WE'RE HERE, WE'RE QUEER, Featuring Over 100 LGBT Interviews, Published

We're Here, We're Queer, a new book by Chicago writer Owen Keehnen, contains more than 100 interviews with activists, artists, writers, and others who helped lay the groundwork for the current LGBTQ world. Many of the subjects died soon after these interviews took place.

Primarily conducted in the 1990s, these chats with some of the defining members of the LGBT community provide an excellent window into the world during this tumultuous and pivotal stage of our history.

Included in this collection are conversations with Quentin Crisp, Edmund White, Samuel Steward, The Daughters of Bilitis, Harry Hay, Dorothy Allison, Dick Sargent, David Wojnarowicz, E. Lynn Harris, Tommy Tune, Joan Nestle, Holly Woodlawn, RuPaul, Sarah Schulman, Paul Monette, Chuck Renslow, Jerry Herman, Sapphire, Susie Bright, Michael Cunningham, Dennis Cooper, Janis Ian, Pam Tent, Jewelle Gomez, Michelangelo Signorile, George Chauncey, Camille Paglia, Scott Heim, Scott O'Hara, Shyam Selvadurai, Darry Yates Rist, Felice Picano, Scott McPherson, Ethan Mordden, Alison Bechdel, Kate Bornstein, Joan Jett Blakk, and many more.

Collectively these primary source interviews provide substantial insights into an era that may have been only a few decades ago, but was also a world away. It was a time of combustable urgency when out of dire necessity everything changed. There was no going back to the place where we had been. Suddenly we were everywhere and our message was a simple one, We're Here, We're Queer - Get Used To It.

Chicago-based writer Owen Keehnen's work has been featured in hundreds of periodicals and anthologies worldwide. He is the co-author, with Tracy Baim, of Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow and co-edited Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago's LGBTQ Community 1977-1997. He is also the author of the horror novel Doorway Unto Darkness as well as the forthcoming gay novel The Sand Bar. He is currently at work with Tracy Baim on Jim Flint: The Boy from Peoria.

The book is available on Amazon and in Chicago at Women & Children First and Unabridged bookstores.

For a review copy contact: Owen Keehnen at owenkeehnen@yahoo.com
Prairie Avenue Productions, $19.00
ISBN-13: 978-1463606213
ISBN-10: 1463606214

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