The Gay People’s Chronicle is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Founded in February, 1985 by Case Western Reserve University anthropology professor Charles Callender, the Gay People’s Chronicle has gone from a monthly paper distributed in the Cleveland area to a weekly paper reaching all of Ohio, as well as border areas of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky.The Gay People’s Chronicle has served the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community through good times and bad. In 1986, Callender passed away unexpectedly. The following year, Martha Pontoni and Robert Downing formed KWIR publications to give new life to the newspaper, and Pontoni remains the publisher to this day.
Twenty years have seen both the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision upholding sodomy laws and their 2003 one reversing it, and also Cincinnati’s 1993 vote to bar equal rights ordinances and last year’s vote to allow them. From the Cleveland Heights partner registry to Massachusetts marriage and the murders of Julianne Williams, Laura Winans, Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard, the Gay People’s Chronicle has brought it all to LGBT and allied people in an intelligent and thoughtful manner, and remains committed to doing so for another 20 years.
The February 4, 2005 issue of the Gay People’s Chronicle, out now, looks back at two decades of news and events covered by the paper. Stories from it are also online at www.gaypeopleschronicle.com, along with a calendar of events, a resource directory and previous issues going back to 1999.
