Bill Calder. Journal of Australian Studies. Volume 39, Issue 2. June 2015.
Striving to Change Attitudes
Liberationist publishers produced the very first gay magazines in Australia from 1970. They wanted to change the way the world thought about homosexuality and to change the way individual homosexuals thought about themselves. More liberal social attitudes, and, at a practical level, reform of censorship laws made this publishing possible, yet the harsh reality of magazine commerce curtailed publishers’ ambitions. The subsequent rise of a commercial gay world, and the growing success of more entertaining gay magazines, increased the always-present tension for liberationists. Should they stay true to the original largely political charter or adopt a more commercially viable publishing operation supported by both advertisers and a broad readership interested more in being entertained than politicised.
This article explores the development of two key gay liberationist magazines that started in the 1970s: Camp Ink from the beginning of the decade and Gay Community News at the end. Both were collectively published with a consciously activist focus, in contrast to privately owned gay publications in the 1970s such as William & John or Campaign that at times contained significant liberationist content but had a primary focus on entertaining readers through sexual imagery and gay lifestyle stories. While careful attention has been given to the stories and advertising of the magazines, this article goes beyond looking just at content, as other researchers have previously done, and investigates the complexity of factors that influenced these content decisions. Biographical details of key participants—based on oral history interviews, published accounts from the time and other participant witness accounts—are included to better understand the attitudes of individual players who were central to the decisions made. Consideration is given to the historical context and, in particular, the tensions that publishers faced between the goal of bringing about social and political change and the need to fund the project. The two publications took different trajectories: the publishers of Camp Ink largely retained a direct political focus for their magazine and faced eventual demise, whereas the publishers of Gay Community News chose to transition into a commercial business adopting more popular content and the catchy new name OutRage, which allowed them to continue, albeit in a very different form.
Sydney activist Lex Watson says gay liberation “grew essentially out of the political left”, and commentator Adam Carr describes 1970s liberationist magazines as reflecting “the radical nature of gay politics at the time” with a broadly left-wing and feminist perspective. Both Camp Ink and Gay Community News were published by activist groups with the political aim to explain the oppression of lesbians and gay men, and each produced their publication with the primary purpose to bring about improvement in gay people’s social status. This was in contrast to other gay publications that also started in the 1970s and that were usually privately owned, with content more aligned to readers’ desire for entertainment.
Historian Robert Reynolds describes the liberationist role of Camp Ink as “challenging dominant knowledge about homosexuality”, and providing “safe spaces in which homosexuality could be rethought [and presented] in a new and positive light”, along the lines suggested by communications scholar John Downing for radical media generally—that is, by confronting “hegemonic codes that appear natural and sensible … to disrupt the silence, to counter the lies, to provide the truth [when] mainstream media misrepresent social and political realities”. Historian Graham Willett summarised Camp Ink‘s two key functions as the circulation of ideas among “opinion-makers in the community (journalists, MPs and so on)”, and to encourage the membership of the publishing organisation “to be politically active”.
Gay Community News continued in this tradition for its first three years, until it was transformed into the gay men’s lifestyle magazine OutRage at the start of 1983, a move that by chance corresponded with a change in federal politics from a Malcolm Fraser led Liberal Party government to a Bob Hawke led Labor Party one. The change of government had a significant influence on Australia’s response to the AIDS epidemic that arrived during this time; this also transformed the magazine. The broad popular reach of the new-look magazine, combined with its publishers’ developed political commitment, saw OutRage play, as researcher Shirleene Robinson notes, a “central [role influencing] Australia’s successful management of HIV/AIDS”, an influence that saw the new Labor government, after some debate, adopt a cooperative approach with the gay community to manage the disease through a range of measures such as promotion of “safe sex” practices. OutRage continued for nearly two decades, though in its later years faced criticism for its ongoing populist drift that Willett describes as its “march towards being a kind of Cleo for gay men”. Historian Yorick Smaal documented this shift from the “body politic” to the “body beautiful” during the 1990s and more recently revisited this theme to explore its role in the replacement of traditional forms of activism with consumerism.
