Queer Nation

Queer Nation

Formation	March 1990
Type	direct action
Purpose	Elmination of homophobia and increase LGBT visibility

Queer Nation was an organization founded in March 1990 in New York City, USA by AIDS activists from ACT UP. The four founders were outraged at the escalation of anti-gay and lesbian violence on the streets and prejudice in the arts and media. The group is known for its confrontational tactics, its slogans, and for the practice of outing.

History

On March 20, 1990, sixty LGBT people gathered at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Services Center in New York's Greenwich Village to create a direct action organization. The goal of the unnamed organization was the elimination of homophobia, and the increase of gay, lesbian and bisexual visibility through a variety of tactics.

The direct-action group's inaugural action took place at Flutie's Bar, a straight hangout at the South Street Sea Port on April 13, 1990. The goals included a desire to make it clear to (straight) patrons that queers would not be restricted to gay bars for socializing and for public displays of affection, and to call attention to the fact that most "public" space was in fact heterosexual space. Through parodying straight behavior (such as "spin the bottle") at these events, queers refused to be invisible while publicly questioning the naturalized status of heterosexual coupling activity. Visibility actions like this one became known as "Queer Nights Out."

Although the name Queer Nation had been used casually since the group’s inception, it was officially approved at the group's general meeting on May 17, 1990.

The militant protest style of the group contrasted with more assimilationist gay rights organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign or the Log Cabin Republicans. Queer Nation was most effective and powerful in the early 1990s in the USA, and used direct action to fight for gay rights. They also worked with AIDS organization ACT UP as well as WHAM! Even though never officially disbanded, many of the local groups did so in the mid-to-late 1990s.

The group's use of the word "queer" in its name and slogan was at first considered shocking, though the reclamation has been called a success, used in relatively mainstream television programs such as Queer Eye and Queer as Folk.

Other slogans used by Queer Nation include "Two, Four, Six, Eight! How Do You Know Your Kids Are Straight?" and "Out of the Closets and Into the Streets," and the widely imitated "We're Here! We're Queer! Get used to it!"'

Early timeline

Here are some of Queer Nation's first actions:

• April 20, 1990

Queer Nation members show up en masse at Macy's department store where Olympic gold medallist Greg Louganis is promoting a new swimsuit line. Queers arrive with WHEATIES cereal boxes with swimmer’s picture pasted on front, to recall the time the cereal maker rejected Louganis as a spokesperson, ostensibly because he is gay.

• April 26, 1990

Responding to the 120% increase in violence against queers, Queer Nationals climb the billboard on the roof of Badlands, a Greenwich Village bar and hangs a 40-foot banner that reads: "Dykes and Fags Bash Back!"

• April 28, 1990

A pipe bomb explodes in Uncle Charlie’s, a Greenwich Village gay bar, injuring three. In protest, Queer Nation mobilizes 1000 queers in a matter of hours. Angry marchers fill the streets, carrying the banner “Dykes and Fags Bash Back.”

• May 12, 1990

The inauguration of "Queer Shopping Network." Members of Queer Nation travel from New York City to the Newport Mall in Jersey City with leaflets offering information about queers, safe sex tips, and a list of famous queers throughout history. The leaflets are titled "We're here, we're queer and we'd like to say hello!"

Legacy

A television program of the same name with a focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) New Zealanders and current events and issues regularly aired in New Zealand for 11 seasons from 1996 to 2004, by which time it claimed to be the world's longest running free-to-air LGBT television show. The programme was funded by NZ On Air under its mandate to provide for the interests of minorities in the community.

Queer Nation in other locales

A confrontational sticker created by Queer Nation/San Francisco (1990)

Queer Nation chapters were founded in dozens of other cities, including Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Boston, Charlottesville, Virginia, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, Columbia, S.C., Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, Montreal (known as Queer Nation Rose), Philadelphia (known as Queer Action), Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle and Toronto.

Queer Nation/San Francisco was founded in June 1990 by Mark Duran, Steve Mehall and Daniel Paíz; they organized a meeting at the San Francisco Women's Building the following month where the group was launched publicly. In the fall of 1990 the group helped organize a protest against a visiting televangelist who vowed to "exorcise the demons" from San Francisco on Halloween. The organization was active through 1991; an attempt to revive the group in 1992 was unsuccessful. An offshoot, the San Francisco Street Patrol, was a neighborhood safety patrol in the Castro District; it outlived QN/SF itself by a year.

The Queer Nation chapters in Atlanta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; Berea and Lexington, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee were active in protesting homophobic policies of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.

Queer Nation in Houston was active from the beginning of 1991 through late 1994. On July 13, 1991, the group held a major demonstration to protest police response to the July 4 gay-bashing murder of Paul Broussard; that demonstration involved between 1200 and 2000 individuals who seized the intersection of Montrose Boulevard and Westheimer Street at the heart of Houston's gay neighborhood. Other actions by the group included a march in the suburban town that was the home of Broussard's killers, seizing the rotunda of Houston City Hall after another murder, protesting the Houston Post's firing of columnist Juan Palomo after he came out, and protesting discrimination against HIV-positive nurse Brian Bradley. The group also took the lead in organizing LGBT and HIV/AIDS protests at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston.

Queer Nation/Portland generated many original and popular sticker designs and slogans, including "Fuck Your Gender," "Bend Over Pretty," and a series of stickers interpolating Madonna lyrics, as "Strike a Pose, Not a Fag."

See also

• Civil rights
• Gay rights
• Heterosexism
• Queer nationalism

External links

• Queer Nation Manifestos
• Some articles
• article
• Queer without Fear
• article by a former QN member
• Website of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
• Guide to the Alan Klein papers at NYU's Fales Library. Klein is a founding-member of ACT UP/New York and a cofounder of Queer Nation/New York.
• GLBT Historical Society (San Francisco). Houses the records of Queer Nation/San Francisco and the San Francisco Street Patrol; also holds papers from several Queer Nation/San Francisco activists, including Fernando Aguayo-Garcia, Brian Bringardner, Gerard Koskovich and Marco Place. In addition, Queer Nation materials appear in other collections at the Historical Society, including the San Francisco Groups LGBT Ephemera Collection and the papers of Jenni Olson.

Outside Reading

"The Case For and Against Queer Nation," pp. 256–66, Johansson, Warren & Percy, William A. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. Harrington Park Press, 1994.

Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son by Phyllis Burke. New York: Random House, 1993. ISBN 0-679-42188-2. In this nonfiction book, the author recounts her struggle to adopt her domestic partner's son, a drama that is set against a backdrop of Queer Nation actions in San Francisco in 1990-1992.

News articles:

• San Francisco Chronicle, 30 October 1990: 'Spiritual Warfare' at Civic Auditorium
• San Francisco Examiner, 30 October 1990: Local Gays Plan Rally Against Televangelist's 'Prayer Army'
• Wall Street Journal, 30 October 1990: The Devil, You Say? San Francisco Faces Halloween Exorcism
• San Francisco Chronicle, 1 November 1990: 6,500 Christians Attend S.F. 'Exorcism'
• San Francisco Examiner, 1 November 1990: Prayer Army and 'Pagans' Tangle
• Los Angeles Times, 29 April 1991: Gays Bashing 'Basic Instinct'
• San Francisco Examiner, 30 April 1991: Film Forges Ahead Despite Gay Protest