Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 2

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Pushed to the Margins: Women, Sexism and The Gay Press / Christianne Gadd

<1> This essay focuses on The Advocate, the long-running newspaper (later magazine) that was founded by Dick Michaels and Bill Rau in the late 1960s as the newsletter for the homophile organization to which they both belonged (Personal Rights in Defense and Education, or PRIDE). This publication circulated throughout the United States, particularly after 1970, and quickly acquired a reputation as the “newspaper of record” for the lesbian and gay (and to a lesser extent bisexual and transgender) community. But The Advocate was also barraged with complaints about its politics (too conservative for gay radicals), the explicitly sexual ads in its “Trader Dick” section, and the lack of diversity in its pages, particularly in relation to people of color and women. It is the latter complaint that this essay takes up, and explores The Advocate’s content during the 1970s. This era merits special consideration for two reasons. First, this decade saw the sale of The Advocate from its original owners to an individual with a vastly different perspective on gay life, gay rights, and journalism; the influence of this new owner, David B. Goodstein, would prove to have a lasting effect on The Advocate, shaping its form and tone what would characterize the publication for years to come. Second, the 1970s were a period in which sexism, gender equality, and feminism were very much on the public radar, kicking off with Roe v. Wade and continuing with the re-animated Equal Rights Amendment’s battle for ratification. The high visibility of the women’s liberation movement (and its radical offshoots), coupled with its popularity with lesbian/bisexual women of the time, meant that The Advocate could hardly claim ignorance of its efforts as a reason for not reporting on them.

<2> While other scholars of The Advocate, including Katherine Sender, Edward Alwood, and Rodger Streitmatter, have argued that economics were largely to blame for The Advocate’s marginalization of women, this essay suggests other explanations for this tendency. Examination of the publication’s internal records and the personal papers of some of its most influential staff reveal that gay/bi men and women began to disagree about The Advocate’s inclusion of women soon after its founding, and that its incorporation of women-specific content waxed and waned in tandem with larger trends in the gay/lesbian/bisexual community, particularly during the 1970s and early 1980s. During the 1970s, tensions between lesbian/bi women, gay/bi men, the gay liberation movement, and feminist movements influenced how much, and what type of, coverage The Advocate gave to women’s issues. At the decade’s midpoint, a change in the publication’s ownership coincided with a renewal of national efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and contributed to a surge in The Advocate’s inclusion of women. This short-lived upswing slowed down toward the decade’s end, and in 1979 The Advocate publically—and proudly—proclaimed itself to be, and to have always been, a magazine for and about gay men [Advocate 11/15/79]. That this blunt refusal to serve women’s interests occurred contemporaneously with the vitriolic battles between gay/bi men and lesbian/bi women over pornography and sexual behavior seems telling. Coupled with the refusal of its then-publisher David B. Goodstein to cover aspects of the gay/lesbian/bisexual community to which he personally or politically objected, it seems that the editorial staff of The Advocate regarded inclusion in its pages as a type of reward to be bestowed upon their friends and allies—or, in this case, withheld from its “enemies.”

Female Interests, Female Writers

<3> From its earliest days, The Advocate was informed by readers that its coverage of women was lacking, and as a result realized that many gay women expected the publication to acknowledge them. For its first decade or so, it seemed to be the opinion of The Advocate’s leadership that gay men could not write about women’s issues because they wouldn’t understand them or explain them sufficiently. Founder and editor Dick Michaels wrote in a 1969 letter to “Gene Damon” (pseud. Barbara Grier, then-president of female homophile organization Daughters of Bilitis) that

from time to time, we have received letters from some of our female readers asking why we don't have more news of interest to the girls. Our answer is always the same: Our staff is an all-male one, and we have no one who is in tune with what is going on in the girls' sphere or what the girls would like to read. We have made several attempts to recruit a female staff member, but each time the arrangement has fallen through...Until we find someone, I shall be glad to accept articles from you if the spirit moves you in that direction [Michaels 2/3/69].

