Will Roscoe

Will Roscoe has been active in the LGBTQ movement since 1975, when he helped found Lambda at the University of Montana (still active today as the Lambda Alliance).

The following year, he served an intern at the National Gay Task Force, and in 1977, as coordinator of the Gay People’s Alliance at the University of Oregon. In 1978, he completed an internship at the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, where, working with Harvey Milk and other community leaders, he helped organize a successful campaign to win United Way funding for the Center, the first LGBTQ social service agency in the country to do so. He also served as voter registration coordinator for the No on 6 campaign in San Francisco (the Briggs initiative), an effort that resulted in the registration of over 10,000 new voters.

In 1979, he attended the first radical faerie gathering in Arizona, where he met Harry Hay, and became involved in efforts that led to the founding of Nomenus, a group dedicated to the exploration of gay spirituality. In 1980, with Tede Mathews and other San Francisco queer artists he organized “Mainstream Exiles: a Lesbian and Gay Men’s Cultural Festival” and between 1980 and 1982 with his late partner, Bradley Rose, published Vortex: A Journal of New Vision. In 1984, he became Project Coordinator for the Gay American Indians History Project and edited Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology.

Roscoe holds a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he has taught in several Bay Area colleges and universities.

In 2002 he was canonized as Saint Vera Severa by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for his work in promoting harm reduction in the dance music and circuit party scene. In 2003, he received the Monette-Horowitz Achievement Award in recognition for lifetime contributions in combatting homophobia.