Chronicling the locally-grown alternative press
Thursday 03 May @ 12:02:57 |
 BY PHIL WILLKIE
I first picked up the Chicago Seed at an antiwar demonstration in 1970. The Seed was a left-wing alternative paper that covered a wide range of political and social movements and views that were never heard in the mainstream press. It included reports from the Black Panther Party, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the Puerto Rico independence movement, the Attica prison riot, the movement to free Angela Davis and the emerging women and gay liberation movements.
They provided contact information for free stores, political organizations and support groups. At 17, I read about a gay youth group in Chicago, but I never mustered the courage to go.
In Minneapolis, Eddie Felien and a collective had been publishing "A Hundred Flowers."
Another journal in publication since April 1970 was the North Country Anvil. The Anvil, published in Winona, also focused on rural communities, organic gardening and on alternative energy.
The gay press emerged in the early 1970s with Gay Community News and FagRag from Boston, the Body Politic from Toronto, Gay Sunshine from San Francisco and a rural gay men's weekly quarterly, RFD, founded in Grinill, Iowa.
These papers were community based and published news, views and poetry. By 1992, these alternative papers were gone, except for RFD.
In Minneapolis, the GLC Voice emerged in 1979, and was run by militant gay activist Tim Campbell. Campbell covered the struggle with Minneapolis Police. But he also bashed closet cases and lesbian separatists. Campbell was very controversial, often responding to letters that attacked him.
Equal Time, a community-supported paper, emerged in 1982 and allowed more voices to be heard. They were often joined by a third paper, The Gaily Planet, and later Gaze, which evolved into Lavender.
These gay papers were much more political and primarily depended on gay bars for advertising revenue.
In 1979, Sweet Potato began as a music and left-wing paper and eventually morphed into City Pages. The Twin Cities Reader had been publishing for years. City Pages and the Reader competed until 1997.
Ten years ago, Stern Publishing (the company that had acquired the Village Voice) bought both the Twin Cities Reader and City Pages. They then put the Reader out of business. Eddie Felien bought the Reader's racks, and the very next week Pulse was born. ||
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