Tommi Avicolli Mecca collection

Tommi Avicolli Mecca (b. 1951) is a writer, singer/songwriter, performance artist, and activist. Avicolli Mecca was born to Anthony Avicolli and Rosa Maria Mecca and grew up in a working-class Italian family in South Philadelphia. Attending a Catholic high school, he wrote for the school's underground newspaper and in the neighborhood newspaper, the South Philly Review Chronicle, and he became involved in the anti-war and civil-rights movements. He began study at Temple University in 1969, in part to avoid the draft (he registered as a conscientious objector). He studied creative writing and won the prestigious Temple University “Young Poets” award in 1971, the same year he came out of the closet. He also continued his involvement in activism, joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS, an anti-war organization) and Temple's Gay Liberation Front (GLF), for which he served as secretary and later chair. With Temple GLF he was involved in organizing the Temple Gay Coffee Hours and participated in a "Kiss a Queer" booth on campus on Valentine's Day 1973. He graduated from Temple University in 1974 with a Bachelor's degree in creative writing.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Avicolli Mecca was involved in many Philadelphia-area Gay rights organizations. In addition to his work with Temple University's GLF, Tommi was also involved with the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), for which he served as president in 1975, the Gay Media Project (GMP), and was a founding member of Radicalqueens and GALA: The Gay and Lesbian Arts Festival. He was an organizer of the first Philadelphia gay pride march in 1972, was a founder and organizer of the Gay Coffeehouse of Philadelphia (1974-1983), and served in several capacities for the Gay Community Center of Philadelphia (GCCP), including as member of the Building Maintenance Committee, the Policy Council, and the Board of Directors. He established the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Archives, which grew into today's John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives. In the 1980s he presented a narrated slide show called "Rocking the Cradle: A History of the Gay/Lesbian Movement in Philadelphia, 1960-1980."

Avicolli Mecca has produced a substantial collection of writings in several genres, including poetry, prose, drama, and journalism. His poems are published in two chapbooks (Magic Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1976), and Boy Dreams (1983)) and appear in such journals as Northwest Magazine, Philadelphia Poets, Fag Rag, Gay Sunshine, Lazy Fair, Mouth of the Dragon, Caesura, and Orgasms of Light, as well as in the newspapers The Drummer, The Weekly Philadelphia Gayzette, GPU News, and in the anthology Gay and Lesbian Poetry in our Time (1988). Many of his early poems have been reprinted in the iBook, Defying You Still (2015).

Prose works are published in as many journals and anthologies including Men Freeing Men (1985), Lavender Culture (1994), Queer View Mirror (1995), Eyetalian magazine (1996), Quickies (1998), The Whole World's Watching (2001), Out in the Castro (2002), I Do I Don't (2004), Sweet Lemons (2004), That's Revolting (2008), and Reconstructing Gender (2009). He is the author of Between Little Rock and a Hard Place (1993) and co-editor of Hey Paesan!: Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent (1999) and Avanti Popolo: Italian Writers Sail Beyond Columbus (2008). For the 40th anniversary of the formation of the Gay Liberation Front in New York, he edited Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (2009).

As a playwright and performance artist, Avicolli Mecca has produced and presented numerous original works including Judgement of the Roaches (1978), The Life Expectancy of Snow Creatures (1980), Giving Voice (1985), images of a war unfought (1986), All in All I’d Rather be Having Sex (1997), Italian.Queer.Dangerous (2005) and This Boy Is Just So Strange (2014). In the 1970s he performed in drag reviews (often as Bette Midler or Barbra Streisand) with the activist group Radicalqueens, on guitar and vocals with Paul Tighe as “The Queer Boys," and with Michael Barnett as “Finocchio” (a southern Italian slang word for “faggot”). He founded the multiracial queer theatre troupe Avalanche which performed in Philadelphia (and one summer toured colleges throughout the Northeast coast courtesy of a grant from Philadelphia Foundation) from 1986-1991. In the early 1990s in San Francisco, he performed on guitar with Ted Tallase (vocals and flute) as “Tallase and Mecca.” In the late 1990s he spent two years as a playwright in residence at San Francisco’s Jon Sims Center, producing three one-act plays: La Madonna Nera (the Black Madonna), the aching in god’s heart, and Esther’s Boys. His work, He Defies You Still: The Memoirs of a Sissy (originally published in Radical Teacher, 1983), was adapted for stage by Jessa Carlstrom at Bailiwick Repertory in Chicago in 2003. With Doug James he wrote the words for an AIDS-related dance piece called "a man pours" (2012). And with Alison C. Wright, he produced a musical about San Francisco’s housing crisis called A Roof over My Head (2016).

As a journalist, Avicolli Mecca served as reporter, local news editor, and managing editor of the Philadelphia Gay News (1981-1991), associate editor of New Gay Life magazine (1977-1978), and has written for the Weekly Philadelphia Gayzette, Boston Gay Community News, Philadelphia Magazine, San Francisco Bay Times, Philadelphia Daily News, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Bay Area Reporter, and for beyondchron.org, sfsentinel.com, 48Hills.org, and other web news blogs.

In 1991, Avicolli Mecca left Philadelphia and moved to San Francisco. For nearly a decade he worked at A Different Light bookstore (1991-2000). Today, he is active in the housing rights movement, having organized (with Jim Mitulski) three shelters, a weekly food program, and a shower project for homeless queer youth, 18-24, in the Castro. In 2015, he helped open Jazzie's Place, the city’s first shelter for LGBT people over 18, and Marty’s Place, a community land trust co-op for low-income and homeless people with AIDS. He works for the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco and dedicates much of his energies to tenant and affordable housing advocacy.