I was 21 years old when I walked into the offices of Chicago’s GayLife newspaper in the spring of 1984. Fresh out of journalism school, I had just learned about gay media and was excited that there might be a career ahead for an aspiring lesbian journalist. I had been afraid that being out would limit my choices — and it did. Fortunately, the only choice was the right fit for me.

When I started 40 years ago, I had no idea that 60 years prior, a postal worker named Henry Gerber joined forces with a few brave men to launch the country’s first gay-rights group, the Society for Human Rights, and the nation’s first known gay newsletter, Friendship & Freedom. The men were soon arrested, and their organization shut down.

But we can trace the descendants of gay media to those roots 100 years ago. There were some short-lived and long-running “homosexual” publications — from Lisa Ben’s Vice Versa to the Mattachine Review, The Ladder, Gay Community News, BLK, Lesbian Connection and hundreds more. These media especially thrived after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, in part because of the growing movement, and in part because the tools to produce media became more affordable and accessible.

Now, as many community media outlets are looking at ways to counter the narrative of a collapsing ecosystem, News is Out, a collaboration of six LGBTQ+ media representing more than 250 collective years of experience covering the community, is launching the first Local LGBTQ+ Media Giving Day Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024, during LGBTQ History Month. The timing for this first annual event is to celebrate the 100-year anniversary work of Henry Gerber and his peers. 

Tax-deductible donations are being accepted now at https://givebutter.com/LGBTQequityfund. With one click, you can support six of the top LGBTQ+ outlets: Bay Area Reporter, Dallas Voice, Philadelphia Gay News, Tagg Magazine, Washington Blade and Windy City Times. News Is Out plans to expand the campaign in year two. 

LGBTQ+ media has always had a vital and symbiotic relationship with the LGBTQ+ movement. Since most mainstream media either ignored or vilified our community for most of the past century, media by and for us helped document, amplify and change the trajectory of our movement. Whether it was covering the joy and celebrations or making sure we had ways to advocate for our rights and safety, or when we covered the start of HIV/AIDS in a way that was empathetic and educational, the LGBTQ+ press has been there, on the front lines, writing the first draft of our history.

Forty years later, I still feel so lucky to have found my niche in LGBTQ+ media. When I walked into GayLife, tucked between a men’s bathhouse and a men’s leather bar, I had no idea that my own life, and the whole movement, would have made it this far in a relatively short period of time.

But if the next 40 years are to continue to bend the arc of the moral universe forward, we need to make sure LGBTQ+ media are here to document and amplify the fight.

Donate here: https://givebutter.com/LGBTQequityfund.

Tracy Baim is co-founder and owner of Windy City Times.

GayVeterans.us was launched in February 2024 and has rapidly grown, providing expansive support for the LGBTQ+ veterans community. Established by three LGBTQ veterans and a Rabbi ally, who were frustrated with the bigotry and discrimination in their Beirut veterans organization, they created a non-profit, charitable organization. This new venture offers a welcoming online community safe zone for all LGBTQ veterans, free from the discrimination they faced for more than 35 years. 

Initially a community resource directory, it has now blossomed into a fully fledged online community. Aa powerful journey of empowerment and unity with GayVeteransUS-Inc. and our dedicated website, GayVeterans.us. We are a community-driven platform passionately supporting over 1 million LGBTQ veterans, active-duty military, and allies across the United States. An organization at the forefront of LGBTQ advocacy within the LGBTQ veteran community. Here’s why our partnership is a game-changer:

Our impact extends beyond our website, reaching a diverse audience through our strong presence on major social media platforms. Within our portal, as a publisher with a versatile audience, we cover various sectors such as retail, travel, books, clothing, electronics, health & beauty, and more. GayVeterans.us was established and is continually managed by Bill Kibler, a completely hearing-impaired and disabled Marine veteran, alongside his fellow Beirut veteran, John Kiknslow, a survivor of the Beirut bombing on Oct. 23, 1983. Dedicated to aiding LGBTQ veterans, Bill and John ensure that their voices are heard and their needs addressed. They are supported by Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff, also a Beirut veteran and the first responder at the explosion site. 

Throughout his Navy tenure, he advocated for LGBTQ rights, even delivering the prayer at the 2010 presidential ceremony repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” His younger brother Joel, a renowned artist, succumbed to AIDS in 1986. Another LGBTQ veteran, Bonnie Tierney, is globetrotting during her retirement and plans to return to the States this fall. She regularly checks in to monitor our progress. As a proud non-profit organization based in Tennessee, we are in the process of securing IRS §501(c)(3) status. With our low operational expenses and utmost transparency, your contributions will enable us to expand our services and support LGBTQ veterans in a meaningful way.

Our newly launched community portal offers a safe space for LGBTQ veterans to connect, share experiences, and access valuable resources. With 45+ groups and user-created groups, forums, chatroom, videos, and more, our members have a platform to support one another. A safe space for LGBTQ veterans to connect, share experiences, and access valuable resources.

We have partnered with Wreaths Across America’s 2024 Campaign and will be assisting the San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio of San Francisco in remembering and honoring our LGBTQ veterans by laying Remembrance wreaths on the graves of our nation’s fallen heroes. All LGBTQ organizations are welcome and encouraged to register under our LGBTQ Veterans sponsorship umbrella. Details can be found on our website, gayveterans.us.

