Will Roscoe (February 8, 1955) is an American activist, scholar, and author based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

Early life

Will Roscoe was born on February 8, 1955. He grew up in

Missoula, Montana Missoula ( ; fla, label= Séliš, Nłʔay, lit=Place of the Small Bull Trout, script=Latn; kut, Tuhuⱡnana, script=Latn) is a city in the U.S. state of Montana; it is the county seat of Missoula County. It is located along the Clark Fork ...

Gay activism

Roscoe helped found the Lambda Alliance at the

University of Montana The University of Montana (UM) is a public research university in Missoula, Montana. UM is a flagship institution of the Montana University System and its second largest campus. UM reported 10,962 undergraduate and graduate students in the fa ...

, that state's first

LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term ...

organization in 1975. He served as an intern at the

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force The National LGBTQ Task Force is an American social justice advocacy non-profit organizing the grassroots power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. Also known as The Task Force, the organization supports ac ...

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 United Way is an international network of over 1,800 local nonprofit fundraising affiliates. United Way was the largest nonprofit organization in the United States by donations from the public, prior to 2016. United Way organizations raise funds ...

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 Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk was born and raised in ...

in the "No on 6" campaign against the

Briggs Initiative California Proposition 6, informally known as the Briggs Initiative, was a ballot initiative put to a referendum on the California state ballot in the November 7, 1978 election. It was sponsored by John Briggs, a conservative state legislato ...

. After attending the first Radical Faerie gathering in

Arizona Arizona ( ; nv, Hoozdo Hahoodzo ; ood, Alĭ ṣonak ) is a state in the Southwestern United States. It is the 6th largest and the 14th most populous of the 50 states. Its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona is part of the Fou ...

in 1979, he became colleagues with

Harry Hay Henry "Harry" Hay Jr. (April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002) was an American gay rights activist, communist, and labor advocate. He was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States, as well a ...

, co-founding Nomenus, which operates a LGBT retreat center in southern

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

. 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".

Career as a writer

Roscoe was awarded the

Margaret Mead Award Margaret Mead Award is an award in the field of anthropology presented (solely) by the Society for Applied Anthropology from 1979 to 1983 and jointly with the American Anthropological Association afterwards. This award was named after anthropologis ...

for his first book, ''The Zuni Man-Woman''; it also won the

Lambda Literary Award 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 i ...

for gay men's nonfiction. In 2003, he received a Monette-Horwitz Achievement Award for research and scholarship combating homophobia. His book ''Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love'' received a Lambda Literary Award in 2005.

Selected publications

; Books * ''Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love''. San Francisco: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004. * ''Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America''. Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 1998. * ''Queer Spirits: A Gay Men's Myth Book''. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. * ''The Zuni Man-Woman''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. ; Edited volumes * ''Boy Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities'', edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe. St. Martin's Press, 1998. * ''Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature'', edited by

Stephen O. Murray Stephen O. Murray (May 4, 1950 – August 27, 2019) was an American anthropologist, sociologist, and independent scholar based in San Francisco, California. He was known for extensive scholarly work on the sociology, anthropology, and compara ...

and Will Roscoe. New York: New York University Press, 1997. * ''Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder'', by Harry Hay. Boston: Beacon: 1996. * ''Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology''. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

References

* Roscoe, Will. (2006, October 8). "Unsolved Mystery," Montana Standard, C1-2. Reprinted as "1917 Union Lynching Still Casts Pall in Butte," Helena Independent Record, October 15, 2006. * Mass, Lawrence D. (1990). "On the Future of Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Dialogue with Will Roscoe." In Homosexuality as Behavior and Identity: Vol. 2, Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution, 234-52. New York: Haworth Press, 1990.

External links

Official website by Will Roscoe
{{DEFAULTSORT:Roscoe, Will 1955 births Living people Writers from Missoula, Montana University of Montana alumni Radical Faeries members Writers from the San Francisco Bay Area Activists from the San Francisco Bay Area American gay writers Lambda Literary Award winners LGBT people from Montana Historians of LGBT topics American historians