Drawing the Crowds

https://gaymediahistory.wordpress.com/published-articles-2/Gay lifestyle publications: drawing the crowds to grow the bar scene

published in Media International Australia August 2015, No 156.

Abstract

This article argues that the rapid expansion of Australia’s gay bar scene from the late 1970s was aided by the parallel development of a new media genre, the gay lifestyle publication. The reason for this was a powerful synergy that existed between the publicity needs of the bar scene, and the editorial, distribution and revenue needs of the lifestyle magazines. Conversely, the lack of such a synergy between the internet and the bars today can be seen as a contributory factor in the recent decline of gay bars in Australian cities.

 

Key Words

gay, lesbian, media, history, bars, venues

 

 

 

 

 

This article looks at how, from the late 1970s, gay print media in Australia played a significant role in the burgeoning growth of privately owned gay bars, with case studies of two magazines and one newspaper. It provides an insight into how specialised media in the right conditions can play a crucial role in the organic development of community infrastructure, yet when conditions change, can play a role in dismantling the infrastructure, as occurred with the recent growth of a gay internet community that led to the decline of both gay print media and the bars. While careful attention has been given to the stories and advertising of the magazines, this article goes beyond looking just at content, and investigates the complexity of factors that influenced these content decisions. Biographical details of key participants – based on oral history interviews, published accounts from the time, and other participant witness accounts – are included to better understand the attitudes of individual players who were central to the decisions made. Consideration is given to the historical context and, in particular, the tensions that publishers faced between goals to bring about social and political change, and the need to fund their media venture.

Reliant on word-of-mouth

In 1950s Australia homosexuals were ‘persecuted’ historian Graham Willett says (Willett 2000). There was active discrimination by state institutions, in employment and other rights, an increase in psychotherapies and criminal convictions accompanied by the isolating effect for individual gay people of either media silence or vilification. Books and publications with even ‘hints of homosexuality’ were zealously banned under strict government censorship laws, both federal and state (Moore 2012). Many gay men and lesbians got married and lived closeted lives, fearful of oppression on many fronts. Under the political circumstances of the mid twentieth century in Australia there was no gay or lesbian identified media. Mainstream media outlets often refused to mention homosexuality, while others, as historian Robert French has indexed, delighted in running stories outlining sordid details of tragic or criminal homosexual activity (French 1986). The few gay sympathetic media spaces came from small circulation, politically liberal publications and student newspapers, joined from the early 1970s by the feminist press that discussed lesbian issues (Wotherspoon 2014).

The gay subculture that existed in Australia prior to 1970 was limited largely to chance encounters and friendship networks. It remained hidden from public gaze and existed through private parties, in public parks or in discreet corners of restaurants, coffee shops and bars (Wotherspoon 1991). There were no designated gay bars as such. Gay and lesbian people who desired to meet others for sexual, social or romantic relationships were forced to rely on luck, or word-of-mouth, though this sparse social landscape for gay people would rapidly change in the 1970s as attitudes in society became more liberal towards homosexuality.

From silence to a flourishing of voices

The development of Australia’s local gay rights movement from 1970 is linked strongly to events in other countries, as well as to support from heterosexual liberal voices. During the 1960s, a range of movements appeared: against the Vietnam war, New Left radicalism, environmental concerns, the “get high, get laid” counter-culture and second wave feminism, and each challenged the dominant values of western society. It became possible to publish gay magazines due to the ‘virtual collapse of censorship’, as political academic Dennis Altman describes it (Altman 1982), which occurred progressively in Australia from the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s, and the start of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s was linked with a flourishing of gay media in Australia.

