Queerly Classed was published in 1997 with South End Press. I am connecting it here as an open source book for a number of reasons. First, because there is a real gap in the before-internet and post-internet materials available. Queer communities in the 1980s and 1990s produced an extraordinary amount of cultural and political work and infrastructure. Much of this work was severely impacted by the AIDS crisis. We lost so many brilliant and powerful leaders. The cultural work of the times carried the same tangle as the cultural work produced today does: too many white people defining queerness only in white terms, tensions between shifting the mainstream versus leaving it entirely, tensions around gender, class, culture, region (really, not everything good comes from NYC or the Bay) and more. And with all of that, a testament to the power of these movements was the scale of targeted attack by the fundamentalist christian and economic Right to minimize and disappear the truth of queer lives. This targeting caused a lot of things: the decimation of an ecosystem of small independent presses which means the loss of parts of our histories as well as the political redirect towards a focus on marriage as a primary LGB strategy. Queerly Classed came into being because an editor at South End Press, Loie Hayes, had seen an issue of The Evergreen Chronicles focused on class. She reached out and asked if we wanted to put together a book. Queerly Classed also came into being because Carmen Vasquez met me in a random way, believed in this project, and introduced me to a hell of a lot of people. Publishing as community organizing, organizing a book as community organizing: they are real things. Movement elders who attend to younger folk and resource them to follow their own ferocity.

A few things to say: Queerly Classed came out just as we were moving from a gender-binaried way of talking about queerness to a more fluid or broader way of experiencing ourselves and understanding gender. For this reason “queer” exists alongside “lesbian and gay.” Within not too many years, this was an outdated way of referring to our collective lives. While the language of identity in this book is not fully in alignment with the language of identity today, the experiences described are often the same or similar. Some of the contributors to this anthology no longer name their gender and/or identities in the same way they did in 1997.

The other reason to tell this story is because of South End Press. We lost a great deal when this publisher had to close their doors. Many first books were published here, books by radical movement leaders from the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Some of those books have been republished in other places, but many have not. We lost other radical feminist, queer and queer-friendly publishers with that same commitment to cultural work and community organizing: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Firebrand Books, and others. Books from some of those presses have been picked up elsewhere, but others are now only circulating in libraries, private collections and second hand book sales. Thankfully, there is a new surge of independent publishers who see themselves as organizers and cultural workers. As one of the contributors said, in reflecting on this book, it’s true, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So with all of that, here is just one of the many books and journals and zines that lived only on paper. Nearly half of the contributors have since passed, five of them due to complications from AIDS and two from breast or ovarian cancer. One has passed since I first put this book on the internet - Carmen Vasquez is a huge loss for so many of us and only one of the elders who died from COVID. Some are less public as figures than they were in the 1990s, others are more or differently known.

I am proud of this book and proud of all of the work we did to make it happen. With gratitude to the contributors:

Donna Allegra, David P. Becker, Allan Bérubé, Victoria Brownworth, Justin Chin, Eli Clare, Kennette Crockett, Aklilu Dunlap, Michio Fukaya, Catherine Saalfield Gund, B.Michael Hunter, Joe Kadi, William J. Mann, Johnny Manzon-Santos, Miranda Mellis, Harold McNeil Robinson, Scot Nakagawa, Ruthann Robson, William Reichard, tova, Jane VanderBosch, Carmen Vasquez, Morgan Grayce Willow, Judith K. Witherow,