They range from major community news to a simple game of volleyball. So, for this 45th anniversary of the Philadelphia Gay News, we’ve put together a list of 45 stories of goodness from the paper. It pervades every industry and comes in myriad forms. But it’s safe to assume a majority of us of a certain age grew up with more negative portrayals than positive, and that was our starting point for coming to terms with who we were. This is not to discount the joy that many LGBT people have always felt in their personal lives. We were portrayed as criminals, deviants, or mentally unstable, and our stories in books, films, and television were almost always negative. Until recently, queer joy was a radical act rarely shown in mainstream culture.
The stories included many triumphs, such as Philly’s LGBT nondiscrimination law in 1982 and the first LGBT historical marker in 2005, but also featured a lot of what is all too common among LGBT people: murders, AIDS, and discrimination on all levels. Two men at the 1993 Gay World Series, hosted in Philadelphia.įive years ago, in honor of PGN’s 40th anniversary, we did a feature on the top LGBT news stories of the last four decades.