Occurring parallel to this political situation was a wave of internal migration across Australia during the latter half of the 20th century. The relative anonymity and safety of inner suburban living, particularly in Sydney, became a magnet for gay people fleeing, not just rural New South Wales, but other parts of Australia. The 1960s’ ‘boom in residential towers and smaller blocks of flats’ and the moving out of many Anglo-Australian families paved the way for a more mixed inner suburban demographic that included gay people (Wotherspoon 1991). It became possible for a gay business sector to emerge that operated commercial venues to service the community, and Oxford Street in Sydney developed into a gay precinct from the late 1970s for a number of reasons: it was close to the existing night life of Kings Cross, yet far enough away to avoid the ‘suburban voyeurs, come to look at the weirdos’. Entrepreneurs attracted by the availability of cheap building stock, moved in and bought up the licences of old ‘plonk shop’ wine bars in the street to convert them to smart bars. The increasing affordability of cars, in effect ‘mobile bedrooms’ for the young provided a place for sexual experimentation, and made it easier for gay people in suburban and country areas to visit the fledgling inner city scene. The development of gay venues accelerated from the 1970s: the number of ‘gay spots’ in Sydney grew from ten according to a 1973 issue of Stallion, many of which were gay only one night a week, or had a quiet section where gay people could gather, to 38 listed in the February 1984 issue of Campaign, many of which were now exclusively gay bars. As well as bars catering to a gay clientele, bookshops, restaurants, and clothing shops opened, as well as sex shops ‘with pornography and sex aids for sale, and – usually – a back room for sexual encounters’ (Wotherspoon 1991). From the early 1980s Oxford Street’s annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras grew in popularity attracting world-wide interest and by 1993 a crowd estimated at around half a million lined the street to watch the parade (Carbery 1995). Oxford Street became as historian Robert Reynolds says, ‘one of the great global gay precincts’ (Reynolds 2009). A similar trend occurred in other cities, and by the end of the 1980s, according to local gay newspapers, Melbourne had 20 bars and sex-on-site premises, with eleven throughout Queensland, though mostly in Brisbane, nine in Adelaide, and six in Perth.

The focus of the first liberationist publishers was on direct political change rather than seeking accommodation within the capitalist system and this led many to deliberately ignore the commercial gay scene. Researcher Alan Petersen in his study of Camp Ink identifies several reasons why some activists found the venues ‘politically objectionable’ and these ranged from considering them a ‘closeted’ world, often emotionally ‘damaging’ for patrons, to places of ‘economic exploitation’ through price mark-ups (Petersen 2013). Some of the early 1970s gay magazines were commercial ventures that used pictures of naked men and titillating fiction as the primary means to sell their product. At times these publications promoted the few fledgling gay bars that had started to open, but the significant change occurred with the arrival of a new genre of gay lifestyle magazines from the late 1970s that eschewed both radical liberationist politics and overtly titillating content. The first lifestyle publishers were Sydney based, but their publications included information on other cities and were distributed nationally. Just as gay venues were primarily places of entertainment, so too a key aim of these magazines was to entertain their mainly gay male readership that often picked up the magazines when out on the scene. This entertaining reading came in a variety of forms such as articles on celebrities of gay interest and gay lifestyle, arts and classified personal advertisements. These publications reported on community events – both in the commercial venues and the non-commercial social groups – with venue guides, advertisements, and photographs of people enjoying themselves, that helped build iconic status for individual bars, performers and events. They rarely included overt sexual imagery and while some included a news section, the broad-based radical politics of the earlier liberationists now gave way to news coverage around issues of direct concern to the gay community and a bar attending readership – such as law reform, police harassment, street violence and from 1983, the AIDS epidemic.

A key reason for the growth of lifestyle magazines from the late 1970s was the synergy that existed between the bars and the publications, which helped propel the rapid development of both. These lifestyle publications devoted considerable space to the promotion of the gay social scene, and became an indispensable source for those coming out as gay, visiting a new city, or for regulars simply wanting to know about special events and new venue openings. The importance of this is highlighted in an interview by sociologist Gary Dowsett of ‘Dennis’ who stumbled across a copy of one such magazine and ‘read about the bars, venues, and events in the Oxford Street precinct [and soon after] made his first furtive trip’ to the street (Dowsett 1996). The bars in turn provided the publications with cheap and easily obtained content in the form of social gossip and personality profiles, and an almost endless supply of photographs – often performers dressed spectacularly in drag, or shots of good looking patrons. The venues also provided important distribution outlets for the publications and crucial advertising revenue, at times as high as 50 percent. The less sexually and politically confronting nature of lifestyle editorial meant a greater willingness by retail outlets to stock the magazines. By publishing guides and advertisements, with addresses, phone numbers and opening hours, lifestyle magazines provided their readers with a way to connect with this community of commercial bars and social groups, and through their personal classifieds gay people could connect directly with each other as they sought romantic and sexual partners.

However the goals of different lifestyle publishers varied. At one end of the spectrum were the publishers who saw the gay community and its venues simply as exciting places for gay people to enjoy themselves. Some of these publishers were also venue owners or event organisers who saw the role of their magazines as being to let people know about the bars and other activities, and to enhance the experience, as City Rhythm publisher Ken Payne reflects, by providing exciting ‘froth and bubble’ stories, and covering only ‘fun’ news and gossip. At the other end were the more activist publishers who had rethought the liberationist agenda from revolutionary change of social structures towards a more tangible program of building gay community, including the commercial bars. They saw connecting with, and educating, a broad gay readership, and helping to build and defend gay community as the great project to push forward political rights. OutRage publisher Danny Vadasz saw his lifestyle magazine as playing an important role in creating ‘the building blocks of a whole community infrastructure’.

