Andy Colpitts, PhD Student in Performing and Media Arts 

This communiqué from Northern λ Nord (North Lambda Nord) is the fourth of over two hundred monthly bilingual (French-English) newsletters mailed to queer residents in rural Maine, Québec, and New Brunswick between 1980–2003. (Click on the gallery to Zoom in.) Northern λ Nord was an LGBTQ+ group founded in 1979 and based in Caribou, Maine with members hailing from as far as seventy-five miles away. Although initially formed to organize social events, the group quickly moved into political activism and education. The Greek letter λ (Lambda), which had been established in 1974 as an international symbol for gay activism, functions as a typographic borderline between the English and the French, providing a glimpse into the lives of LGBTQ+ residents of this international, Acadian region. In this issue, one writer decries a 1952 statute allowing US border agents to refuse entry to queer foreign nationals under a regulation excluding “persons afflicted with… sexual deviation,” and calls for a letter–writing campaign to support a motion to end this law. This language, however, wasn’t removed until 1990. For a community where crossing the US-Canada border for work, shopping and socializing (including queer meetings) is a way of life, this regulation posed serious problems. 

Beyond political news, this communiqué includes editorials, poetry, and articles on local gay life. Articles in French and English are printed upside-down to one another and, in many cases, discuss entirely separate material, thus encouraging (even requiring) readers to invert viewpoints and traverse linguistic as well as national boundaries to establish queer community in a remote region. The handwritten, manual-typed, cut-and-paste and xerox-copied materiality of the newsletter reflects its earthy provenance. This stylistic austerity, what Scott Herring might describe as “critical rusticity,” aligns Northern λ Nord with rural queer magazines such as RFD and Country Women in decentering urban life in LGBTQ+ discourse.

Source

Communiqué, Northern λ Nord, May 15, 1980. Miscellaneous human sexuality periodicals, #7687, Box 6. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM07687.html

Bibliography

Phillip Fotheringham. “Rural Outreach: What? Gay People Here?” in Body Politic, no. 82 (April 1982): 11. 

Scott Herring. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: New York University Press, 2010.  

Michelle Smith & Kristin Morris. “Finding Aid” for Northern Lambda Nord Archives, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries.