ABSTRACT
A lesbian and gay newspaper published in Boston, Massachusetts, Gay Community News was founded in June 1973 as a local, community-based mimeographed newsletter. It soon became an influential sixteen-to twenty-page weekly newspaper providing local, national, and international news and features to a large national audience. Unlike the vast majority of U.S. lesbian and gay periodicals, GCN was produced by and oriented toward both lesbians and gay men. A strong advocate for radical social change, the newspaper developed explicit commitments to feminism, antiracism and multiracialism, awareness of class issues, support and advocacy for prisoners, sexual liberation, the fight against AIDS, and alliances with other progressive movements. The number of GCN subscribers peaked in the 1980s at approximately four thousand, although thousands more copies of the newspaper were printed each week for newsstand and bookstore sales and free distribution. Estimates of GCN’s weekly readership reached as high as sixty thousand.