With expanding distribution, the lifestyle publications reached more readers and allowed gay people across the country to learn about venues and events in the different cities. In doing so they helped promote and build the rapidly expanding gay community. The magazines also had a discreet political influence – even for those produced by publishers who were determined not to go beyond promotion of the scene – in the form of, a kind of soft diplomacy. They presented a positive image of people enjoying the venues and other events, which helped to legitimate the gay community in the minds of readers, and encourage participation in it. Yet all publishers and their editors personally faced the real tension of living openly as gay, and often moved from purely scene promotion into the terrain of political activist by confronting issues that directly affected the venues and their patrons, notably law reform, police harassment and the AIDS epidemic. Promotion of community, and its defense, became their political program, and offered broad common ground for all such publishers whether coming from a venue background, or a more activist one.

Bar-rags build the scene

Cheaply produced magazines, known somewhat disparagingly at the time as ‘bar-rags’, sprang up firstly in Sydney from 1979 and focused largely on the Oxford Street venue scene. There was a flurry of these with Sydney Star, Oxford Weekender News, Cruiser and Village Voice, and similar such attempts in other cities with Melbourne Voice, and Brisbane Szene. The most famous of these was Sydney Star that Michael Glynn, a ‘lanky American with no shortage of attitude and chutzpah’ (Dunne 1994), started at a time when he had no job and just a thousand dollars in the bank. He had ‘absolutely no journalism or publishing experience, other than as a student contributor to his high school newspaper’ (O’Grady 2012), but when a friend showed him a gay business and entertainment guide picked up in Texas, he immediately saw the idea as a business opportunity that ‘would work’, and by encouraging gay people to patronise the city’s gay venues, a chance to ‘make Sydney more interesting [at a time he considered there] was really nothing much exciting happening’ (Glynn 1981). In July 1979 he printed 200 copies of his first guide, and carried them around to Oxford Street venues in his back-pack. This first issue was a 16 page A5 fortnightly black and white free pocket guide featuring a shirtless man on the cover, with listings inside of gay groups and venues, a what’s on guide, horoscopes, and some arts coverage. He named his guide as a tribute to a friend and former Olympic ski champion, who had suicided, taking a mainstream newspaper’s headline description of her as ‘The Sydney Star’. Over the next five years he rarely took a holiday, becoming an Oxford Street fixture ‘snapping pictures’ of venue patrons, and handing out papers from a small table in the street.

Glynn’s initial aim for Sydney Star was to promote and encourage development of the gay commercial sector. He published photo-spreads of patrons in bars and featured venue entertainers on some of the covers. Sydney Star included a guide listing bars and supportive businesses, and most of its paid advertising was from venues. Glynn believed that showing in print what entertainment was available would also highlight the lack of it and inspire the community to undertake what he called: ‘getting your act together’ to improve the scene (Glynn 1979). Glynn urged ‘gay business people’ to advertise and support the community in other ways as well (Glynn 1984), and famously coined the slogan from issue one, ‘think gay, buy gay’ that combined gay consciousness and community advancement with support for his advertisers who were the basis of his business. There was a symbiotic relationship between promoting these commercial venues and the needs of Sydney Star, as Glynn’s biographer Dominic O’Grady says, the venues provided ‘an important revenue stream; and gay publishers could use these bars, clubs and bookstores as readymade distribution points’. This became more apparent when a new style of gay bar started that was focused on friends meeting to socialise rather than just cruising for sex. These bars opened on Saturday afternoons and early evening, rather than just late at night, and provided an important new distribution niche for Sydney Star, as patrons at these venues ‘could read it at the bar while they were waiting for their mate, or they could quite naturally take it home’ (O’Grady 2012), and cigarette machines became ‘prime real estate’ for newspapers to sit atop, so much so that Glynn changed the format of Sydney Star from a smaller folded style suited to display stands and adopted the more expansive flat tabloid style.

In addition to publishing his newspaper, Glynn directly organised a number of social events, particularly in the men’s leather scene, starting the Australian Mr Leather contest in 1979. He was also instrumental in the evolution of Sydney’s Mardi Gras after initially opposing its original more overt liberationist agenda. With Mardi Gras’ change of focus in 1981 from political demonstration to gay cultural celebration, and a calendar change to a more festive summer time slot, Glynn became an active committee member. He was a founding member of Australia’s first Gay Business Association, and a leading figure in the push to send an Australian team to the first international Gay Games in 1982.

