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Will Roscoe grew up in Missoula, Montana. In 1975 he helped found the Lambda Alliance at the University of Montana-Missoula. It was Montana's first LGBT organization. He served as an intern at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1976, and the following year he formed the Oregon Gay Alliance, a statewide coalition of LGBT groups. After relocating to San Francisco in 1978, he organized a successful campaign to obtain United Way membership for the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, the first LGBT social service agency in the nation to receive that status. He subsequently worked with Harvey Milk in the "No on 6" campaign against the Briggs Initiative. After attending the first Radical Faerie gathering in Arizona in 1979, he became colleagues with Harry Hay, co-founding Nomenus, which operates a LGBT retreat center in southern Oregon.

In 1995 he edited and published a selection of writings by Hay, the "father" of the gay liberation movement. Roscoe's first book, The Zuni Man-Woman, received the Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for gay men's nonfiction. In 2003, he received a Monette-Horowitz Achievement Award for research and scholarship combating homophobia. His book, Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love, received a Lambda Literary Award in 2005.