Welcome to Purple Hand Press
About Us
Purple Hand Press is the imprint of award-winning author, Elena Graf. Originally founded to publish historical fiction reimagining how LBGTQ people lived in the past. Much of what we know about the lives of LGBTQ people before the 21st century was hidden by censorship or euphemism. Now we know that many famous and not-so-famous people lived unconventional lives right under the noses of their contemporaries. The list has since broadened to include modern history.
The Purple Hand Story
On October 31, 1969, sixty members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) staged a protest outside the offices of the San Francisco Examiner in response to a series of news articles disparaging LGBT people. Examiner employees dumped printer’s ink from the third floor of the building onto the crowd. The protesters used the ink to scrawl ‘Gay Power’ and other slogans on the building walls and stamp purple hand prints throughout downtown San Francisco.