Help needed for gay media history

A former gay newspaper editor is calling on people who worked in the gay and lesbian press in the 1970s and early ‘80s to help fill the gaps of a new gay media history project.

Melbourne-based editor Bill Calder is looking to speak to people from

Melbourne and Sydney in the lead up to a PhD he will be completing. The problem, Calder told the Star Observer, is tracking people down.

“It’s kind of the story behind the publication I’m looking for as well, and that’s proved harder, particularity in the ‘70s’ to find who was behind publications,” he said.

“One of the reasons is it was a long time ago … and sometimes people were too frightened to put their names in the paper.”

Calder is currently focusing on the ‘70s with a preliminary paper and hopes the final work — which will chart both the gay and lesbian media landscape in Australia up until the dramatic collapse of the Satellite Group in 2000 — will eventually become a book.

Calder himself comes to the project with a great of experience in the editors’ chair. He started his career in gay media as news editor of Outrage in the late ‘80s; then became editor of Melbourne Star Observer in 1991; then Brother-Sister in 1992, which was sold to Satellite in 1999; and later started up Bnews which was sold in 2005 before its collapse in 2008.

Calder said he wants to look at the gay and lesbian publications so the story of the newspapers themselves is not lost.

“Language changes across that period of time, the strident, liberationists, confrontational language of the earlier times is different to the language of a more comfortable and mature community of today, so that clearly reflects a change,” he said.

“I think it’s an accessible way in for people because everybody reads the newspapers … and particularly at the time people are coming out and discovering their sexuality, they often connect to a particular publication … it’s a way into the broader historic story, what was going on in the community and in society.”

As to some of the colourful clashes within and between rival publications over the years, Calder said he is interested in the details.

“At times it would be crucial to the development of gay media, but other times it is probably just a personality spat,” he said.

“Sometimes the competition between papers has brought innovation and developments and so even though there may be hostilities at the time, in time it’s flowed on to be something significant.”

Calder is particularly looking for people involved in early 1970s Sydney gay and lesbian publications Apollo, Little Butch/Gay, Stallion/Gayzette.

He is also looking to speak to: Bill Munro, Harry Mitchell, Jim Brennan, Julie Waif, John Baker, Michael Delaney, William Easton or Peter Langford who are listed in past papers.

info: If you can assist, please email Bill Calder [email protected]