Richard LaFortune

Richard LaFortune, also known as Anguksuar (Yupik for Little Man), (born 1960 in Bethel, Alaska), is a two spirit activist, author, community organizer, and artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. LaFortune was an early organizer of the Native American LGBT community in the 1980s and co-founded the Two Spirit Press Room (2SPR). LaFortune began working in health and human services and by 1991 he served on the Governor's Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Minnesotans during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. LaFortune appeared in the 2009 PBS documentary, Two Spirit, that narrates the story of Fred Martinez, a two spirit teenager, and included interviews with many two spirit individuals.

Early life LaFortune was adopted by a white missionary couple from the Moravian church when he was less than a week old. but knows that his biological mother came from a lineage of Yupik medicine people and spiritual leaders. As a child LaFortune lived in Alberta, Canada and then a small town in upper Michigan. He later became the executive director of Honor the Earth, a Native American environmental justice organization. In the 1980s LaFortune immersed himself in the Native American communities of Ojibway, Dakota, Lakota, and Ho-Chunk people living in Minnesota and in the American gay community. One of the first actions of the Two Spirit Press Room was to publish a "Community Briefing Handbook", meant to educate the public about two spirit people. and in 2010, he was featured in the book Queer Twin Cities. LaFortune was featured in the 2009 PBS documentary film, Two Spirt, directed by Lydia Nibley. In the film LaFortune speaks about the murder of Fred Martinez, a two spirit teenager, and about the history of discrimination against two spirit people in America.

Writing LaFortune wrote a chapter in the 1997 book Two-spirit People titled A Postcolonial Colonial Perspective on Western Mis Conceptions of the Cosmos and the Restoration of Indigenous Taxonomies. The report describes how Native languages have been taught and preserved and recommends ways to continue their preservation. In 2010, LaFortune wrote an article for the Jewish-American magazine Tikkun about the history of organizing in the two spirit community.