Both Camp Ink and Gay Community News tried to expand their readerships to increase influence and viability, yet failed to sustain enough support from readers to overcome financial difficulties and continue as liberationist publications. In 1984, the British research group Comedia investigated the problems for alternative media attempting to increase or sustain readership. It found most such publications survived on free labour and some form of political subsidy, and most people involved in this publishing tended to have “a strong reaction against the techniques and skills of the capitalist publishing industry”, including rejection of hierarchies of authority and complex division of labour. It also found that most alternative media publishers had “blind-spots [regarding the] importance of skills such as financial planning, budgeting, credit control, accountancy, entrepreneurship and management”.
The publishers of both Camp Ink and Gay Community News relied on the commitment and enthusiasm of volunteers. Camp Ink was financially dependent on organisational support, and, while the magazine circulated publicly, most of its readers were members of the organisation. After three initially strong years, during which the magazine was published monthly, it limped along in reduced form on a quarterly basis for another four, before withering to nothing at a time when more populist gay magazines were starting to discover commercially successful formulas either through promotion of gay lifestyle or by publishing male nude titillation. Camp Ink‘s publishers always maintained strong views against “the whole exploitative commercial scene”—both titillating nude imagery and the venues—and while they regularly included articles about seeking sexual partners and liberating sexual desire, they did not fundamentally shift from their primary focus on political action. Researcher Alan Petersen in his study of Camp Ink identifies several reasons that some activists found the venues “politically objectionable”, ranging from them being a “closeted” world, and often emotionally “damaging” to patrons, to being places of “economic exploitation” through price markups. Despite the strong rhetoric often found in print, many activists nonetheless attended the bars as “there were few other spaces in which gays and lesbians could safely gather”.
For the activists in the mid-1970s, the tension over financial difficulties led to the end of Camp Ink; they could see no tenable option to resolve this. At this time, many activists maintained the strong view “that only with the overthrow of capitalism could we find genuine sexual liberation”, as academic and author Dennis Altman explains. This fuelled an unwillingness to broaden readership through compromised engagement with the parallel and emerging commercial gay world. The incentive to do so was also small, as gay venues in the early 1970s were usually gay for only one night a week, or had a quiet section where gay people could gather. A decade later, there were thirty-eight venues in Sydney, many of which were now exclusively gay bars, with a similar though smaller trend in other cities.
Gay Community News appeared during this time when the commercial gay world was growing, though its publishers started with strong anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal views and a similar suspicion of gay venues. They sold copies via subscriptions and direct sales but needed additional fundraising to survive. With time, and despite internal angst, its publishers moved to access the developing streams of advertising revenue from businesses servicing the emerging gay world. They dramatically transformed the magazine after three years, from a liberationist to a gay men’s lifestyle magazine, taking the new name OutRage, and the magazine continued as such for nearly two decades.
Starting the Resistance
Thirty-two-year-old university student John Ware and his neighbour in a North Sydney block of flats, Christabel Poll, read mainstream media reports of the 1970 New York gay liberation march commemorating riots the previous year that followed a police raid on the Stonewall Inn. Drinking a bottle of whisky together one night, they decided to launch their own protest and, in doing so, sparked the start of Australia’s gay liberation movement. They established the organisation Campaign Against Moral Persecution with its “playful acronym CAMP”, a term used at the time by gay men to describe themselves. Yet before CAMP’s first public meeting in February 1971, and before CAMP had any significant membership, Ware and Poll published Camp Ink in November 1970. As Ware later said, it was to be “a voice to the outside world”. The first edition of Camp Ink was sixteen A4 pages long, and 500 copies were printed and sold for twenty cents each. From issue two, it became the official journal of CAMP, and, by the end of its first year, 5,000 copies of the monthly magazine were printed.
Ware was the key instigator of the magazine, with Poll listed as co-editor despite ceasing active involvement after the first year. Ware was born in 1938 in the north Queensland city of Townsville, left school early to work as a carpenter on the railways, and in the early 1960s moved to Sydney where he found a job in an office and met his long-term boyfriend, Michael Cass, in a bar. In the late 1960s, Ware returned to study psychology at university where he announced he was gay in an exam paper and clashed with his lecturers over their teaching that his sexuality was deviant. He continued this battle from the first issue of the magazine, writing a long article campaigning against psychology’s use of such treatments to “mentally castrate” homosexuals, accompanied by a black-and-white front cover illustration that suggested aversion therapy was akin to sawing off a man’s penis.
