The ''Seattle Gay News'' is a weekly

newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, spor ...

aimed at the

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region o ...

and

Puget Sound Puget Sound ( ) is a sound of the Pacific Northwest, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and part of the Salish Sea. It is located along the northwestern coast of the U.S. state of Washington. It is a complex estuarine system of interconnected m ...

area

LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term ...

community in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sove ...

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

History

''Seattle Gay News'' was founded in 1974 by Jim Tully and Jim Anderson. As of 2022, the SGN is distributed to every library in the King County Library System,

Seattle Public Library The Seattle Public Library (SPL) is the public library system serving the city of Seattle, Washington. Efforts to start a Seattle library had commenced as early as 1868, with the system eventually being established by the city in 1890. The syst ...

System, and

Pierce County Library System The Pierce County Library System (PCLS) is a library system serving the residents of Pierce County, Washington. The Pierce County Library System has 20 library locations serving 580,000 people in unincorporated Pierce County and 15 cities and tow ...

, as well as roughly 115 other locations in Seattle and Tacoma. Former editor George Bakan was an LGBTQ+ activist in Seattle and acted as head of the SGN from 1984 until his death in 2020. SGN files are preserved in the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. The SGN is also currently being archived by

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...

, University of Washington Seattle in Seattle, and the

System.

Microfiche Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...

copies of the archives can be found at UW and the Seattle Public Library. In 2021, staff began restructuring of the paper to improve its diversity and inclusivity. In the same year, SGN launched a

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosin ...

as part of the restructuring effort.

References

External links

* LGBT culture in Seattle LGBT-related newspapers published in the United States Newspapers published in Seattle 1974 establishments in Washington (state) {{washington-newspaper-stub