We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown (review)

Narratives of Gay Liberation often get reduced to simplistic pictures where Stonewall sparks Gay Liberation. This common brushstroke often paints with a broad brush that leaves Gay Liberation’s cross-pollination with Black Power and homophile activism out of the frame. Such absences risk missing complexities, historical contexts, and the importance of converging movements in generating social change. In their new book, We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown avoid these problems to give readers a vivid and complex portrait of the last seventy years of queer organizing in the United States. The book, which mixes the coffee table genre with historical criticism, presents a narrative and visual record that gives readers a glimpse into past queer life-worlds. Filled with detailed descriptions and evocative photos, the book performs intellectual and political work that does not reduce the queer past to one simplistic picture, adding layers to the portraits of many contemporary U.S.-based queer social movements.

Written in a pluralistic manner that explores many multiples of past queer organizing, Riemer and Leighton navigate contested histories with multidimensionality. This multidimensionality can be attributed to the authors’ work running the popular Instagram account LGBT_history, which posts snapshots from archives accompanied by contextual information. Due to this form of public engagement, Riemer and Leighton’s work has been assisted by a vast hive-mind, some of whom were present when the pictures were taken. In the book’s acknowledgments, the authors describe how correspondence with photographers and those present in the images they posted led to correction of details, informed choices of language and perspective, and pushed the book “toward grassroots histories that delve into the deep divisions populating the queer past” (16). The affordances provided through this form of engagement have implications for correcting the failures of collective memory and archives. After receiving numerous messages, Riemer and Brown updated the attribution of multiple photos by Gay Liberation photographer Diane Davies, whose subjects had been incorrectly identified for decades, including Zazu Nova, a transgender woman of color who was incorrectly identified as Marsha P. Johnson. Besides correctional work, Riemer and Leighton also remind readers that many of the images they have seen on the internet attributed to famous events (i.e., Stonewall, Compton’s Cafeteria) are often of other events. These examples provide an important reminder that there are dangers in assuming one knows what they are looking at when glancing at artifacts from another epoch. Those attending to the queer past must do diligent work that uses oral history and archives in tandem to recontextualize the past. As living queer elders age, the window to do this work is quickly closing, making projects like We Are Everywhere even more imperative.

To combat misremembering, Riemer and Leighton contextualize the politics surrounding the book’s photos. I was particularly impressed with the careful description of activist debates around competing tactics for social change (militant or petition), ways of comprehending oppression (gender, sexuality, race), and overarching goals (reform or revolution). Much like queerness itself, these categories do not always line up neatly in the ways one would assume. The book’s narrative provides helpful insight into these past intra-movement tensions while also criticizing how racism and transphobia imposed additional layers of marginalization on many. For these reasons, although We Are Everywhere was written with nonacademic audiences in mind, the book is relevant to those in queer studies interested in multidimensional accounts of the queer past.

As I flipped through the book’s lively photographs, I found myself experiencing a variety of emotions. Many of the images are iconic, and seeing them sprawled across the page made me smile. J. J. Belanger and Robert Block’s infamous lip lock is present. Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries engaged in direct-action activism...