Matt Wells
Wednesday October 6, 2004

The Guardian

After 20 years of championing homosexual issues, the Pink Paper has done much to change British attitudes. But this week it announced its closure. Matt Wells says goodbye to an icon undone by its own success

The demise of the Pink Paper, for almost two decades Britain's only national weekly newspaper devoted to gay interests, has been a long time coming. Militant lesbians just don't invade parliaments and television studios as often as they used to, and the revelation that the daughter of a bigoted police chief was gay could today just as easily be made on the front page of a mainstream newspaper. The gay community has come out of the ghetto, but the community freesheet never quite got its head round the change. This week, the colour finally drained from the Pink when its owners announced its closure.
Launched in 1987 with a philanthropic promise to plough profits back into lesbian and gay charities, the Pink quickly became one of the leading voices of agitation. The front-page lead in the first issue set the tone: "Big ears in sex row," ran the headline, over a story that concerned not the peccadilloes of Noddy's best friend but the problems encountered by a gay employee at the secretive monitoring centre, GCHQ. The scale of the Pink's charitable donations may not have been as extensive as its founders desired, but over the next decade it positioned itself at the centre of battles to repeal section 28 and equalise the the age of consent, as well as the fight against HIV/Aids.

In the pre-internet age, the Pink provided a means of connection for gay men and women who would otherwise have been isolated by their sexuality. The paper was, for many gay people, a key point of reference: a reminder that beyond the prejudice and secrecy of their daily lives there was a wider community suffering similar setbacks, fighting familiar battles and, crucially, securing important victories. There were personal stories about bullying at school and harassment in the workplace, as well as coverage of the big political issues, while reviews of books and films and a discreet personal ads section completed a weekly microcosm of gay life in Britain.

Behind the scenes, particularly in the early years, there were said to be arguments and fall-outs, with accusations of petty point-scoring in house and a more serious legal wrangle over differing opinions on Aids treatments with the gay investigative journalist Duncan Campbell. But the Pink was also a training ground for now prominent figures: Ben Summerskill, now chief executive of the lobby group Stonewall, cut his teeth on the Pink, as did Tim Teeman of the Times and Philip Reay-Smith of ITN. For most of its 17 years, the Pink had plenty of puff.

Its means of distribution was crucial. Unlike the longer-running monthly glossy Gay Times, readers did not have to reach conspicuously up to the top shelf of the local newsagent to pick it up, thereby declaring their sexuality to a still-unforgiving world. Instead, the Pink was distributed free to gay bars and clubs around Britain, and the arrival of the newspaper in neatly packed bundles every Friday became an event to look forward to.

For most of its life, the Pink came with a partner: the sassier, sexier Boyz magazine, which concentrated on entertainment, club listings, sex ads, and a smattering of soft porn. The Pink was the serious one in the relationship, the dinner-party socialite that talked politics and sexual health while its wild-child companion was out getting drunk, taking drugs and sleeping around. For years they were the perfect couple, a mirror to two great pillars of gay life, politics and partying.

But two major changes in British life proved the undoing of the Pink, one political, the other social. The first was the election of the Labour government in May 1997. While their agenda for equality took a few years to achieve tangible results, change was clearly on the way. The age of consent would be equalised and section 28 repealed; it was a matter of when rather than if. The wind was taken out of the activists' sails and a key foundation of the Pink Paper's news agenda was weakened. At the same time, the greater visibility of homosexuality meant the mainstream press had begun to take notice of the equality agenda, holding Labour to account (from both liberal and conservative perspectives) over employment, pension and partnership rights.

The second broadside was the expansion of the gay media and, in particular, the advent of the internet. A printed newspaper available only after a trip to a gay bar on a Friday evening suddenly seemed anachronistic when gay websites providingnews, contacts, club listings and pornography were available instantly at home. Meanwhile, glossy monthlies such as Attitude and a revamped Gay Times gave breadth and depth in lifestyle and entertainment coverage. "Five or 10 years ago we occupied our own enclosed space, and the Pink Paper was part of that scene. But now it's different; the bound aries have become more blurred, gays have moved into the mainstream," says Mark Watson, managing director of Gay.com UK.

His company, which claims 500,000 registered users of its uk.gay.com portal, marks the changing times today with a front-page advertisement in the Guardian, the first time a gay consumer company has taken such a prominent slot in a British national newspaper. Watson calls it the "deghettoisation" of the gay scene. "The gay scene has changed dramatically in the last five years or so. Gay men don't always go to gay bars to meet any more. It's quite a hassle to go and find a gay bar every Friday just to pick up a paper." The Pink Paper, he suggests, never succeeded in responding to the change, remaining ghettoised.

David Bridle, the general manager of PP&B, the company that published the Pink Paper and continues to publish Boyz, says the Pink's advertising revenues have been affected by the internet and the strength of the regional gay press, such as the popular Manchester magazine, Bent; he also points to the success of the gay rights movement. "The nature of the activist debate has changed. With section 28 and the age of consent, the Pink was at the heart of all that. But times have changed."

The Pink Paper tried various wheezes to respond to its new situation, including a softening of its news agenda and a move to a news magazine format. For a time, it was available in the shops as a paid-for publication, but its tight budgets meant it could not deliver the editorial quality that readers expected. Its last editor, Tris Reid-Smith, worked hard to keep it alive, but ultimately the sums did not add up.

Reid-Smith is sad to see the Pink go, and wonders what its demise says about the disparate group of people that were once easily defined as the gay community: "If the gay community doesn't have a community newspaper any more, is it still a community?"

It may be more simple than that. In the past few months, the two big "gay" news stories have been Peter Tatchell's astonishingly successful campaign to get murder music onto the agenda, and the fight to stop the civil partnership bill from being diluted in the House of Lords. The Pink Paper has covered both of these issues in detail: the difference is that today, it is not alone in doing so.