INFORMATION
- Issue #35
- 15p
- 24 pages (4 in the middle are an advertising feature)
- 1-28 November 1973
- WHAT PRICE KISSES?
- Editor: Denis Lemon
- Editorial Staff: Stephen MacLean, Michael Mason
- Art Director: Jean-Claude Thevenin
- Advertising/Circulation Manager: Peter Mundy
- Business Manager etc: Stuart Patterson
- Subscriptions, Listings, Box Replies: Derek Jardine
- Admin Assistant: Anne Elizabeth
- Typesetting: Sandi Rutenberg (BLOT)
- Regular Contributors: Roger Baker, Barry Conley, Denis Cohn, Brian Dax, Grant Dowling, Iain Finlayson, Jackie Forster, John Gough, Carl Hill, Howard Llewellyn, John Montgomery, Rictor Norton, David Seligman, Pete Wicker and Ian Dunn (Scottish correspondent)
- Ralph Thompson gave his friend Thomas Whyte a quick kiss goodbye. Lilly Law saw, and both were up in front of Marylebone Magistrates fined them £20 (about £300 in today’s money) plus costs for public indecency.
- Across the Iron Curtain, it’s the World Festival of Youth, where young GLF activist Peter Tatchell is in trouble for holding up a gay rights placard. Not from the communist authorities in East Berlin, oh no: the trouble comes from the UK’s National Union of Students, who are outraged that bumsex is being brought into the holy atmosphere of the GDR.
- Reviews include Quick and Easy Chinese Cooking by Kenneth Lo, the album Joel Grey Live, and Helmut Berger being ‘utterly beautiful’ on screen in The Secret of Dorian Gray.
- “WHAT can we say but sorry? As most of you know, this issue is two weeks late, something we hoped would never, ever happen.
- When Gay News started to break even this summer, we thought that the worst of our problems were over. But money, it seems, can’t buy off Fate.
- First, one of our writers disappeared without telling us he was leaving. Stephen, the other writer, has been planning to go and live in Italy, and had to spend half his time running after passports and so on. Then Sandi, the typesetter got flu, and passed it on to Denis, who already had acute tonsilitis. And Jean-Claude (who, with Denis, has been working without a break on the paper since it was first thought of, over 18 months ago) just had to take a rest, before he dropped dead at our feet. Which left the paper at half strength.
- And we had to move offices to Chiswick.
- In the circumstances, the rest of us felt pretty proud when it looked as though the paper was only going to be two days late.
- And then the final blow. Try as they might, the printers couldn’t fit us into their schedule if we were two days behind. So we had to delay the issue a whole fortnight. Gloom settled on the office. And we are only too well aware from the letters and phone calls we received that we upset a lot of our readers too. We really mean it when we say a big sorry to you.
- Looking on the brighter side, everyone is well again. Michael has moved from the business side over to full time writing, and his job has been taken over by a new face, Stuart Patterson. And the admin side goes up in strength too, with Ann Elizabeth joining us. So maybe the sun is coming out again.”
- Mr Ward of North Kensington: “Absolutely disgusting! I’m against it. It’s supposed to be quite legal now, so I suppose there’s nothing much you could do about it except cross the street. I really only think about three per cent are really homosexual, and the rest are cultivated.” – page 3