Author Talk: Martha Shelley

Join Martha Shelley, a co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front, at the Avid Reader to discuss her memoir We Set the Night on Fire on September 14th at 6:30pm.

About the Author

Martha Shelley is a native of Brooklyn. After the Stonewall Riot in 1969, she organized the first gay protest march in New York and helped found the Gay Liberation Front. During that eventful year, she wrote Notes of a Radical Lesbian and Gay is Good, essays that shaped the ideology of the movement and have been anthologized and translated worldwide.

About the Book

Martha Shelley didn’t start out in life wanting to become a gay activist, or an activist of any kind. She grew up during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, was inspired by the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements that followed, and struggled with coming out as a lesbian at a time when being gay made her a criminal. Shelley organized the first gay march in response to the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and then cofounded the Gay Liberation Front. Martha Shelley’s story is a feminist and lesbian document that gives context and adds necessary humanity to the historical record.