The Women’s Weekly of the gay scene

In Melbourne the strongly venue based free magazine City Rhythm started in November 1981, printed on high quality paper. Venue owners, Jan Hillier and Ken Payne, who separately ran Pokey’s and Mandate, started the scene promotional magazine and they stuck to a formula of pictures and stories to capture its excitement. The 28 page, A4, black and white glossy was a guide and pictorial record of Melbourne’s ‘wide and varied’ gay social scene (Aitken 1981), designed to be, Payne reflects, a ‘little glossy mag on the coffee table’, with just under half of it paid advertising, and the editorial was a mix of gossip, promotional profiles, horoscopes, latest dance music lists and pictures of people enjoying a night out on the scene. They were soon printing several thousand copies of each issue, perhaps as many as 6000 (Watchorn 1988). The two venue owners started City Rhythm Payne says because they wanted to shift their advertising spend from the more serious gay publications into a magazine with ‘fun news … gossip [and stories about] the venues’, the sort of magazine Hillier called, ‘the Women’s Weekly of the gay scene’ (Calder 2001).

The primary purpose of City Rhythm was to promote the gay social scene, and the publishers’ own venues featured prominently in editorial and advertising, with new editions handed to patrons as they left. The publishers were sensitive though to charges of bias, and committed themselves to report widely on Melbourne social events, both with coverage of other gay venues and non-commercial community events. They listed all venues, community centres and advertisers, and their gay guide and map that listed 64 groups, supportive businesses and venues attracted mainstream Truth newspaper in 1982. Venue listings were grouped as ‘Mixed Nights’, ‘For Ladies Only’, and ‘Where the Guys Go’, each on its own page, and a large part of the editorial was photographs of people socialising in venues, under headings such as ‘Everyone’s a Star at Night’ and ‘A Bubbly Time Around the Scene’. Pictures of performers or participants at events regularly featured on the covers, while advertisements and gossip columns promoted the happenings at different venues.

The social scene was presented as a enjoyable place, and the publishers of City Rhythm pushed its distribution into a circulation network of supportive non-gay businesses that helped inform and inspire attendance by readers to join the excitement. City Rhythm was distributed through the publishers’ own venues and a range of small local retail businesses such as pharmacists, restaurants, bookshops, florists, galleries and clothes shops, some of whom also advertised, and the magazine presented to its readers a glamorous entertaining world for gay people in contrast to the guilt and fear many experienced in their everyday world. Drag spectacular, central particularly to Pokey’s stage shows, often featured on the covers or in photo-spreads, alongside positive images of disco dancing boys, or gay men who adopted the out and proud hyper-masculine style popular in the 1980s that often featured moustaches, denim and leather. While the men’s scene dominated the advertising and editorial coverage, City Rhythm always included lesbian events, and from the second issue introduced columnist Barbie Cassidy to give her round-up of ‘wonderful’ times out socialising in the venues. Payne says ‘the serious media [failed to reflect] the simple joys and failures and happiness and whatever of the gay scene and how we lived and how we partied and how we did all kinds of things. City Rhythm was pretty good for all that’.

The journey to national glossy

Before Oxford Street became the undisputed centre of Sydney’s gay life in the 1980s, Kings Cross gay bar owner Rod Stringer launched what became Australia’s longest running gay lifestyle magazine Campaign. Inspired on a trip to America after meeting staff of the high circulation Los Angeles Advocate he launched in September 1975 a modest sixteen page monthly newspaper, selling for $1. The first cover ran a news story on law reform, and inside was a pictorial spread of a local dancer, entertainment reviews, a travel section and personal classifieds. It had only one $30 paid ad, for Stuart Blundell hairpieces. Distribution of Campaign steadily increased from just 700 sold of the 5000 first issue print-run, and peaked at nearly 11,000 sold each month in 1978. These were sold nationally through newsagents, sex shops or subscriptions mailed around Australia in plain brown envelopes.

