LGBTQ+ Newspapers and Magazines
-
Front page of Southern Voice volume 2, number 16 from September 28, 1989. The cover story concerns ongoing controversy over North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms's sponsorship of an amendment banning National Endowment for the Arts funding for works deemed "indecent," "obscene," or "homoerotic." Helms suggested similar amendments for the Interior Appropriations bills in 1990, 1991, and 1992.
Courtesy of Kennesaw State University. Department of Archives, Rare Books and Records Management, Southern Voice newspaper collection, 1988-1995.
-
Volume 7, number 38 of Southern Voice from November 10-16, 1994. The story "Between the Sexes" interviews Richard Michaels, a trans man; Kate Bornstein, a non-binary performance artist; and Dallas Denny, trans woman and activist who founded the American Educational Gender Information Service. The interviewees speak about the stigma and silencing they have faced; Denny points out that transgender people are "welcomed into the gay/lesbian community when needed [for causes like fundraising]. . . but then ignored when more serious moments occur."
Courtesy of Kennesaw State University. Department of Archives, Rare Books and Records Management, Southern Voice newspaper collection, 1988-1995.
-
Front page of The Atlanta Barb volume 1, number 6 from July 1974. The cover story concerns Atlanta Police Chief John Inman's ordering of an investigation concerning police use of entrapment to target gay men. Bill Smith, gay activist and later editor of The Barb who served on Atlanta Community Relations Commission, reviewed the resulting Vice Division report and found that it was either fabricated or incomplete and faced resistance to open communication with the Division.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
-
Cover of E.T.C.E.T.E.R.A, volume 4, number 4 from January 29 - February 4, 1988. The cover image shows parade marchers carrying banners for Men Stopping Violence Against Women and Black and White Men Together. In the foreground, writer Peter Dakutis carries a sign saying "We claim our gay brothers James Baldwin Bayard Rustin," the only publicly known gay men involved in the civil rights movement.
Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, Cal Gough, loaned for digitization.
Several LGBTQ+ papers established during the 1980s publication rush became long-lived and widely distributed news sources for queer communities in the southeast. Ecetera, or ETC, was founded by Pat Coleman, Jaye Evans, and Jim Heverly in 1985 and became a weekly mainstay for the almost seventeen years it was printed. ETC’s largest competitor was Southern Voice, one of the few LGBTQ+ media publications run by women, founded by Chris Cash and Leigh VanderEls in 1988 after the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Like ETC, Southern Voice aimed to be more than a “bar rag,” covering news at the regional and national level and reporting on politics with a more mainstream perspective than the editorial content in ETC. Southern Voice was sold to Window Media in 1997 and unexpectedly shut down in 2009, but several former Southern Voice editors and executives launched Georgia Voice the following year as a successor to SoVo’s legacy. The magazine David Atlanta, the “go-to guide” for gay entertainment and nightlife in Atlanta, underwent a similar series of changes. Launched in 1998 with Window Media, David Atlanta was closed alongside Southern Voice when the holding company folded in 2009. David was purchased and continued printing from 2010 to 2017 before shuttering entirely, but like Southern Voice, former employees of David picked up its pieces and translated them into a new publication, PeachATL. In the twenty-first century, online-only publications have also forged their own identities. Amidst the late 2000s struggles of Southern Voice and David, publisher Matt Hennie launched Project Q Atlanta to deliver news in a blog-style web format. And in 2014 a group of LGBTQ+ writers and photographers created WUSSY Mag to document queer art and culture in the South. In 2017 both publications began issuing print editions, Q Magazine (now Q ATLus) and WUSSY Mag. The continuing births and rebirths of LGBTQ+ publications underline both the varied interests, events, politics, and perspectives of queer Georgians as well as the labor required keep queer voices in mainstream circulation.