Abstract
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, born in Philadelphia in 1951, moved to San Francisco in 1991 and quickly established himself as a leading queer performance artist, playwright, and newspaper columnist as well as a leading housing rights and antigentrification activist. This interview is excerpted from an interview initially conducted by Susan Stryker, general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, for the GLBT Historical Society on November 19, 1998, and edited in consultation with Mecca for publication in TSQ, to highlight content related to the interrelationships between feminism, drag culture, and gay liberation politics in Philadelphia in the 1970s. In what follows, Mecca discusses his early involvement with radical sexuality and gender politics with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) at Temple University, his later involvement in the more assimilationist Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), the formation of the Radical Queens collective, and his alliance with the separatist lesbian feminist group DYKETACTICS.
