For more than four decades, I’ve been seeking answers to the questions posed by Harry Hay in 1950 at the dawn of lgbtq liberation. They’ve led me on amazing journeys into queer history, culture, politics, and spirituality.

In my books, articles, podcasts, and art I share what I have learned along the way.

The Zuni Man-Woman

Born in 1849, We’wha combined the work and characteristics of men and women with traits unique to the role of a Two-Spirit, or lhamana, in Zuni tradition. We’wha was an accomplished potter and weaver, and a cultural ambassador for the Zuni people. The anthropologist Mathilda Stevenson described them as the “strongest character and the most intelligent of the Zuni tribe.”

In 1886, We’wha spent six months in Washington, D. C. mingling with the wives of powerful politicians and calling on President Grover Cleveland. But a few years later, when the US cavalry invaded the Zuni village and tried to arrest its leaders, We’wha fought back — and spent a month in a military jail.

University of New Mexico Press, 1991
Margaret Mead Award; Lambda Literary Award

Gender diversity is one of the most widely shared traditions in Native North America. Third and fourth genders have been documented in more than 150 tribes from Alaska to Florida. As artists, healers, leaders, warriors, and kin, lgbtq and Two-Spirit individuals were widely accepted in traditional Native communities and in some considered spiritually powerful. Changing Ones tells the stories of historical Two-Spirit people, women warriors, and women chiefs, documents the origins of today’s Two-Spirit movement, and delves into the ways that Native American gender diversity deepens our understanding of gender and sexuality and the history of contact between indigenous Americans and Europeans.

Changing Ones:

Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America

Published in 1988 by the Gay American Indians organization in San Francisco, Living the Spirit was the first collections of writings about lgbtq Native people by Native people. Weaving together history, personal accounts, stories, myths, images, and poetry it celebrates the heritage of Native lgbtq/Two-Spirit people and the lives of Two-Spirit Indians today. Contributors include Randy Burns, Paula Gunn Allen, Maurice Kenny, Clyde Hall, Beth Brant, Chrystos, Janice Gould, Hulleah Tsishnahjinnie, and other pioneers of today's Native/First Nation Two-Spirit renewal.

Living the Spirit:

A Gay American Indian Anthology

St. Martin's Press, 1998

St. Martin's Press, 1998

Radically Gay:

Harry Hay is the lgbtq movement’s Malcolm X—the unassimilable radical who returns in every generation to inspire those young-at-heart, unwilling to accept indignities that their elders have endured. He was there at the beginning, in 1948, talking about homosexuals as a cultural minority; he was there in the sixties urging stodgy homophiles to make room for Gay liberation; he was there in the seventies challenging assimilationists with radical faerie visions of politics and culture; he was there in the eighties, speaking to the masses in New York’s Central Park on the twentieth anniversary of Stonewall wearing a camouflage skirt over a pair of blue jeans. He is the queer movement’s antidote to complacency.

Here, in this collection of essays, articles, manifestos, and speeches lovingly curated by Will Roscoe, Harry extolls his radical faerie vision for queer politics and culture.

Beacon Press, 1996

Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder

Queer Spirits: A Gay Men’s Myth Book

Queer Spirits is a kaleidoscopic collection of myths, stories, fairy tales, and poetry from around the world that reveal the powerful archetypes behind the eroticism, romance, and flair threaded through the lives of gay and queer men — from the radical queen to the dark leatherman to the ecstatic powers released when equals and sames, the Divine Twins, unite.

Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love

Drawing on recently discovered ancient sources, Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love offers a striking new view of Jesus as a charismatic mystic whose teachings on love and the kingdom of heaven were complemented by a secret rite that imparted the experience of entering heaven. From there the book traces the shamanic themes of this rite back to the origins of Western religion.

Beacon Press, 1995

Vortex Media, 2004, 2013, 2020
Lambda Literary Award 2004

Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities

Among the many myths created about Africa, the claim that homosexuality and gender diversity are absent or incidental has been especially pernicious. Some African leaders claim that that same-sex patterns and nonbinary genders were introduced by Europeans or Arabs. In fact, historical essays, anthropological studies, memoirs, and first-hand accounts in this eclectic anthology show beyond how widespread of same-sex relationships and gender diversity were and are in African societies in every region of the continent.
Boy-Wives and Female Husbands is the basis of a short play by Caryl Churchill, Pigs and Dogs, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2016.

Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History,
and Literature

“Islamic Homosexualities is the fullest analysis of homosexual behavior over the many centuries and diverse regions of the Islamic world. The dominant tradition of relations between men and boys in the central Islamic lands is described in a series of historical studies, and this is accompanied by anthropological accounts of gender-based homosexuality in Southern Asia, Africa and the Balkans. These finds are placed in larger comparative context and related to the rise of modern western homosexuality. A splendid collection.”
—Randolph Trumbach, City University of New York

SUNY University Press, 1998, 2021

New York University Press, 1997

Edited with Stephen O. Murray (1950-2019)

Drop...Dead: The DJ Murders

Dropping was no big deal for Joey De Vera. Everyone at Club Galaxy took "party favors." They were circuit boys and they lived the fast-lane life of sex, drugs, designer jeans, and disco dancing. That is, until the the DJ dropped—dropped dead—and a trail of clues leads Joey across dance floors on both sides of the Pacfic Rim.

“Jump down this exciting rabbit-hole with Joey, a young Filipino club boy, and a metrosexual cast of characters in this new murder mystery.”—Mary Wings, author, She Came too Late.

“Drop...Dead is VERY funny while delivering a clear political message on the indifference to harm reduction measures.”—Stephen O. Murray, author, Angkor Life and Pacific Homosexualities.

“Tonne Serah will flip your triggers on a bumpy ride of campy and dirty fun trolling through the club scenes and the pits of politics in search of answers and better living through chemistry.”—Sister Kitty Catalyst, co-founder of the SF Queer Club and Party Outreach Project

Podcast
“Give 'Em Hell, Harry!”:
The Man Who Kept Harvey Milk’s Dream Alive

Harvey Milk

Harry Britt

“Part of Harvey’s greatness was not that he just found the smartest, best people in the world, and offered them jobs, it was that he took some screwed-up people and helped them to see themselves as having within themselves some strengths, and some powers, and some beauty that gave them motivation and belief in themselves. And there aren’t too many better examples of that than me.” —Harry Britt

Articles Chapters Reviews Links

Montana History

Vortex: A Journal of New Vision

Two-Spirits

Queering Christianity

Just Dance!

More

“Will Roscoe's books have been a great inspiration to me, and a great education as well. Growing up queer in a conservative Christian household in the 1980s and '90s, I came to believe that my love was a sin, punishable by eternal fire. His book Queer Spirits: A Gay Men's Myth Book gave me my first clue as a teenager that my queerness could be beautiful—even spiritual. His book Changing Ones then helped me begin to understand the extent to which queer people of color have been excluded and erased from the ’official 'histories’ we are all taught in school. More recently, in my work as a scholar of Black queer history, I have joyously returned to Boy-Wives and Female Husbands again and again. Each time I learn something new about our African queer ancestors, their lives, their loves, and their forgotten role in the many cosmologies of the mother continent.”
—Channing Gerard Joseph, author House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens — and Changed the World