American writer, educator and gay activist. Born in Seattle to a chemistry professor father and pharmacist mother, Will Roscoe was raised in western Montana where he says “sky, mountains, and streams inspired me to be a dreamer.”
He came out as gay in 1975, becoming active in the Gay movement and helping to establish Lambda, the first Gay/Lesbian organization in Montana. In 1976 he served as an intern at the National Gay Task Force and next year spearheaded the formation of the Oregon Gay Alliance, a statewide coalition of Gay/Lesbian groups. In 1978, he completed an internship at the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, where he coordinated a successful campaign to win United Way funding. His was the first Lesbian/Gay social service agency to do so.
In 1979, Roscoe attended the first Radical Faerie gathering in Arizona, meeting the movement’s gay guru Harry Hay, and helping found Nomenus, a gay retreat still operating in Southern Oregon. In 1980, with other local artists he organized “Mainstream Exiles: a Lesbian and Gay Men’s Cultural Festival” and co-published and co-edited “Vortex: A Journal of New Vision” 1980-82, with his partner Bradley Rose. In 1984, he became Project Coordinator for the Gay American Indians History Project and edited “Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology.”
Roscoe’s research on the Native American berdache or two-spirit tradition has appeared in numerous journals and publications. His book, “The Zuni Man-Woman” 1991, received the Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association and a Lambda Literary Award. He has since published “Queer Spirits: A Gay Men’s Myth Book” 1995 and edited “Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder” 1996, by Harry Hay. He is also co-editor of “Islamic Homosexualities” 1996; “Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities” 1998; and “Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America” 1998, which is a comprehensive study of the lives and cultures of “two-spirit people.”
Roscoe holds a 1991 Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has taught Anthropology, Native American Studies, and American Studies at UC/Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, UC/Berkeley, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Dominican College. From 1991-1995 he was an affiliated scholar with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, and he is now adjunct faculty for the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.
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