Creating Community and Grappling with History: Queer DIY Publishing in the United States after Stonewall

This article examines the growth of liberationist LGBTQ and feminist community-based, collectively run newspapers, journals, and small presses in the United States during the 1970s, looking at three distinct, interrelated points of cultural and political tension that these publications and presses faced. The first was the need for publications to define a specific community of readers at a time when stable definitions of community were fluid and often highly contested. The second tension concerned these groups' grappling with the interplay between the radical politics of these publications and their collectives and the more assimilationist, often conservative, groups and journals that came before them, and to which they were, in some ways, indebted—a tension that led to a desire to uncover a history of same-sex and feminist activities as an affirmation of their identity, leading to a plethora of sloppy historical conjecture and misinformation that created a "feel good" sense of the past that was often at odds with the groups' usually more rigorous sense of historical analysis. The third tension was how these groups could maintain their liberationist political identities as discussion of same-sex themes were becoming more prevalent—even marketable—in mainstream media.