Issue 50

Gay News Archive Project — Thu, 04 Jul 1974 13:37:10 +0000

From the project to digitise early editions of the UK's pioneering LGBT+ newspaper Gay News...

INFORMATION

Editor: Denis Lemon
News Editor: Michael Mason
Reporter at Large: Jeff Grace
Contributing Editor (Features): Roger Baker
Contributing Editor (Features) and Typesetting: Rictor Norton
Art Director: Jean-Claude Thevenin
Art Assistant: Glen Platts
Advertising/Circulation Manager: Bernard Mears
Business Manager etc: Stuart Patterson
Subscriptions, Classified Ads and Box Replies: Maggie Donovan
Regular Contributors: Sean Aubrey (Brighton & District Correspondent), Peter Burton, Denis Cohn, Barry Conley, Elizabeth Cornu, Brian Dax, Ian Dunn (Scottish Correspondent), Andy Dvosin (New York Correspondent), Iain Finlayson, Jackie Forster, Veronica Harvey, Mike Heberden, Sebastian Helmore, Carl Hill, Derek James, Howard Llewellyn (Cardiff & District Correspondent), Leo Madigen, ‘Merlin’, John Montgomery, Barry Nonweiler, John Riley, David Seligman, Richard Thomson (Portsmouth & District Correspondent), Richard Webster (Cumbria Correspondent) and Pete Wicker.

The newspaper celebrates 2 years of publication and the 5th anniversary of the Stonewall riot. There’s also Pride in Hyde Park where about 300 people turn up. CHE and Gay Switchboard are looking at combining their telephone information and advice lines to increase coverage. The Appeal Court in London has decided that calling someone gay is a slur.
Reviews include the Bolshoi at the Coliseum, Sugarland Express on general release, and The Way We Were by Barbra Streisand on vinyl.

In GN48 in our report ‘Women, we need you’ we quoted Jackie Forster as saying that “CHE’s women’s group in Manchester was a farce and had collapsed, and Sappho was still picking up the pieces.” Jackie was, in fact, referring to the CHE women’s group in London, not Manchester.

Ms Whitehouse struck dumb –
CANTERBURY: Gays were among the hecklers who prevented Mary Whitehouse from speaking at the University of Kent recently.
Ms Whitehouse was attempting to address a meeting of the Conservative Association, and the lecture theatre was packed with students, many of whom had attended in the hope of hearing the speaker make herself ridiculous.
There were confused attempts at engaging Ms Whitehouse in a debate but these were defeated by the general disorder of the meeting.
As well as the campus gays, members of Radical Women, the Communist party and the LMG prevented the meeting from starting.
Dave Locker attempted to make a statement putting the gay viewpoint, in which he said that Ms Whitehouse had called homo sexuality “an incipient canker.”
The guest refused to answer a question as to whether she was connected with the National Front, and retaliated by stating that Kent was the worst university she had ever visited. Never had she been faced with such “ irrationality.’ She added that she had never before been prevented from speaking.
After an hour the meeting was completely abandoned and Ms Whitehouse left the room – page 20