<4> The onus of responsibility for women’s exclusion from The Advocate rested, in Michaels’ eyes, on women themselves. Two years following Dick Michaels’ first suggestion that Barbara Grier remedy The Advocate’s gender myopia by writing for the publication, he proposed a similar situation in response to a query from the D.O.B. publication The Ladder about an “ad exchange” [Tucker 3/24/71]. Michaels rejected this proposal outright, citing the limited size and circulation of The Ladder, relative to The Advocate. Instead, Michaels offered to carry an ad for The Ladder in every issue of The Advocate if Grier would write a biweekly column for the latter (in actuality, Grier would have been obligated to write two columns, as Michaels proposed that her topics would alternate between reviews of gay literature and “items of lesbian interest”). Michaels noted that this was a “fairly generous offer, considering The Ladder’s circulation” [Michaels nd.]. But Grier was nonplussed, reminding Michaels that their limited circulation resulted from a commitment to running “only very good quality ads” and turning down “over 90% of the paid ads we are offered” and asserting that she simply had no time to write for another publication [Grier 4/28/71]. Michaels’ reaction, recorded in a letter to Nancy Tucker, The Ladder’s manager, evinced his wounded pride:

Since Barbara is devoted to The Ladder, I wouldn't have guessed she would object to the small amount of work involved for The Ladder. The opportunity to have an ad regularly in the largest gay publication (30,000 sold) could be a great shot in the arm for TL. I am appalled that she didn't view the matter in this light...I can't help but think that this is all part of some big psychological split between the boys and the girls [1] [Michaels 5/1/71].

<5> Michaels not-so-subtly implied that Grier’s rejection of his offer would only perpetuate The Advocate’s omission of women’s issues: “Once again, we have failed to get more of the women's viewpoints into The Advocate. This has happened many times over the last three and a half years…I feel Barbara was very shortsighted and didn't even consider the enormous value to her own publication, what with the ad, her byline, and all. But then,” Michaels added unkindly, “maybe that's why The Ladder is still so small.” This perspective allowed Advocate leaders and writers to claim that it was women’s failure to participate in The Advocate that was to blame for their omission from its pages. The sentiment was far from unique in lesbian and gay political and cultural organizations, where the absence of women and people of color from leadership positions was, often defensively, attributed to their lack of interest in participation [Nagourney/Clendinen 1999]. The notion that only men could write about men and only women about women was even then curiously antiquated; it was this idea, in fact, that was partially to blame for the landmark gender-discrimination EEOC lawsuit brought against Newsweek magazine by some of its female employees in 1970 [2]. But given the gender-based divisions within the homophile movement where both Barbara Grier and Dick Michaels cut their teeth as activists, this assumption was unsurprising. 

<6> Credible or not, however, this idea suggested that women’s marginalization in The Advocate might be remedied if more women joined its staff. This strategy was employed by the publication’s next owner, David B. Goodstein, who purchased The Advocate from Dick Michaels and Bill Rau in 1974. Goodstein’s vision of The Advocate was radically different from that of its previous owners. Already involved in political fundraising and organizing, Goodstein regarded the publication as a means to motivate and influence gay/lesbian/bisexual voters. This “big tent” idea, coupled with Goodstein’s desire to build The Advocate’s circulation and sales, contributed to increased coverage of women in The Advocate from 1975 to 1980.

<7> Goodstein was unequivocal about his intention to make his publication more inclusive of women. Veteran lesbian activist Barbara Gittings wrote a complimentary letter to Goodstein in 1975 about the new diversity in The Advocate. Goodstein thanked her for her “kind comments about the new Advocate” and promised that a forthcoming issue would “have not only more news about and of interest to women, but also will contain a portfolio of photographs of and by women” [Goodstein 3/3/75]. Goodstein held with his predecessors’ notion that a lack of female staff was to blame for The Advocate’s minimal coverage of women, writing in a 1975 letter to one prospective female freelancer that

I really do hope that you can send us some articles about the law as it applies to gay women. We do not pretend to be knowledgeable about that area of law. I do not wish to ask a man to handle it. We did our best in the special report about gay parents, but I’m sure that our coverage of the legal aspects were far from inclusive…it is my opinion that there are many legal subjects of concern to gay women other than the lesbian mother issue. Frankly, I think most of our readers are totally unfamiliar with them. Very straight forward (sic), very basic kinds of articles about the legal concerns of gay women would be much appreciated [Goodstein10/10/75].

