The birth of gay media

Before magazines, newspapers, TV programs, radio shows and websites, there were newsletters. Historian Bill Calder charts the origins of gay media in Australia.

There was no gay media in Australia before 1969 but during the following decades, hundreds of newspapers and thousands of small group newsletters appeared – along with radio, television and the internet.

The big bang for all this was the Stonewall riots in America that inspired the birth of the Australian gay rights movement.

The organisation Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) started in 1970 and immediately published the magazine Camp Ink. It reflected the new mood of defiance and desire for justice, demanding both social acceptance and law reform for homosexuals.

When Camp Ink was first published it had sixteen A4 pages, with a black and white illustration on the cover that suggested aversion therapy was akin to sawing off a man's penis. Five hundred copies were printed and sold for 20 cents.

Camp Ink was the key activist publication in the 1970s, but there were dozens of locally based or specific campaign based newsletters, as well as breakaway groups such as Gay Lib, gay Christian groups and lesbian separatists, each one taking up the cause or interests of a specific group. The very first of these newsletters came from the Melbourne chapter of the American group Daughters of Bilitis who started producing a group newsletter in 1969.

The activists and their media were the spark that ignited moves to dramatically change Australian attitudes towards homosexuality. But they were not always in tune with everything that members of their own community wanted.

Commercial entrepreneurs followed the activists and with a partial reform of Australia's censorship laws small companies began to publish porn magazines that appealed more to people's desire for love and sex, than the fight for justice. Previously body-building magazines had provided gay men the only quasi-legitimate form of visual stimulation, but the new style porn had gay men and their bodies coming out of the closet. Lesbians though had to wait until the 1980s for magazines publishing porn for them.

The main fare of these porn mags was titillating pictures and stories. And in the 70s this was a radical act: for the first time the very act of homosexuality was presented in a positive light. Some of the 1970s gay porn mags, while focussing on titillation, also included serious feature articles, lifestyle stories and personal classifieds that allowed readers to meet each other and find out information about the fledgling gay community.

There were three important porn publishing houses. John Baker and William Easton published William & John in 1972, but they soon set upon by conservative state government censors and the magazine closed down due to a costly obscenity trial after only eight issues. Bill Munro published Butch magazine the same year and following the closure of William & John expanded into newspaper format with Little Butch. He soon ran into financial difficulty though and handed it over to a straight porn publisher who renamed the publication Gay. The third publishing house was straight owned from the beginning, producing the magazine Stallion. Also facing battles with state government censors the publishers sanitised Stallion's contents and even renamed it Gayzette, while producing a second magazine Apollo designed deliberately to be classified a restricted publication.

The third strand of media in the 70s was the community paper that coincided with the growth of a commercial venue scene and having fun. Campaign magazine was the most significant such magazine in the 70s. It sought to avoid both direct political conflict and the censor's wrath towards pornography.

Campaign started in 1975 and was soon Australia's most widely-read gay magazine. Its first owners were strongly connected to Sydney's gay nightclubs and it was launched as a modest 16-page monthly tabloid with a cover price of $1.

The first issue sold only 700 copies but distribution steadily increased from there, reaching nearly 11,000 by 1978. It was sold to the owners of the sex shop Platterpuss the following year and became increasingly lifestyle focused over the next decade, with two more owners subsequently, before it closed in 2000.

The activists who started Camp Ink and the other newsletters, the pornographers and the community publishers together provided a chorus of voices. The activist press politicised those who read it, while the porn mags and community newspapers reached a set of readers that the political press could not: fighting for rights on the one hand and providing the means to find sex and love on the other.

Much has changed for gay men and lesbians since 1969 and the pioneering work in the 70s of many individuals played a large part. Gay media too has changed both in size and professionalism, and at its core, the underlying message of having some fun, a bit of titillation and defending our rights still echoes the voices from the 70s.

Bill Calder is a former editor and publisher. He is currently researching Australia's gay and lesbian media history from 1969-2000. Follow his progress at www.gaymediahistory.wordpress.com