Queer Labour in Boston: The Work of John Wieners, Gay Liberation and Fag Rag

Abstract

In the early 1970s, John Wieners became involved in significant activities of the Gay Liberation movement in Boston, Massachusetts and beyond, alongside Boston’s Mental Patients’ Liberation Front. Wieners’ involvement included reading poems at movement events; attending national events as a Gay Liberation representative; and publishing writing in numerous radical newspapers. Wieners was also part of the publishing collective for Fag Rag, a gay male anarchist newspaper. Drawing upon Wieners’ archives and that of Gay Liberation organisers and newspapers, this chapter situates Wieners’ poetic praxis, the publication of his work and its critical reception, within the work of the Gay Liberation movement. Wieners understood his poetry and political action as both important aspects of supporting the transformations of everyday life engendered by Gay Liberation. The chapter develops the dialectic of queer labour and queer consciousness posited by Matthew Tinkcom (as “camp labour” and “camp consciousness”), to theorise and consider the labour of Wieners and the Fag Rag collective as a mode of “queer world-making” (Berlant and Warner).