Bay Area Reporter marks 55 years in San Francisco queer media
When Jim Provenzano thinks of the Bay Area Reporter, he says he thinks of its integrity. Provenzano has been at the locally-owned paper since 1992, in which time he has worn a variety of hats but now serves as arts editor, and has enjoyed the community and creativity he’s found over the years.
“I’ve always wanted to write about queer people, even before I knew I could,” Provenzano said. “We’re still around…we’re adapting. I was given opportunities to be creative again and again, and that’s the fun part.”
The Bay Area Reporter (BAR) turns 55 this year, making it the oldest continually published LGBTQ+ weekly newspaper in the country, standing the test of time among others who have adapted and continued to succeed in the mid twenty-first century. In 2024, The New York Times said of the outlet: “Local news is dying, but not in San Francisco.”
The BAR was the first newspaper to print photos alongside obituaries for people who died of AIDS. It made national news when it printed the headline “No obits” on August 13, 1998, marking a shift in coverage of the epidemic. Prominent gay leader Harvey Milk was also a regular columnist at the BAR from 1974 to 1978, both before and during his time on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Since its beginning, the paper has included a wide range of news content and topics — including those considered crude by major outlets — such as pornography reviews, escort ads and a first-of-its-kind leather column.
While the focus is on covering LGBTQ+ experiences, Provenzano explained that their stories are equally focused on what LGBTQ+ people are doing and need or want to know about.
“Hopefully, we have evolved to, ‘this article is about this person’ more than the fact that they’re gay,” Provenzano said. “It’s the fact that they’re doing this thing, they have a record, they have a play, they have a book.”
Local political news is a primary focus as well, especially after the addition of a news briefs section following the legalization of gay marriage by the mayor. “We started that after Gavin Newsom ordered same-sex marriage in 2004 because we were just so overwhelmed with all the people getting married that I didn’t have room for standalone stories on all these little benefits and stuff,” said news editor Cynthia Laird. “So we just put them all together in a newsbench column, and it’s worked out really well.”
In The Beginning…
The Bay Area Reporter was started in 1971 by chef and founder Bob Ross, who died in 2003, and was well known throughout the community.
This public reputation did not mean Ross was a great media manager.
“He was a very difficult person to work for,” says Michael Yamashita, who has served as BAR’s publisher since 2013. Yamashita was brought on as an assistant editor in 1989, right out of college. “He was a real character, a real San Francisco character, and he basically ran the paper by force of his will and his deep connection with the community, and activism within the community.”
Yamashita has watched the BAR evolve over time, having begun as what he calls a “gossip rag” before the publication turned into a real community news source, particularly during the AIDS epidemic.
“People [were] losing contact with people who were passing away, not knowing that they were sick, and it was happening so fast as well,” Yamashita said. He further explained that it wasn’t always possible to know if someone died if people only knew them from seeing them across the bar and not by name, making its breadth of coverage of the AIDS crisis uniquely impactful for the community.
Much of the BAR’s archives, primarily those from 1971 to 2005, have been preserved and digitized by the GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archive. The historical society has housed exhibitions as well, such as the 2021 project “Stories of Our Movement,” in honor of the paper’s 50th birthday.
San Francisco queer historian, professor and author Gerard Koskovich calls himself a “founding member” of the Historical Society, and served on its board and staff for many years. He has been researching and collecting antique books for decades, with a primary focus on LGBTQ+ documents and experiences.
“We’re part of a tradition of claiming the queer and trans past as a way of enriching our lives and establishing our sense of belonging in society,” Koskovich said.
He emphasized the importance of history in understanding the LGBTQ’s community present, and how queer and trans history in particular has been suppressed and ignored.
“Having a past was a way for us to belong in the present, to say that we are part of the society, we always have been,” Koskovich said. “It’s a privilege that straight cisgender people have from birth. They start hearing stories about the past from their parents, their grandparents, their faith communities at school, they see them in mass media, museums, monuments, historic sites. LGBTQ people don’t see our past reflected there. It’s like we arrive with no place in time. We’re exiled from the very concept of time, and it’s up to us to go and create a past for ourselves, so that we can better imagine our present and our future.”
In some cases, creating that past has required going into the community and finding queer elders who can fill in the gaps. Laird wrote a feature on the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966, where drag queens and trans women resisted and fought back against police violence.
“More recently, last year, last summer, I did a story on why the exact date for the Compton’s cafeteria ride in 1966 has never been determined,” Laird said, noting there were no real news reports of it. “Susan Stryker, who’s an expert on it, and did a documentary on it, she herself does not have a date. I talked to her, I talked to several other people, and they’ve all kind of narrowed it down to later in August.
“It was just fascinating to kind of find out all this information about old early LGBTQ groups that were involved with Compton’s [Cafeteria Riot], the trans and drag members who went there and the kind of harassment they experienced. It was an interesting story to do, and I got a lot of positive feedback on it.”
The staff say reader feedback is important, as well as community engagement. The BAR’s Bestie, or Best of The Bay Awards, are a staple in the community, and are historically relevant, says Michael Flanagan, a longtime freelancer for the BAR.
“There is a historically important element to the Besties that you may not think of,” Flanagan said, noting, for example, the paper’s past coverage of actor and drag queen Heklina. “One year I was doing the Besties, and Heklina won everything. I got to write up all of these various aspects of Heklina’s career, and then, of course, Heklina died after that. So now we can go back and look at that.”
Yamashita also highlighted a need for collaboration within the current news landscape, saying that newsrooms don’t operate in a silo anymore.
“When it comes to legislation we’re pushing, we need to be together as an industry,” Yamashita said.
With threats from the federal government looming overhead, Koskovich emphasized the need to learn from history.
Throughout the past 55 years and further, the BAR and its impact are not going anywhere. Koskovich said he has faith in a new generation to keep making positive strides.
“Our ingenuity, our resilience, our stubbornness, our unwillingness to be erased [or] told we don’t belong – Some of us are old enough that we date back to when the last time our government hated us and wanted to erase us,” Koskovich said. “I grew up with that, and I have full faith that young people who didn’t grow up with that have just as much nerve, courage, ingenuity, originality and persistence.”