https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rrunOsz_1w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDQXdu8nMWA
In 1969, the Stonewall uprising inspired a flurry of national publications and queer activism. Fag Rag was one such early gay print endeavor, arising from the Boston 1970 gay and lesbian magazine Lavender Vision, which dissolved shortly after the women involved in the project left to begin their own separate publication. In June 1971, Fag Rag, co-founded by gay poet and historian Charley Shively and gay liberation activist, writer and bookseller John Mitzel, published its first edition. Over the course of the next 17 years, 44 issues of Fag Rag were distributed, with the very last issue circulating in 1987. Described as "pre-punk" and "anarchic," Fag Rag was extremely influential in the queer Boston print scene, inspiring and directly connected to the emergence of organizations such as the Boston Gay Review and Good Gay Poets Press.
Two digital oral histories (linked above) conducted by the Boston Queer Communities Archive document the early involvement of a group of gay, leftist writers, activists, artists, and historians in the formation of Fag Rag. They identify that Fag Rag emerged not just from the roots of queer liberation compounded by the Stonewall riots, but from the women's movement, the War Against Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Movement, where these gay men learned activist tools from seasoned organizers or combined their radical social politics with their queer identity, articulating their own marginalization. Historian and Harvard Professor Michael Bronski likewise described the sociopolitical conditions amongst which the magazine formed as an "extremely hot crucible" (26:30). The name of the magazine itself was an intentional reclamation of the f-slur, and, while notably controversial for its time, indicated an early attempt at removing power from harmful language used oppressively against the gay and lesbian community. Fag Rag irrelevantly celebrated "gender fuckery," androgyny, and challenged binary expressions of gender presentation in a period where hypermasculine, muscular stereotypes and images of gay men abounded. Its significant contributions to the Bostonian queer literary and activist communities indelibly shaped the course of queer liberation politics, aesthetics, and art in print and in the streets.