Here and Queer on the West Coast: Small Presses, a Poetics of Sexual Disgust, and North America’s Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements

This presentation will examine and discuss the intersection between Vancouver's and San Francisco’s small presses and North America’s lesbian and gay liberation movements. Specifically, it will examine how San Francisco’s City Lights Publishers as well as Vancouver’s blewointment press and Press Gang Publishers created aesthetic spaces grounded in anti-homophobic, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist values that galvanized its communities and readers towards achieving social justice across national borders. While members of the publishing collectives in both cities, such as Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco and bill bissett in Vancouver, faced issues with social oppression, they also supported each other by producing, circulating, and promoting a poetics of sexual disgust that forged transnational alliances.

How can the production and circulation of poetry facilitate the formation of transnational alliances that contribute to queer rights efforts? This presentation proposes that these presses produced intersectional spaces of resistance through the production, circulation, and reception of a poetics of sexual disgust that contributed to the development of local, national, and transnational queer counterpublics.