S T E V E N F. D A N S K Y

Biography

Christopher Street Press

Hot August Night/1970

On Bearing Witness

In Public

The Come Out! Reader

Videos

Essays

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ACTIVIST, WRITER, DOCUMENTARIAN

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

He is the publisher of Christopher Street Press and the executive director of Outspoken: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers and Outspoken Films.

Pre-Stonewall Rebellion, he was in the civil rights and anti-war movments; and a community organizaer on New York City's Lower Eastside. He was a reporter for The New York Free Press and a contributor to the SoHo Weekly News. He worked for the progressive newspaper, The Guardian; and was the publisher of Basta!, a bi-lingual community newsletter.

Post-Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, he was in the early LGBT movement as an influential member of Gay Liberation Front (GLF). He is referenced in most books on the formative years from 1971 to the present. He was on the Come Out! newspaper collective. He was a founder of effeminism and a copublisher of Double-F: A Magazine of Effeminism cowrote the iconic The Effeminist Manifesto.

During the HIV/AIDS pandemic, he was a professional volunteet with Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) and Body Positive. He was a a hospital administraor for HIV/AIDS programs in the underserved communities of New York including, Harlem, South Bronx, Jamaica, and East New York. He is the author of two books on the pandemic, Now Dare Everything: Tales of HIV-Related Psychotherapy (1994) and Nobody's Children: Orphans of the HIV Epidemic (1997).

As an essayist, he is a frequent contributor to the Gay and Lesbian Review, and has been anthologized in several books on the LGBT movement.

His photography has been in solo and group exhibitions and has been published in photobooks such as, Protest!: Photographs of Social Justice in the 21st Century (2016) and In Public: Studies from the Street (2012), and in LensWork magazine.

As a documentarian, his full-length film From Trauma to Activism was screened in several cities including, New York, Las Vegas, San Diego, and San Francisco. In 2019, it was selected for the Pride of the Ocean Film Festival. On Performing Identity was shown at the Leslie-Lohman Musuem, New York (2016).

Outspoken: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers has interviewed more than one-hundred trailblazers and is archived at ONE: Gay and Lesbian Archives, USC, Los Angeles, CA, where his personal papers are also collected.

He has a Master of Social Work (MSW), Hunter College, NY. He received postgraduate training at the Instittue for Human Identity (IHI). He had a private psychotherapy practice in NY and was affiliated with Choices Counseling and Consulting, Albany, NY. He was a pediatric instructor at the Children's Hospital, Albany Medical College.