Forty years ago, I was startled to see a boldly labeled, unabashedly lavender Philadelphia Gay News vending box on a Center City street.
I was 22 and out (more or less), an aspiring newspaperman recently arrived from Syracuse, NY, where a local TV special report called "The Secret Underground World of Gays in Central New York," or some such, failed to include a single on-camera interview with an actual homosexual. Needless to say there were no gay news boxes on the street up there, either.
The station may well have tried to find someone willing to come out publicly -- a potentially life-ruining (and surely, career-destroying) act in those days. Happily, in big cities like Philadelphia, activist women and men of all colors and backgrounds were coming out big time.
Among them was Mark Segal, a pugnacious guy who spent his early childhood in a South Philly housing project. He began to publish his pioneering weekly paper in 1976, and hasn't stopped yet.
"Our very own community didn't believe a professional news publication was possible for us," Segal recalls, writing in the current issue.
"We had very little money. Most businesses didn't want to see their names in our paper, so they didn't give us financial support...When we put vending boxes on the street, they were bombed, cars ran into them and the doors where torn off," he writes.
Rarely if ever described as self-effacing, Segal is promoting PGN's place in history with the same zeal he's used to promote his memoir, And Then I Danced – Travelling the Road to LGBT Equality (Open Lens).
The entertaining book is the story of a man at ease with himself and confident about his own place in history, detractors (he's certainly had a few) be damned. And it's packed with photos of the publisher, his partner and celebrities of all sorts.
But the pictures that resonate for me are black-and-white and show a young Segal, wearing hippie hair and an in-your-face expression, disrupting live TV broadcasts to protest the mainstream media's miserable mis-treatment of LGBT people. I vividly remember the way it was: If we weren't ignored altogether, we were invisible (a la Syracuse), or characterized as a vile menace. Or worse.
This is why the simple existence and sheer visibility of those PGN vending boxes, as well as the papers they contained, were so heartening to a gay 22-year-old who so wanted be a print reporter. And later became one, including (full disclosure) a stint as a freelancer of features and reviews for PGN.
The political progress Segal highlights in his memoir, and in the commemorative issue, are heartening as well. But as North Carolina's recent and utterly odious legislation suggests, there are plenty of less uplifting stories in need of aggressive coverage by the LGBT and the mainstream media.
So congratulations, PGN. I was happy to pick up your 40th anniversary issue in a vending box amid all the others outside the PATCO station in Westmont, NJ. And thank you, Mark Segal, for showing a boy from Syracuse that gay people could share in the power of the press.