Queer Nation - Queer Nation in Other Locales

Queer Nation in Other Locales

Queer Nation chapters were founded in dozens of other cities, including Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Boston, Charlottesville, Virginia, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, Columbia, S.C., Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, Montreal (known as Queer Nation Rose), Philadelphia (known as Queer Action), Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle and Toronto.

Queer Nation/San Francisco was founded in June 1990 by Mark Duran, Steve Mehall and Daniel Paíz; they organized a meeting at the San Francisco Women's Building the following month where the group was launched publicly. In the fall of 1990 the group helped organize a protest against a visiting televangelist who vowed to "exorcise the demons" from San Francisco on Halloween. The organization was active through 1991; an attempt to revive the group in 1992 was unsuccessful. An offshoot, the San Francisco Street Patrol, was a neighborhood safety patrol in the Castro District; it outlived QN/SF itself by a year.

The Queer Nation chapters in Atlanta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; Berea and Lexington, Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee were active in protesting homophobic policies of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.

Queer Nation in Houston was active from the beginning of 1991 through late 1994. On July 13, 1991, the group held a major demonstration to protest police response to the July 4 gay-bashing murder of Paul Broussard; that demonstration involved between 1200 and 2000 individuals who seized the intersection of Montrose Boulevard and Westheimer Street at the heart of Houston's gay neighborhood. Other actions by the group included a march in the suburban town that was the home of Broussard's killers, seizing the rotunda of Houston City Hall after another murder, protesting the Houston Post's firing of columnist Juan Palomo after he came out, and protesting discrimination against HIV-positive nurse Brian Bradley. The group also took the lead in organizing LGBT and HIV/AIDS protests at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston.

Queer Nation/Portland generated many original and popular sticker designs and slogans, including "Fuck Your Gender," "Bend Over Pretty," and a series of stickers interpolating Madonna lyrics, as "Strike a Pose, Not a Fag."