Ware saw Camp Ink as a forum for ideas from a gay perspective “to counter public ignorance about homosexuality”, particularly by correcting the mainstream media’s misrepresentation. This shaped Ware’s strategy for the role of the magazine. He argued that by talking freely about homosexuality “the public will eventually get rid of their misconceptions and … homosexuality will be accepted like red hair and freckles”. Ware was no supporter of commercial gay bars, describing them as places “only a certain type of homosexual will frequent”. His politics were not rigidly anti-capitalist but more in tune with the counter-cultural movement of the time. Ware refused to use titles such as president and opposed any formal structure for the organisation. At CAMP’s first public meeting in February 1971, held in a church hall, Ware says they “consciously upset a lot of people” by sitting casually dressed at the front table drinking from a flagon of wine.
Ware saw Camp Ink as “our propaganda” sent to key decision-makers, both in the government and media, and it gained regular coverage from sympathetic journalists such as The Australian‘s Phillip Adams. Ware saw the publishing of Camp Ink as part of a range of strategies that would include brochures, debates, lectures and discussion groups, to provide “accurate knowledge of homosexuality” to all sections of society. CAMP members were urged to contribute to these aims by taking out gift subscriptions of the magazine “as a Christmas present to your doctor, lawyer, minister, friends or relatives to help further their understanding”.
Articles in Camp Ink initially highlighted social injustices suffered by homosexuals and included articles on oppression: from laws to the medical practice of aversion therapy and to street bashings and religious dogma. A man being hanged, in reference to harsh criminal punishment of homosexuals, was featured on one early cover, as well as a cartoon that depicted a motley collection of “poofter bashing” street thugs. Initially, neither CAMP nor its magazine presented a clear programme for change; instead, Camp Ink highlighted the existence of oppression, challenged misinformation and explored ideas around living a gay life.
This changed with time as the publishers grew in confidence, no doubt inspired by the process of publishing and gaining support for their endeavours. After highlighting the social oppression of homosexuality on its first few front covers, Camp Ink switched to a more defiant message, featuring gay rights demonstrations—initially from America—and same-sex couples walking proudly arm in arm. When Sydney’s widely circulated daily newspapers refused to accept a paid advertisement promoting the group’s activities, the editors counter-attacked with a cover story and the inclusion of the rejected advertisement. When a member of CAMP was sacked from his job at the local church for coming out as gay, the editors gave extensive coverage to the subsequent protests, which mirrored the fledgling movement’s growing assertiveness and willingness to be involved directly in gay rights actions.
The magazine was sent to the growing number of CAMP members as part of their membership fee. Ware wanted these readers to question their own attitudes towards homosexuality. Book reviews and feature articles were written or reprinted from gay publications in the USA that presented homosexuality in a positive light. The editors championed the notion that their readers should come out openly as gay, to “loudly demand. … rights [and not accept] a shadowy existence”. They argued that “silence is submissive and destructive to ourselves and others who may be gay” and provided one way, quite deliberately, for members of CAMP to come out. A regular programme was undertaken to sell the magazine in suburban shopping strips, and while not many copies were actually sold, Ware says that the action confronted members of the general public with the issue of homosexuality and transformed many previously “up-tight” guilt-ridden members into gay proud sellers of Camp Ink on street corners. Coming out covers were introduced in late 1971. The first was a photograph of four CAMP members above the caption “Come Out”, followed by the next issue with thirty-five members photographed under the caption “We’ve come out of our closets to wish you a Merry Christmas”. An inner-Sydney outlet of Angus & Robertson bookshop displayed this issue for sale in its shop window, and, one of those who had been photographed worked in the next building. The cover was seen by his work colleagues, which resulted, literally, in his coming out. These actions aligned very strongly to Ware’s belief that social change would occur as the general public recognised the ordinariness of individual homosexuals.
In addition to wanting to replace internalised homophobia with gay pride, articles in Camp Ink urged lesbians and gay men, as US activist Carl Wittman wrote, to “shed” imposed gender roles and “purge male chauvinism”. This commitment to challenge gender attitudes led to a free flow of ideas on all manner of topics including monogamy, gender sex roles, sadomasochistic sexual practices, pornography and drag. Ware considered the development of new ideas via the letters page “terribly important”, and, if not enough letters were received, the editors, to encourage others, would write them. They devoted a full page for letters in each issue, which was later expanded to two or more pages. These articles and letters provided the first significant forum for Australia’s gay community to discuss how to live as a gay person.
