"It shocked for the sheer joy, the sheer rage, of it."

With a note from the author: this fascinating story explores the history of the brashly named Fag Rag, one of the most distinctive queer magazines of the 1970s. The brainchild of Charles Shively, a history professor, poet and anarchist, its thirty issues spanned the dawn of gay liberation and the depths of the aids crisis. Here, Jeremy Lybarger considers Fag Rag's relevance today and how, in its powerful essence, it pushed for a political revolution by presenting queerness as a rejection of everything wrong with America.

Jeremy Lybarger is a Chicago-based longform writer and editor, whose reporting and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Boston Review, The Baffler, among many others.