<8> Under Goodstein, more women did join the staff, and—bearing out his hypothesis—more features focusing on women and feminism did appear. Freelancer Randy Shilts noted in a 1975 letter soliciting women to participate in an upcoming feature that “if you’ve checked out an issue from the last few months, you’ll probably notice that the news copy is losing the old-time male-dominated flair.  (This is largely due to the work of news editor Sasha Gregory-Lewis, a lesbian activist herself)” [Shilts 8/12/75]. Two recurring women-oriented columns, “One Woman’s Viewpoint” (later titled “A Feminist Perspective”) and “Womensline,” were published during this period, the former running from 1975-77 the latter appearing in issues between January and August 1977 (prior to this, The Advocate’s only consistently-appearing women-oriented feature had been a column called “Lesbians in Literature” that ran from April 1969 through December 1970).

<9> Increasing The Advocate’s female staff also resulted in an expansion of coverage of ratification efforts for the Equal Rights Amendment in the mid-1970s. While the ERA’s potential use as a weapon against anti-gay discrimination had occurred to some gay and lesbian activists, it was still perceived by most Americans as pertinent to women only. In the hopes of persuading its gay male readers to vote for the amendment’s ratification, The Advocate emphasized how the ERA could benefit men as well as women. A spate of articles on the amendment appeared in 1976, including an editorial by Sasha Gregory-Lewis urging readers to support its ratification [Advocate 2/24/76]. That this would be an uphill battle was soon clear; fed up with amount of coverage the ERA was receiving, one reader griped to The Advocate that, “It seems obvious to me that the main beneficiaries of the ERA would be heterosexual women and their marriages. Putting aside your foggy notion of liberalism, there is no reason why a homosexual organization would support such a movement” [Advocate 4/21/76].

<10> The Advocate’s new attention to women and feminism was met with disapprobation by some longtime readers; one pointed communiqué from a male writer read, in its entirety, “I have one question only: When will someone publish a newspaper for homosexual men?” [Advocate 4/23/75] Similarly, in September 1976, another reader complained, “All I ever see is photos and stories about women. Who cares about them anyway?” [Advocate 9/22/76] Another letter chiding the magazine for its changes sparked a dialogue between readers and editors about sexism within the gay community. The author demanded to know

What is happening to our good old Advocate? Originally, this was a great magazine for men…why the sudden rush to run so many foolish articles on dykes? The buying public for your wares cannot consist of many lesbians. Let them get their own publication. Give The Advocate back to the guys—and no more articles on the celebrity fag-hags. A magazine for men run by men: that’s how I’d like to see The Advocate again [Advocate 9/8/26].

Underneath this letter was the editors’ terse reply: “The Advocate will continue to report on the entire gay community, both men and women.” [3]

<11> Other readers, female and male alike, commended this commitment, suggesting that it might pave the way for a better relationship between genders. “I am disgusted,” one man wrote, “to read letters criticizing The Advocate for either publishing too many articles about women or handing the paper over to women” [Advocate 10/20/76]. Another commented, “The Advocate is probably the best newspaper concerning the gay community and women certainly deserve equal recognition. I applaud your stand to continue to report on the entire gay community—women and men” [Advocate 10/6/76]. A self-professed “gay man who strongly supports women’s liberation” lauded The Advocate’s “new and growing coverage of women” and chastised gay men who “cannot accept women on their own merit” [Advocate 5/21/75] as others cautioned that “If we cut out our sisters, we are cutting out a part of ourselves” [Advocate 10/20/76].

<12> Female readers also cheered the changes at The Advocate. “Here’s one woman who thinks you’re doing a terrific job,” wrote reader Kris Bronowski, noting with approval the publication’s attention “to matters that concern gay women, and especially the pictures of really fine-looking women (rather than the femme fatale chicks that the straight media bombard us with)” [Advocate 8/13/75]. Bronowski’s sentiments were echoed the same year by a female writer who thanked the magazine for “discovering that a large percentage of the gay population includes women as well as men,” and compared it favorably to other “male-oriented publications [that] refuse to even acknowledge the lesbian community as an extension of the gay lifestyle” [Advocate 4/23/75].

<13> The readiness of the editorial staff to combat readers’ sexist assumptions was humorously demonstrated in response to a letter that didn’t concern gender issues at all.  This missive, which discussed the similarities between libertarian political views and the gay rights movement, used the salutation “Dear Sirs.” The editors dryly responded, “All libertarians may favor gay rights as you suggest, but it is obvious from your salutation that some Libertarians make sexist assumptions about the status of gay publications” [Advocate 5/5/76].

