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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 14, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 17, 2023

Rescuing the voice of Seattle Gay News, in print and online

By Clay Eals

Viewed on newsprint, vintage headlines can shock us as if they were published today.

That’s what Tom Rasmussen found recently while diving into copies of Seattle Gay News from 40 to 50 years ago. Tracking down the publication’s historic early editions was his initial goal. But what he saw along the way — such as a Jan. 1, 1982, story about a deadly “gay cancer” (AIDS) — delivered a wallop.

“Every week there would be pages like this,” says Rasmussen, a Seattle City Council member from 2004 to 2016. “It was chilling because ‘Who’s next?’ It was a plague. There was no awareness of what was causing it. There was no cure. It was this sudden sense of hopelessness. They were real people, and how young they were. These were people whose life should have been ahead of them, and they didn’t make it.”

One of Seattle’s earliest openly gay elected officials, Rasmussen three years ago began marshaling public and private institutions for the mammoth task of locating, sorting and archiving thousands of past editions of the paper and digitizing them to coincide with the paper’s 50th anniversary next March.

This quest pairs with a second golden milestone: five decades since the Seattle City Council’s vote on Sept. 10, 1973, to add sexual orientation to protection from employment discrimination.

Sponsoring that ordinance was council member Jeanette Williams, a human-rights advocate for whom Rasmussen worked as an aide decades before his own council stint.

Adding to this season of celebration, Seattle Gay News this fall acquired an enthusiastic new publisher, Mike Schultz. He rescued the paper from potential oblivion following uncertainty triggered by the 2020 death of 37-year owner George Bakan.

Notably, Schultz is reinforcing an abbreviated brand forged recently by Bakan’s daughter, Angela Cragin. Much as AARP did with its publications, Seattle Gay News adopted “SGN” as its name, reflecting the wider LGBTQ+ swath of its traditional coverage. It also hints at Schultz’ expansion of SGN’s service area beyond Seattle to Spokane, Bellingham and the Washington coast.

“We’re pulling in more of our queer community that otherwise didn’t necessarily have a voice,” he says.

Schultz plans a beefed-up, more timely online presence for SGN while retaining a regular print run. The continuing editions will augment physical SGN collections housed at a half-dozen repositories. This cheers Rasmussen, who cherishes the history of local LGBTQ+ progress and grew up on print.

“A physical newspaper is as close as you can get to being there,” Rasmussen says. “There’s something about holding a newspaper that was created at that time that is so tangible. It just helps you understand.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to University of Washington communications librarian Jessica Albano, Angela Cragin, Rick McKinnon and especially Tom Rasmussen, Mike Schultz and Maggie Bloodstone for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals’ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

You also will find 2 additional videos and, in chronological order, 17 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), SGN and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.