Publishing Camp Ink required major ongoing financial support from the organisation. In fact, an estimated $3.84 from each membership fee of just $4.70 went to maintain the magazine. This left little for other activities such as organising discussion groups, attending conferences and paying the rent on the organisation’s clubrooms (where Ware and Cass lived free of charge from 1971, after Ware gave up study to be a full-time unpaid worker for CAMP). To raise funds, weekly social events were held in the clubrooms, and by the start of 1973 there was a national fund drive to raise $2000, at least in part due to the costs involved in producing Camp Ink. Ware was under pressure from some in the organisation to provide “more entertaining” editorial content. From May 1971, he introduced coverage of CAMP’s organised social events in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Music with gay appeal was subsequently covered, and poems introduced. Promotion of social events in Camp Ink became entwined with the publication’s need for funding, and Ware said at the time: “Social functions raise money, not very much but at least enough to allow us to pay the rent and excess printing costs”. The coverage and promotion of these social functions eased in part this tension between political goals, reader interest and financial concerns.
In April 1972, following arguments that Ware was actually a “de facto leader surrounded by an informal clique of activist friends”, a structured organisation for CAMP with defined roles for office-bearers was adopted, and an executive elected with Sue Wills and Lex Watson as co-presidents. The new structure led to more formalised advocacy for social change, particularly in the area of law reform, and this was reflected in Camp Ink‘s coverage. In response, Ware retreated from direct involvement in the organisation, though continued to edit Camp Ink. He concedes, in retrospect, that his leadership style was “dictatorial disguised as some sort of democracy” and was actually “quite happy to hand it all over to anyone … competent … who’d grab it”. Camp Ink was published each month from November 1970 until it drifted out to a two-monthly schedule during 1973 and by the end of the year—when Ware moved to Canberra with Cass who had a job there—stopped completely for nearly twelve months. Ware subsequently ceased all involvement in gay politics and instead pursued business interests. Ware and Cass moved to Brisbane in 1975 and later returned to live in Sydney. They stayed together until Cass died of AIDS in 1995, after both had tested positive to HIV in 1985. Ware died in May 2011, aged seventy-three.
A new executive revived Camp Ink in October 1974, describing it as “a vital part of our movement”. It was published quarterly, though without the bold sweep of feature articles and debate that underpinned Ware’s editorship. It largely included reports on CAMP’s political activities and small news items, increasingly mimicking the CAMP NSW newsletter that had started in 1973. Camp Ink ceased permanently in March 1977 for financial reasons, as each issue cost between $1000 and $1500, and “reaction and feed-back [had become] non-existent”. As Camp Ink declined, and as liberationists branched out into different states and campaign areas, activists were forced to rely increasingly on cheap, low-circulation newsletters to broadcast ideas and organise actions. From the mid-1970s, gay activism was built around national homosexual conferences, with the first one in 1975, sponsored by the Australian Union of Students, and continuing until 1986.
As is often the case for social movement publications, longevity was not achieved by Camp Ink. This is not necessarily a measure of success or failure, as social movement publications appear to promote and organise specific campaigns, often disappearing following victory or defeat, or when publishers succumb to burnout. Camp Ink was a crucial part of the early gay liberationists’ strategy to challenge dominant social and political attitudes that condemned homosexuality. It provided, for the first time, a significant mouthpiece to push gay liberationist ideas among society’s opinion-makers in the media, church and government. It played a significant role in instilling gay pride among its readers and challenging the secretive nature of homosexual activity. It provided a safe forum for lesbians and gay men to explore their own feelings and attitudes towards their sexuality. Camp Ink had successfully started a process of discussion on how to be gay and to challenge mainstream assumptions of homosexuality. But with its demise, this role now passed into the hands of entrepreneurial publishers who started magazines with the primary purpose of selling their product to the emerging gay niche market. They used male nude titillation, personal classifieds for people to meet sexual partners and information about the bar scene and other entertainment. Liberationist goals were not their key objective, and often the publishers of these magazines declined to promote the campaigns of the activists, an omission that later liberationists attempted to redress.
Liberationist Publishing Renaissance
At the end of the 1979 National Homosexual Conference, held in Melbourne, the event’s organisational newsletter was merged with the equally small-circulation Gay Teachers and Students Newsletter to form Gay Community News. This was the start of a renaissance for ambitious liberationist magazines. The new publishing collective received $525 seeding money from conference proceeds with the brief to publicise the gay movement’s news and political campaigns. The first edition was fifty-two A4 newsprint pages, dropping back soon after to forty pages, published ten times a year. In its first editorial, it announced its aim was to unify gay organisations against “an unholy alliance of rabid fundamentalist Christians and gutless opportunist politicians”.
