Gay Community News (site)

*Gay Community News* was published weekly out of Boston from 15 June 1973 through October 1999, a 26-year run that made it the longest-running US gay weekly newspaper of the twentieth century. GCN's circulation peaked at 25,000 in the late 1980s and its editorial network included dozens of correspondents in every major US city; it was, at its height, the closest thing US LGBTQ+ movement had to a national newspaper of record. The paper was founded by a Boston Homophile Union collective and produced from a series of downtown Boston addresses. Its longest-tenured office was 167 Tremont Street, occupied from 1978 to 1994, where staff produced the paper on a weekly production cycle. The paper's crown-jewel run through the AIDS crisis — Roger Winters, Cindy Patton, John Kyper on staff — provided the movement's first sustained investigative reporting on epidemic mismanagement. A suspicious fire in the Tremont Street offices on 24 July 1982 destroyed the paper's archive and interrupted publication for three weeks; the paper's slow rebuild through the 1980s was funded largely by community donations. The archive that survived the fire is now the crown of the History Project's Boston collection. The 167 Tremont Street storefront has since housed a rotation of shops and restaurants; the current tenant is a downtown chain café. A History Project marker installed in 2015 on the exterior identifies the site. Free sidewalk view; visible 24/7. Chinatown or Park Street Red Line are both five minutes' walk. This is one of the two "sites of Boston queer publishing" alongside the Charles Street Meeting House 15 minutes north.