FagRag No. 27/28

Boston: FagRag, 1972. Offset on newsprint with black and white photography and illustration throughout. 17 ½ x 11 ½ in, folded to 8 ½ x 11 ½ in. 48 pp. Very good. Item #5723

After Stonewall, when the gay press emerged from past censorship as a vibrant and mobilizing counterweight to mainstream papers one of the most distinctive was Fag Rag, founded in Boston in 1971. The brainchild of Charles Shively, a history professor, poet, anarchist, and incendiary theorist of gay liberation, Fag Rag was produced by a revolving collective of volunteers which sustained Fag Rag for thirty issues between 1971 and 1987.

Titled the ‘Dramatic Issue,’ FagRag No. 27 contains an array of personal essays, fiction, poetry and four dramatic plays, including ‘Commonwealth vs. Mr. Appleby,’ and an insert of ‘Folie a Deux’ by Maya Silverthorne. The issue aims to gather the unassimilatable - ‘that in faggot life which cannot be absorbed into the system.’

A provocative and witty collection of radical queer creativity from one of the community’s iconic journals.

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