With the help of two partners, one a financial backer and the other the magazine’s first editor, Stringer aimed for a publication that would gain ‘acceptance within the general community’ (Bashford 1995), and ‘respect’ from gay people (Stringer 1976). Although politically active in the Australian Labor Party, Stringer saw Campaign’s political project as being to contribute something to the gay community, and highlight the issues that directly affected it. Stringer deliberately avoided overt sexual imagery, in order to achieve ‘respectability’ in the belief his readers would ‘respect us more and trust us as their newspaper if we treat them as real people’. His magazine focused mainly on gay men’s entertainment and lifestyle, which included not just the venues but articles on gay themed and gay interest movies, theatre and music, as well as books, profiles of entertainers of interest to a gay readers – sometimes just for their good looks – fiction, gossip, and travel.

The year after starting Campaign Stringer moved out of his gay bar Castello’s in Kings Cross and opened the gay bar Patches Disco in Oxford Street. Campaign’s development mirrored the growth of gay venues in Sydney and other cities, and national coverage of venue news steadily increased. One reader in 1975 expressed surprise to see an article on the Melbourne scene that they had not known existed, writing in a letter that it was ‘good to know and read of the different places to go to, if you feel like it’, and there was demand expressed by readers soon after for more ‘information on gay organisations and gatherings, meeting places and happenings’. From the first issue Campaign also included a personal classified service where individual gay people could describe themselves, preferred partner and type of relationship in about thirty words and another reader could, for a fee, send a letter of introduction to be passed on by the magazine. For the first time in February 1976, photographs of people at gay venues were included. This development was announced cautiously in an editorial, and Langford outlined the magazine’s policy of asking first if someone was willing to be photographed, stressing that such photographs did not necessarily mean a person was gay. It was an editorial success with a substantial photo-spread of the venue Patch’s opening night three months later. Such ‘happy snap’ spreads of people enjoying a night out at the bars became a regular feature with individual city guides and venue photo-spreads, and even the less visible backroom sex bars received occasional promotion such as one story of experiences readers may have thought ‘only existed in porn’ (Colvin 1979).

Internet changes media’s relationship with the bars

The dominance of gay print media in Australia started to decline with the arrival of the internet, and this development coincided in notable ways with the declining popularity of gay bars. As social researcher Robert Reynolds puts it, the internet’s growth led to ‘the demise of established forms of gay social life’ (Reynolds 2008), notably Sydney’s Oxford Street which ‘declined as a gay precinct’ (Reynolds 2009). There was a rapid increase in use of the internet by gay men particularly, ‘as a forum for dating and arranging casual sex’, and a similar phenomenon occurred in western cities around the world (Rosser 2008). The new media increasingly replaced print media as a more efficient, convenient, safe and immediate means to meet partners, which led to a decline in the use of print media personal classifieds, and attendance at gay bars, which directly affected two sources of revenue for the publications, and further impacted on their viability through reduced pick-up rates by readers previously browsing them at the bars or while using their classified service.

It should be noted though that such a phenomenon is not universal to gay communities in all parts of the world. The internet, in fact, has helped to expand the gay bar scene notably in some non-western countries. Peter Jackson found that the internet in Thailand helped drive expansion of commercial gay venues. In the less affluent layers of Bangkok society working-class gay men could access on-line dating but lacked ‘independent living arrangements [so the] need to meet their on-line date … produced a demand for more gay-friendly private locations in which to meet’ (Jackson 2011).

Conclusion

A key impact of the gay lifestyle magazines from the late 1970s was to publicise and promote the gay scene, both commercial and non-commercial. In playing this role lifestyle publishers benefited from the symbiosis that existed between their magazines and the commercial scene, which provided advertising revenue, distribution outlets and editorial that helped resolve their financial difficulties. With expanding distribution the lifestyle magazines could increasingly provide information about the venues to gay people, including those still in the closet, and by meeting the direct needs of individual readers – in this case efficiently providing the information they sought regarding venues and events to meet partners – help expand the physical network of gay bars.

The growing support and acceptance of gay venues and other community events that the lifestyle magazines helped build, made it easier to defend even sex-on-site premises, in the face of police crack-downs and the backlash that accompanied the AIDS epidemic (Sendzuik 2003). The venues became more than just a place to drink and cruise, but played a crucial role in developing a sense of community. They became important crucibles in the organisation of events such as Mardi Gras, and in responses to political issues important to them and their patrons such as the AIDS epidemic, and campaigns to achieve law reform or stop anti-gay violence.

Gay print media was the first mass media that disseminated the information necessary to draw individual gay people together, and this article has sketched a portrait of how the increasingly popular gay lifestyle magazines in the 1980s played a crucial role in the development of Australia’s gay community. The dominant mass media now is the internet, but in Australia it operates increasingly without the physical meeting space of commercial venues, leaving the future shape of gay community and its media somewhat in flux.

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