<14> The Advocate’s gender-based gambit succeeded in awakening some of its male readers to their own ingrained sexism. In August 1975, one reader wrote the publication praising a recently published article about a lesbian lawyer. He admitted that, “until this time, I have habitually skimmed or ignored articles in your publication that dealt with women as the subject. This is a very sexist and bigoted attitude, no doubt. But the point is that I realized it this time without using the rationale that I wasn’t interested because the article was addressed to women, not men” [Advocate 8/13/75]. Some male readers were so vigilant in monitoring The Advocate for sexism that they could make embarrassing assumptions, as evidenced by a letter printed in January 1976.  The author took issue with the year-end review written by Sasha Gregory-Lewis, who happened to be the first female full-time writer hired by The Advocate specifically to cover women’s issues [Bull 1999]. Referring to “him” as “Gregory-Lewis,” the writer of the letter accused the article’s author of omitting LBQ women, “smear[ing] the attempts of more progressive gays to extend their struggle beyond the narrow interests of their gender, race and class” and taking a “back-handed slap at NOW” [Advocate 1/28/76]. Biron’s criticism was punctuated by the editors’ amused comment that “Sasha Gregory-Lewis is a woman, a lesbian, and an involved feminist” [4].

<15> David B. Goodstein continued to aver, at least through 1978, that The Advocate was committedto covering the female members of the gay/lesbian/bisexual community. That year, Goodstein responded negatively to a reader’s request that The Advocate run a story on California’s Proposition 13, explaining, “We have a policy of concentrating on gay and women’s issues only” [Goodstein 5/25/75]. Privately, however, he expressed some reservations about the extent to which the interests of gay/bi men and lesbian/bi women overlapped. Writing to a female friend who had expressed similar sentiments, Goodstein claimed that “the further I get from the rhetoric of the liberationists, the clearer I am that men and women are more alike than we are different,” but admitted nonetheless that “I am not sure how similar the concerns of gay women and men are, either” [Goodstein 8/9/78]. Just a year later, in 1979, The Advocate would suggest that they were neither similar nor compatible at all.

Feminism, Male Sexuality, and Pornography

<16> In 1979, The Advocate was the stage on which two critical dialogues between gay/bi men and lesbian/bi women played out. These highly charged conversations demonstrated a change in how The Advocate perceived its obligation to its female readers, relative to its earlier perspective, and revealed one of the main obstacles in the relationship between gay/bi men and lesbian/bi women both on The Advocate’s staff and in its audience.

<17> Nancy Paris Poirier, who had worked in The Advocate’s subscriptions department for several years, penned an editorial in October, 1979 in which she criticized the publication’s leaders for their seeming disinterest in women (David B. Goodstein was at this time less involved with The Advocate’s day-to-day operations than in earlier years, and had appointed Peter Frisch as its new publisher) and challenged the credibility of the financial argument frequently used to justify this tendency. Poirier said it was “nearly excruciating” to watch The Advocate effectively ignore an “increasingly sizable market of upwardly-mobile lesbians who can’t point to one printed page published today with them in mind.” Attempting to counter the “dirty rumor persisting in the gay community” that “all lesbians have an aversion to money,” Poirier asserted that “no one—that’s right, not even Kinsey—has a clear handle on the number of lesbians out there, let alone their economic status, purchasing tastes, or other significant data that publishers could analyze in determining potential marketability” [Advocate 10/18/79]. As a result, Poirier wrote, The Advocate would be better served by attempting to reach out to this untapped market than by accepting stereotypes as fact. But her suggestion to this effect met with rejection from Advocate executives who dismissed her “pleadings for published androgyny” as “idyllic and therefore strategically unsound.”

<18> Publisher Peter Frisch followed up on Poirier’s editorial a few issues later, offering a two-pronged justification of The Advocate’s exclusion of women. Frisch averred that, “There is…no way on earth that everything we publish in The Advocate could be of interest to every gay male and lesbian simply by virtue of the fact that he or she is gay. That is not enough of a shared experience” [5] [Advocate 11/15/79]. He also suggested that lesbian and bisexual women’s failure to support The Advocate (in terms of sales and subscriptions) was also to blame, noting, “the current 2 per cent lesbian readership is up only 1 per cent over the last three years despite assiduous efforts on our part to reach and maintain lesbian readers.” Admitting that the magazine may have appealed to both gay male and lesbian readers in earlier years, Frisch stated flatly, “That’s just not the case today,” adding, “So does that make The Advocate a gay men’s magazine? In fact, that is what it has been for twelve years.”

