We Are Everywhere

Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation

About the Book

Have pride in history. A rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, from the creators and curators of the massively popular Instagram account LGBT History.
 
“If you think the fight for justice and equality only began in the streets outside Stonewall, with brave patrons of a bar fighting back, you need to read We Are Everywhere right now.”—Anderson Cooper

Through the lenses of protest, power, and pride, We Are Everywhere is an essential and empowering introduction to the history of the fight for queer liberation. Combining exhaustively researched narrative with meticulously curated photographs, the book traces queer activism from its roots in late-nineteenth-century Europe—long before the pivotal Stonewall Riots of 1969—to the gender warriors leading the charge today.

Featuring more than 300 images from more than seventy photographers and twenty archives, this inclusive and intersectional book enables us to truly see queer history unlike anything before, with glimpses of activism in the decades preceding and following Stonewall, family life, marches, protests, celebrations, mourning, and Pride. By challenging many of the assumptions that dominate mainstream LGBTQ+ history, We Are Everywhere shows readers how they can—and must—honor the queer past in order to shape our liberated future.
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Praise for We Are Everywhere

“Probably the best coffee-table book ever created.”Los Angeles Review of Books

“An impassioned photographic tour of an ever-changing, increasingly vocal and insistently resilient LGBTQ community and culture, from nineteenth century ideology to contemporary conversations around intersectionality.”The New York Times

“Meticulous research accompanies indelible images depicting ferocious outrage, glorious celebration, and profound mourning, making this an essential reference for generations to come.”Gay & Lesbian Review

“Carefully curated to present a fresh view of queer history.”USA Today

“This rich compendium of images, stories, and reflections carries readers into the future of queer liberation.”Publishers Weekly

“A beautiful, crucial, and engaging celebration of the queer community and our history.”—Blair Imani, author of Modern HERstory

“More than a history book and more than a collection of photographs, We Are Everywhere is a chance to experience the queer past in all its complicated shades… Riemer and Brown show us the radicals, the bisexuals, the gender warriors, the women, the people of color, and the militants who have always led the fight for liberation… We Are Everywhere is both an amazing look at where we’ve been and an important reminder of where we need to go.”—Travon Free, writer and comedian

“[This] important book chronicles the amazing history of queer resistance so that every queer person, young and old, can see their history and know we are everywhere.”—Tyler Oakley, activist and author of Binge

“If Riemer and Brown’s book proves anything throughout its deeply poignant pages, it's that we all truly need each other.”—Daniel Nicoletta, author of LGBT San Francisco

“This book is an essential rewriting of queer history according to our own terms.”—Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased

“We Are Everywhere [is] a topical, timely, and timeless resource. In the book’s intersectional showcasing of the under-recognized and the unforgettable, the roots of our activism, anger, and community are more important and profound than ever…queer history comes alive in the pages of this tremendous collection.”—Rhys Ernst, filmmaker

“We Are Everywhere is an invaluable brick in the foundation of our collective LGBTQ+ history, and a vivid reminder that queer people have a joyful, complicated, and inspiring history. I am so grateful this book exists.”—Dustin Lance Black, activist and filmmaker

“Open this book to any page and there will be something you’ve never seen, something you’ve never heard of, or something to fill you with ideas.”—Avram Finkelstein, artist, writer, and activist

“These stunning photographs—many never before published—convey the fierce diversity, defiance, sorrow, and joy of queer life across the twentieth century. Along with the lively tour of the last century of LGBTQ politics in the accompanying text, they will change the way you see the queer past.”—George Chauncey, author of Gay New York

“We Are Everywhere is a handbook for action, cherishing those who risked so much, and is a living bridge between our communities of the past and present…This is history that reaches into the now with a visual richness that makes memory a living body.”—Joan Nestle, co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives
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Excerpt

We Are Everywhere

Seeing Queer History


There’s a sign hanging in the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in Philadelphia—YOU ARE GAY HISTORY—that lets those who enter the space know they’ve come home. Queer archives—the Wilcox, the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, the Botts Collection of LGBT History in Houston, the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC in L.A., San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago, and New York City’s LGBT Community Center National History Archive, among others—are some of the few distinctly and specifically queer spaces left in the world. In these places, you’re surrounded by miles of materials—books, banners, periodicals, papers, photographs, and ephemera—all of which point to a truth that members of the dominant culture take for granted: you’ve always been here, you always will be here, and you are everywhere.   

In his seminal book Gay New York, Professor George Chauncey tells of when the Dean of the Harlem Renaissance, Dr. Alain LeRoy Locke, sent poet Countee Cullen a copy of Edward Carpenter’s Ioläus, a 1917 anthology outlining the cultural tradition of romantic male friendship and love. Cullen reported back that he’d read the book in one sitting; the history, he said, made that which people called unnatural seem natural, even beautiful. “I loved myself in it,” Cullen wrote. Today, in cities around the world, archivists and volunteers maintain spaces in which queer people can love themselves and all those who made their lives possible. These places need you, and you need these places.   

