Friends of Steven F. Dansky

Steven F. Dansky has been an activist, documentarian, photographer, and writer for more than 50 years.

Pre-Stonewall Rebellion, he was in the civil rights and anti-war movements and was a member of Student for a Democratic Society (SDS). As a community organizer on NYC’s Lower Eastside, he published a mimeographed, bilingual newsletter, Peace/La Paz. He was a reporter for The New York Free Press and a SoHo Weekly News contributor.

Post-Stonewall Rebellion, he was prominent in the beginning of the LGBT movement as a member of Gay Liberation Front (GLF). He is referenced as an influential forerunner in numerous books, dating from 1969 to the present. He was co-publisher of the controversial, ground-breaking antisexist periodical, Double-F: A Magazine of Effeminism.

During the early AIDS pandemic, he wrote two books Now Dare Everything: Tales of HIV-Related Psychotherapy (1994) and Nobody’s Children: Orphans of the HIV Epidemic (1997). He was a volunteer with Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and Body Positive, cofacilitating HIV support groups. He was healthcare administrator, working in the unserved communities of East New York, Brooklyn; Harlem; and the South Bronx. He received post-graduate training at the Institute for Human Identity, which has provided LGBTQ affirmative therapy for over 40 years. He was a licensed psychotherapist in New York City; and in Albany, New York, he joined Choices: Counseling and Consulting where his clients were exclusively transgender.

Currently, he is the publisher of Christopher Street Press. As the founder of Outspoken Films, he produced the documentaries, Bookish: Reading the Queer Subject (2019) and From Trauma to Activism (2017). With John Knoebel, he co-founded Outspoken: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers, interviewing more than one-hundred people each collected at ONE, National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California, Los Angeles with all interviews available for viewing at a dedicated website (www.outspoken-lgbtq.org).

Steven F. Dansky’s writing has been anthologized in several books, and he is a frequent contributor to the Gay and Lesbian Review, writing essays about everything from camp and queer culture to Gore Vidal, Mahatma Gandhi, and Malcolm X. His photography has been in solo and group exhibitions and has been published in LensWork (2012); Art and Queer Culture (2013); and Protest!: Photographs of Social Justice in the 21st Century (2016).