<19> Examining this episode in The Advocate’s history, Katherine Sender has suggested that Frisch’s glib response to Poirier’s criticisms hinted at several reasons driving The Advocate’s desire to position itself as a gay male, not “gay and lesbian” magazine at this time. Notable among these were the ideological conflict between commercial publishing (like The Advocate) and lesbian-feminist publishing, and the presumptive differences between gay/bi men and lesbian/bi women in terms of values, priorities, and lifestyles.  Of the former, Katherine Sender writes that “raison d’etre of lesbian feminist publishing at this time was to critique the ideological and material structures of society and the connections between them: patriarchy, capitalism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, imperialism and colonialism” [Sender 5]. The Advocate occasionally criticized overt racism, and regularly critiqued heterosexism, but patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism remained largely unmentioned (not least because the late 1970s-era Advocate was less interested in dismantling these power structures than in turning them to the advantage of gay Americans).

<20> The growing rift between gay/bi men and lesbian/bi women over the issue of sexual morality and pornography is also likely to have informed Frisch’s response. That the two groups had different perspectives on sexual morality was hardly news; lesbian feminists had been critiquing gay male sexual culture as dehumanizing and dangerous since the early 1970s. In late 1979, The Advocate unleashed a firestorm that burned for several months on the publication’s correspondence pages. The spark was provided by excerpts from a widely-distributed letter written by lesbian feminist Sally Gearhart in relation to San Francisco’s 1979 municipal elections, in which voters in the city’s 5th District were asked to fill Harvey Milk’s old seat with either a pro-gay but heterosexual feminist, Kay Pachtner, or the openly gay incumbent Harry Britt [6]. Gearhart’s letter went beyond merely supporting Pachtner, and suggested that lesbian voters and gay male voters had very little in the way of common interests. Gearhart noted that gay men frequently failed to support feminist or lesbian issues, and furthermore sullied lesbian/bi women’s reputations with their sexual practices:

In being part of the word ‘gay,” weary lesbians have spent untold hours explaining to Middle America that [they] do not worry about venereal disease, do not have sex in public bathrooms, do not seduce small boys, do not go to the baths for flings, do not regularly cruise on Castro Street, and do not want to go to the barricades fighting for the lowering of the age of consent for sexual acts [Advocate 11/1/79]

<21> The letter inspired immediate reaction from Advocate readers who alternatively challenged or celebrated it. Mikhail Itkin offered an alliterative challenge to Gearhart’s conclusions, writing, “I am deeply concerned about a pernicious Puritanism perversely and pervasively permeating the lesbian feminist movement” [Advocate 11/29/79]. He was not alone in his views; alluding to the growing rift in the lesbian community over sexual behavior and expression, another writer observed, “There appears to be an increasingly puritan and provincial strain coloring some of the ‘Lesbian Community.’ This, in a segment of society that should be, instead, on the very cutting edge of the sexual revolution!” [Advocate 1/10/80] But some female readers took umbrage to this characterization, charging that lesbian/bi women were being criticized for failing to emulate gay/bi men’s sexual culture. These critics, one reader observed, “[seemed] to assume that a loving eroticism for women would entail V.D., lesbian bathhouses, and regular cruising of Castro Street laundromats. That’s just another way of saying, the men have got it right again: get hep, ladies!” [Advocate 11/15/79]

<22> The Gearhart controversy took place just as gay/bi men were beginning to respond to what they perceived as attacks on their sexual freedom by feminists . Groups like Women Against Pornography, whose members included well-known lesbian activists like Karla Jay, Robin Morgan, and Adrienne Rich, were speaking more frequently and more publically about the issue; by October 1980, even the mainstream National Organization for Women had begun to campaign against what they called "Big Four" of sexual violence: pederasty, pornography, sadomasochism (S/M), and public sex. At least three of the Big Four had historically been fixtures within gay male sexual culture (and pederasty, though much more problematic due to its implications of non-consensual sex with minors, had been tacitly accepted up through the early 1970s, if the advertisements for publications like Boy and Chicken in The Advocate’s back pages are any indication). NOW, along with less-mainstream anti-pornography feminist groups, rejected arguments that would have excused exclusively male pornography from this blanket condemnation, arguing that pornography, by its very nature, contributed to a culture in which male sexuality was used to control and subjugate less powerful individuals (including, they added, non-heterosexual men).