On Veterans Day 2015, we—Matthew and Leighton—knew almost nothing about queer history, so it’s tough to explain why we ended up at the unveiling of Frank Kameny’s headstone. As a gay couple in D.C., we knew of Kameny, and, while the rest of the city paused to honor those who’d served in the military, we thought it fitting to pay tribute specifically to a queer vet. Gathered at Congressional Cemetery, the small crowd listened as speakers remembered Kameny, the curmudgeonly, brilliant gay rights leader, and we were introduced to a history of which we’d barely heard, details we’d never considered, and people whose names we didn’t know, although they’d dedicated their lives to queer liberation. By the end, we felt overwhelmed, isolated, and angry; we didn’t know our history.   

That’s how it started.

Matthew killed time reading old queer periodicals he found online, while Leighton scoured the Internet for queer photographers and photographs. Looking at the pictures together, we’d get lost for hours; we had a visceral, emotional reaction, as if we’d discovered a family album full of people to whom we were deeply connected—infinitely indebted—and about whom we knew next to nothing. While everyone says a picture is worth a thousand words, that assumes, as William Saroyan wrote, you can “look at the picture and say or think the thousand words.” In the beginning, we didn’t know what the images said; we didn’t have the words. We didn’t know that the queen with the stone-cold stare was Lee Brewster, who helped create Gay Liberation in New York City only to be forgotten; we didn’t know that the badass butch in L.A. was Jeanne Córdova, who seemed always to be on the right side of history; and we didn’t know that the militant AIDS activist from Chicago was Ortez Alderson, whose militance was legendary long before AIDS. Only with time and research did the words and images align.   

What began as a hobby became an obsession: we had to figure out as many details about as many photographs as we could; that, in turn, led to atlgbt_history, the Instagram account we started in hopes of sharing what we were learning. We thought we might engage a few hundred people; within a few months, there were ten thousand followers; in just over a year, we’d hit one hundred thousand. As the account grew, we heard from the photographers responsible for, and the people appearing in, the images we posted, those who’d been at the events or who knew the names of the faces featured. We were corrected on details, challenged on choices of language and perspective, and pushed toward grassroots histories that delve into the deep divisions populating the queer past. We faced criticism from people who knew we’d missed something and demanded we do better. And we got emails, usually from isolated young people, telling us that the accessible introduction to history made them feel less alone.       

With few exceptions, those following the account seemed willing to grapple with history, illustrating what James Baldwin said of Black America in 1962: “We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.” The burdensome reality is that queer people in the United States have what Baldwin called “an invented past,” a story but not a history. Our truth is not the popular tale of steady progress interrupted by momentary lapses of backlash, but rather a history of constant struggle interrupted by moments of triumph. Because the “Love Always Wins” narrative—the story of a people whose liberation is inevitable, thanks to a generally just society—is easier to market, however, we’re constantly battling a type of “historical amnesia,” as Audre Lorde wrote, that “keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.”    

A fundamental part of the oppression queer people experience at the hands of the dominant culture is a denial of our history, an erasure of our unique existence in decades and centuries past. Although the majority is ultimately responsible for this oppression, “we must be responsible for our liberation,” and we therefore have an obligation not only to each other but also to those who came before and those yet to arrive. “Each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible,” Lorde taught. If more queer people had access to their history, and if those who had access took advantage of it, perhaps, as activist/photographer Morgan Gwenwald observed, “they would be more sensitive to the possibility that their event/idea/product might not be a ‘first’ and that some acknowledgment to those who have come before should be made.” 

“We choose the history that we say is ours and by so doing,” wrote Lesbian Herstory Archives cofounder Joan Nestle, “we write the character of our people in time.” Our queer invented past—the character of our people—too often consists of stories of strikingly American gays who wanted to be “like everybody else,” presented by strikingly American gays who want to be “like everybody else.” Names, places, events, and issues are picked from the infinite past as those most likely to further the finite aims of the present: we’ve always been in your military, let us serve openly; we’ve always had families, give us your blessing; we’ve always run your companies and your towns, let us do so free from sanctioned discrimination. Although this approach isn’t in and of itself problematic, we mustn’t “use history to stifle the new or institutionalize the old.” Queer military members, queer parents, queer politicians, and queer businesspeople deserve the respect they’ve earned—which, in many cases, is infinite—but so do queer pacifists, queer sex workers, queer artists, and queer communists. Today, one need look no further than the White House or the local police station to know that the institutions into which lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people continue to seek acceptance harbor deep reservoirs of hate, chauvinism, homophobia, and paranoia. Why, then, are we trying to be “like everybody else”? You can “never be like them,” Sylvia Rivera said, and, by longing for normality, “you are forgetting your own individual identity.” The very source of queer power, Nestle wrote, is that our “roots lie in the history of a people who were called freaks.”

We—the authors—didn’t understand or embrace this power until we started to see queer history through photographs that provide, as Susan Sontag wrote, “the principal access to realities of which we have no direct experience.” Photographs, Gay Liberation–era photographer Steven Dansky notes, “make visible what is concealed and become evidence of reality—a photograph is a powerful record of the social space.” For queer people being the subject of a photograph will always be “daring and risky,” a “physical declaration of political and sexual identity” that may or may not fit into simple definitions and dominant narratives. “Our visibility is a sign of revolt,” bisexual activist Lani Ka’ahumanu said in 1993. “We cannot be stopped. We are everywhere.”

About the Author

Matthew Riemer
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About the Author

Leighton Brown
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