History of Pride in Poetry

LGBTQ+ Poetry from Stonewall to the AIDS Crisis

Jun 09, 2026

Dear read poetry friends,

Queer people have always existed, and have always been writing about their experiences and their love in their poetry. From Sappho to Shakespeare, to more modern poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, queer love and identity have always been woven, even subtly, into the works of queer poets. In 1999, Pride Month was established at a national level to take place in June. However, the tradition of celebrating Pride in June stems back 30 years earlier, to the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, and has grown into a global time of celebration for the resilience, love, and culture of the LGBTQ+ community. In the wake of the Stonewall Riots, and since the establishment of Pride Month, poetry has been an essential space of expression and a tool for visibility and representation for the LGBTQ+ community.

The Stonewall Riots & the 1970s in LGBTQ+ Poetry

Around the time of the Stonewall Riots, towards the end of the beat poetry movement, queer poetry performances in New York City could most often be found in countercultural spaces, in radical zines, and small-scale literary publications and presses. Poetry from the LGBTQ+ community could most often be found through activism and community groups that sponsored readings in bookstores, community meetinghouses, church basements, political rallies, arts festivals, college campuses, and public parks. Post-Stonewall, a lot of these literary efforts further solidified with increased activism from LGBTQ+ groups offering publications and venues. As older poets such as Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg joined the movement, the liberation movement sought to break from the confines of the past, and poets sought to save lives and foster resilience through artistic and cultural creation.

A few months after the Stonewall Riots, Come Out!, the first post-Stonewall newspaper published by the gay and lesbian community, was published. Spearheaded by The Gay Liberation Front, a prominent activist group in NYC after Stonewall, the magazine became a place for journalism, political thoughts, and poetry, such as:

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“Roots” by Martha Shelley

We grow darker,
          turned back in the earth
Forbidden to pierce the ground
      and see the sun:
Denied the fruit of love,
We are not what we could become.
Entrapment is no hamfist vice squad cop
But rigid cages of your words.
Philosophies imprison thought:
Our voice has been unheard.

This poem by Martha Shelley was included in the first issue of Come Out! and follows similar themes to poems found throughout the issues. Often, writers were exploring belonging, a desire to be able to love openly, and identity.

Counterculture papers, such as Los Angeles’s Lesbian Tide and Chicago’s Lavender Woman also offered spaces for poets to publish their work and share it with the broader LGBTQ+ community in a time of widespread censorship for LGBTQ+ writers.

The first anthology of gay male poetry, The Male Muse: A Gay Anthology, emerged from Crossing Press in 1973. The collection represented a chance for gay poets to discuss potential poems for the collection and also the publication rights, access to gay literature, and life as gay male poets. Very few poets who reached out to Ian Young, the editor of the collection, included biographical information or opted for their poetry to be published. But the collection represented a revolutionary moment of representation and an assertion of gay identity in literature.

The AIDS Crisis & LGBTQ+ Poetry of the 1980s

From the 1960s and 1970s, there was an exponential growth in poetry of liberation and love from the LGBTQ+ community. However, the turn of the 1980s saw these communities and poets come to face the onset of the AIDS crisis, and the poetry reflected the tragedy that followed for LGBTQ+ communities, especially in cities such as NYC and San Francisco that had been the heart of the communities’ cultural production a decade prior. Poems such as John Ashbery’s “ How to Continue” and Thomas Gunn’s collection The Man with Night Sweats captured the pain and tragedy of the AIDS epidemic’s early losses in mournful elegies, while others aimed to combat the villainization from political structures and to humanize those lost and suffering.

Franz Lebowitz, an author known for her commentary and iconic New Yorker personality, has spoken about the influence AIDS had on general culture, how “the first people who died of AIDS were artists. They were also the most interesting people. I know I’ve said this before, but the audience for the arts […] the knowing audience also died […] It decimated not just artists but knowledge.”

Very rarely in LGBTQ+ poetry from the 1980s is the threat of AIDS named outright. Often it is a sensation of looming death, of a cleaving trauma which has led to large-scale and personal trauma. Many of the poems were not published until posthumously, as the stigma and fear-mongering were so intense. With a disease that’s magnitude (by 1990, deaths attributed to the virus had reached nearly 90,000) and wasting power felt as if it defied sense, community and poetry as a survival tool became all the more important.

The last 30 years of LGBTQ+ poetry have been shaped by resonances of Pride, of activism and resilience from the poets who have come before. Each of the papers and publications from small presses represented a step forward for the voices of LGBTQ+ poets to be represented widely in American literature. Every poem saved and read in the years after Stonewall was a poem pushing for survival and representation, the influence of which can still be found weaving through the poems and collections LGBTQ+ poets are producing today. These writers create a rich landscape of poetic history to draw from this Pride month.

This Pride, celebrate the history of poetry as a space of expression for the LGBTQ+ community. Maybe that looks like penning your own poem, following the form of the poets writing post-Stonewall, or maybe it’s showing up to spaces in your community where poetry is freely shared. It could also look like supporting a local bookstore and purchasing collections by LGBTQ+ poets, or showing up to modern-day poets’ readings. However you choose to celebrate, I hope it is a month full of poetry and pride!

Poem of the Week

Each week, I feature a poem under our monthly theme at the end of the Substack article, with the opportunity for a subscriber to submit a poem along that theme and to be featured on our page. Send us a direct message on Substack to be considered! This June, we’ll be highlighting a theme of community.

“ A Second Train Song for Gary” by Jack Spicer

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When the trains come into strange cities
The citizens come out to meet the strangers.
I love you, Jack, he said
I love you, Jack, he said
At another station.
When passengers come in from strange cities
The citizens come out to help the strangers.
I love you too, I said
I love you too, I said
From another station.
The citizens are kind to passing strangers
And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.
I walk the unbelieving streets
I walk the unbelieving streets
In a strange city.
At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers
Achieve in memory the city's promise.
I wake in love with you
I wake in love with you
At last year's station.
Then say goodbye to citizens and city
Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.
I leave my love with you
I leave my love with you
In this strange city.

Until next week!

Happy writing,

Claire