| Abstract |
Compiled by grassroots activists with the motto "every lesbian life [is] a famous one," the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) is the oldest and largest lesbian archival collection in the world. The newspapers and periodicals from this collection show how LGBTQ journalism developed from a collection of radical zines in the 1970s into a series of widely circulated professional newspapers and magazines in the early twenty-first century. This collection provides a thorough sampling of LGBTQ journalism. There are examples of alternative publications, including the feminist magazine It Ain't Me Babe (1970-1971), the communist Come Out Fighting (1975-1978), and New York's anarchist magazine Clone (1975-1978). But there are mainstream publications as well. The collection contains several issues of The Gay Community News, a Boston weekly with a national reach that for a while served as the movement's unofficial "paper of record," Out Front, a daily news and entertainment paper that is the second-oldest independent LGBTQ publication in the United States, and Frontiers Newsmagazine, Southern California's oldest LGBTQ newsmagazine. The collection also includes issues of some non-LGBTQ publications that treat gay themes, such as the San Francisco Chronicle. Also noteworthy is the Spanish-language Puerto Rico Breeze. |