Based on the responses so far, I know we’re making an impact on LGBTQ veterans’ lives, and that’s the rewarding aspect of our efforts. We have lots more on the horizon.

GayVeteransUS-Inc. is a non-profit, charitable organization in the State of Tennessee and has applied for IRS §501(c)(3) status, allowing you to deduct donations as charitable contributions on your tax filings. GayVeterans.us is run by veteran volunteers, so our expenses are extremely low – no rent, no payroll, nothing fancy. Each year GayVeterans.us will file a publicly available Form 1099 with the IRS allowing you to see how money is spent.

Bill Kibler, a Marine veteran, manages GayVeterans.us.

Imagine marching with the diverse thousands in Washington, D.C.’s Pride parade, then suddenly you are confronted by hundreds of men, mostly blonde, wearing black, shouting in your face to disrupt the march. Separating you from them are helmeted riot police with German Shepherds. You blink your eyes in disbelief. You hear the anti-gay epithets shouted in German. You recoil at obscene placards depicting stick figures locked in sex with a red prohibition slash. The black, white and red colors of the Reich flash; there is another flag with an Iron Cross. “Proud-German-National,” one sign says. 

1933? Welcome to Christopher Street Day, 2024 in Leipzig, Germany. Named in homage to the site of the Stonewall Riots, Christopher Street Day (CSD) is the oldest Pride event in what was East Germany, formed in 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This year, CSD Leipzig has never held such significance, not just in Germany but for us all.

At the Leipzig CSD, there was an overwhelming number of friends and allies, facing some 700 neo-Nazis at the barricades, but the political significance is impossible to ignore. In recent days, the German far-right extremist group Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the most seats in Thuringia and nearly won the most seats in Saxony. The rhetoric was about immigration and nationalism, but on CSD the target was Pride with a shocking re-emergence of Nazi-era rage against homosexuals. The determination of the marchers on Christopher Street Day was inspirational, in the face of this violent hostility from AfD’s thugs.

But this has happened before. In 1922, a young gay veteran and survivor of World War I, Bruno Vogel, broke with his family and left home while he was attending the University of Leipzig. He formed a same-sex “friendship league” for homosexuals that would meet regularly in a restaurant for community and discussion about homosexual human rights and justice.  Discovered by Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jewish doctor and researcher who founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, Vogel’s friendship league blossomed both in Leipzig and in Berlin where he went to work for Hirschfeld. In 1929, Vogel wrote an openly gay and pacifist novel “Alf” about two college preparatory school students Alf and Felix and their love ending with Felix’s death in the trenches of World War I. Magnus Hirschfeld assembled the largest library on sexuality, gender and homosexuality in the world. His library, including “Alf”, along with thousands of volumes was ransacked and burned by Nazis in a public bonfire. The Minister of Nazi propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1933, “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state!…..You do well to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.” Vogel left Germany before the bonfire, later to write about it all and be interviewed in London before he passed away. Otherwise, the name of his friendship league in Leipzig may have been lost to history.  It was “Wir,” the German word for “we” or “us.”

In 2002, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum mounted a historic exhibition entitled “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945.” This was the first time the Holocaust Memorial Museum focused on this targeted community. According to the exhibition’s materials, “Concerned that ‘degeneracy’ carried in the male ‘Aryan’ blood would weaken the ‘masculine discipline’ of the German nation,” the Nazis launched their violent assault against suspected queer Germans. The Museum’s exhibition was both courageous and groundbreaking built upon years of research in archives across Germany including the Federal Archives of Germany (Bundesarchiv Koblenz), accessing newly opened Nazi records. 

The museum’s archival research team discovered hundreds of photographs, many of them the booking shots of gay men dragged from their lives in Berlin to prisons and camps. The Holocaust Museum discovered to a degree never before achieved the archival, evidentiary history of more than 100,000 men arrested for homosexuality, one third of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison. Hundreds more were interned in concentration camps to face brutal conditions, torture, and even castration. As recently as 2016, the German parliament, the Bundestag, enacted legislation to compensate the 5,000 surviving victims of this violence, and to expunge the records of some 50,000 men jailed because of their crime: homosexuality.  This is the historic — and contemporary — context of Christopher Street Day ’24.

We cannot normalize or ignore what happened in Leipzig. Every other party in Germany has refused to enter into a coalition government with AfD, for good reason. Indeed, we must widen the frame. From Germany’s AfD to Viktor Orban’s Fidez Party in Hungary; to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France; to Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party, LGBTQ citizens are strategic, political targets of the European far-right nationalist parties. “Hands off our children,” they shout in Hungary, while deleting same-sex parents’ names from birth certificates in Italy. Depending upon the outcome of the coming presidential election, they are poised to export their political strategy to the United States. What happened in Leipzig is happening to “wir”, all of us, and we must be prepared for the right wing to ratchet up its assault on our community.

Charles Francis is president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., and author of ‘Archive Activism: Memoir of a ‘Uniquely Nasty’ Journey.’ Jeff Trammell was a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Advisory Committee for the Gay & Lesbian Remembrance Project; and was senior adviser for LGBTQ matters in the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns.