype in Bangkok, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne.
Dansky asks attendees to please refrain from taking photographs or recording video at this event.
Steven F. Dansky has been an activist, writer, and photographer for more than 50 years. He was on the cusp of the modern LGBTQ movement after the Stonewall Rebellion as a member of the legendary Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and was a cofounder of the group the Effeminists that continues to generate controversy into another millennium.
Pre-Stonewall Rebellion at sixteen-years old he was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements; and as a community organizer on New York’s Lower Eastside. He published a bilingual, one-cent mimeographed newsletter, Peace/La Paz, and was a reporter for The New York Free Press and a contributor to the SoHo Weekly News.
Post-Stonewall Rebellion he was influential in the development of the modern gay liberation movement. As such, he is referenced in most books on the LGBT movement—from 1971 in The Gay Militants and Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation; to 2012 in Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution; and in 2015, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. He was a member of Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1969 and was an effeminist and coeditor of Double-F: A Magazine of Effeminism.
During the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, from 1983 to 2001, he served as a volunteer with Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and Body Positive. As a hospital administrator and psychotherapist, he worked in the undeserved communities of New York City. He wrote the books, Now Dare Everything: Tales of HIV-Related Psychotherapy (1994) and Nobody’s Children: Orphans of the HIV Epidemic (1997).
As a frequent contributor to the Gay and Lesbian Review, he has written essays about everything from camp to Gore Vidal and Malcolm X to queer culture. His essay, “On Anger: The Months After the Stonewall Rebellion,” was anthologized in After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation (2013) and “The Effeminist Moment,” in Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (2009).
His photography has been in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Massachusetts, and Las Vegas and has been published in LensWork (2012), Art and Queer Culture (2013), and Protest!: Photographs of Social Justice in the 21st Century (2016).