<23> Gay/bi men responded defensively against these characterizations of male sexuality, charging that they validated the stereotype of feminists (and lesbian/bi women) as “man-haters.” Gay/bi men also objected to anti-pornography groups’ attempts to pass local ordinances banning the sale of pornography, seeing these efforts as disproportionately affecting gay-owned bookstores and businesses as well as running directly counter to the gay/lesbian/bisexual community’s endeavors to rescind laws criminalizing same-sex sexual behavior. As a result, some gay/bi men theorized that they might be better served by collaboration not with feminists, but with the very people those feminists abhorred most. Gay writer Richard Umans opined in a letter to John Preston (formerly The Advocate’s editor) that, “Just as [feminists] embraced the New Right as allies on the pornography issue, so we’ve embraced them as allies against sexism…Our natural allies are whatever forces are supporting sexual liberation at a given moment. If the publishers of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler band together against the anti-sexualists, then I suppose our best interests lie with them” [Umans 2/17/82]. But gay/bi men had hardly begun to think about forging these unlikely alliances when GRID, and then AIDS, forced the pornography debate to the side

<24> By the early 1980s, coverage of women in The Advocate had ebbed again, a situation that the publication evinced little interest in rectifying. A reader’s 1981 complaint about the situation met with stony resistance from the publication’s editorial staff. Responding to this reader’s charge that The Advocate “virtually ignores lesbians,” the editors retorted that

despite major efforts on our part to encourage advertising from the lesbian community…few lesbians have chosen to do so. Advertisements are paid for by advertisers, and that helps us pay our bills. We receive almost no such support from the lesbian community. I think it might be more accurate to say lesbians seem to ignore the lesbian content in The Advocate rather than The Advocate ignores lesbians or lesbian issues [Advocate 3/5/81]

The curtain had dropped on The Advocate’s brief experiment with gender equality, and though debates over women’s representation in the pages of “America’s leading gay newsmagazine” would periodically reemerge over the next two decades, this era’s editorial commitment to acknowledging women and feminism would never really be duplicated.

NOTES

[1] The Advocate frequently used the terms “girls” to refer to women (one front-page headline from the July 8, 1970 issue read “Two L.A. Girls Attempt First Legal Gay Marriage.”) In 1972, lesbian activist Kay Tobin wrote to Advocate news editor Rob Cole requesting that the publication and its editors “concede gracefully that women are women, not girls” [Tobin nd. (ca. 7/29/72)]. The response she received was less than encouraging; writer Jack Monroe informed her that the newspaper had no intention of changing its use of the term because, in the eyes of its owner Dick Michaels, “A newspaper…should not try to be the vanguard of changing the existing language” [Monroe 7/31/72].

[2] For first-hand descriptions of this situation, see Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 2000) and Lynn Povitch, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace (Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2012).

[3] Contrast the terseness of the editors’ response (and unapologetic rejection of the reader’s suggestion) with their reply to a December 1976 letter from a woman who complimented the publication for a recent article on Black gay life. To the reader’s observation that black gay women had been overlooked in the feature, the editors responded, “Sorry we overlooked this important element of the gay community. We will try to answer your questions in a future article on black gay women” [Advocate 12/15/76].

[4] The response to Biron’s letter was printed in the same issue of The Advocate, January 28, 1976. It is interesting that the editors believed they could undercut the Biron’s criticisms by noting that the writer he criticized was female, particularly in light of the magazine’s future tendency to feature female writers who challenged feminist orthodoxy; e.g. Pat Califia, Norah Vincent

[5] In a later issue of The Advocate, lesbian publisher Jeanne Cordova offered some support to Frisch’s perspective, writing that gay publications were unlikely to succeed in efforts to appeal to men and women equally, explaining that, “Politically it’s possible, but culturally it’s not. Gay men and women’s lifestyles and tastes are very, very different” [Advocate 12/13/79].

[6] According to The Advocate, “the seat [had] been widely regarded as belonging by right to homosexuals,” not simply because it represented a largely gay part of the city, but because it had been held, briefly but memorably, by Harvey Milk prior to his assassination in 1978. Milk’s tenure and subsequent murder had given the seat “a visibility and symbolic value beyond its inherent importance,” and gay and lesbian Americans throughout the country watched the battle for it closely.

WORKS CITED

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