Key architect behind Gay Community News was the conference co-convenor Danny Vadasz, who had originally started the newsletter Conference News to help organise and promote the 1979 Melbourne conference. Vadasz was born in Israel on 1 July 1951 to Jewish parents who fled Nazi Europe during the Second World War. In 1956, his family migrated to Australia and settled in the working-class suburb of St Albans. At age seventeen, Vadasz mapped out for himself a political career within the Australian Labor Party and was soon local party branch secretary. He was one of only two students from his high school graduating class to go to university, and he completed a bachelor of science and diploma in education. He worked as a teacher, then education and publishing officer at the politically progressive Western Region Education Centre. In 1978, he attended the Fourth National Homosexual Conference in Sydney and was at a subsequent street protest against police arrests that had occurred earlier that year during Sydney’s first Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras. He was “immediately politicised” by the further arrest of 126 people at the second protest and the decision of the mainstream daily Sydney Morning Herald to publish the arrested individuals’ names and occupations. While avoiding arrest himself, his parents knew others on the list and he was effectively outed. His careful plans for a political career were derailed.
Vadasz was only one voice in a publishing collective committed to introducing new volunteers to gay activism and raising their skill levels. Any lesbian or gay man could join and vote simply by turning up to the meetings, though most collective members were gay men with a background of attending the homosexual conferences. There was a spectrum of views, from small “l” liberals to Marxist revolutionaries who argued for “a more political and liberationist GCN” that could “struggle together … with other oppressed people”. If an article was not fully supported by the collective, it would run as a “polemic” under individual members’ names. The overall consensus though was that gay oppression was a consequence of living in a capitalist and patriarchal society. The collective in 1980 declared that Gay Community News would refuse to publish sexually titillating material, “right-wing” pro-capitalist views or material deemed to contain “racism, sexism, creedism, ageism, classism, and other ‘isms’ [on the grounds that] as an oppressed minority, we cannot afford to collaborate in our own or others’ exploitation”. At a practical level, this resulted in little promotion for commercial gay venues—other than the inclusion of basic listings started some months after the magazine began. Paid advertising was only reluctantly accepted with the collective stating that if Gay Community News could be produced “without advertising, nothing would please us more”.
In contrast to Camp Ink, there was less attention given to the medical profession, other than occasional complaints about negative experiences from individual doctors when testing or treating sexually transmitted diseases or reports into new treatment breakthroughs. The psychiatry profession was no longer seen as an enemy, having by the mid-1970s formally rejected the diagnosis of homosexuality as an illness. Religion was rarely discussed and, if so, was usually ridiculed in an accompanying cartoon, and gay Christian writers acknowledged that the church “has, and continues to oppress homosexuals”. Key editorial targets were the government and its laws, and the attitudes of public institutions such as schools, mainstream media and the police. Anti-gay attacks and gay rights demonstrations received strong coverage, with news reports divided into local, national and international. The first issue featured a news story on the front page covering a demonstration against the arrest of two men for kissing outside the gay- frequented Woolshed Bar, part of the Australia Hotel in Melbourne’s Collins Street, with six further pages devoted to the story inside. The “significant defeat for the right-wing fundamentalist Christian lobby” was celebrated when an attempt to ban a sex education book in schools failed. Also covered were protests against the morality group “Festival of Light”, protests against the gay-violence movie Cruising and the assault of gay youth group members in a country hotel. Gay Community News had direct battles of its own when the magazine’s commercial printer censored the word “fuck” from a cartoon and subsequently refused to print the magazine.
Non-commercial social groups were promoted strongly with a designated “network” section of the magazine covering their activities. They published lesbian-content articles often from a feminist perspective, and, at times, the articles broadened into general women’s rights in an attempt to maintain equal content for each gender. The magazine even promoted commercial lesbian venues contrary to their approach towards gay men’s venues. Sadomasochism was condemned in one article on the grounds that it “confirms role stereotypes [and] reinforces women’s self-hatred”, and the notion and role of romantic love in lesbian relationships was discussed in another. The history of male impersonation by lesbians was covered, and a tolerant discussion of “butch” and “fem” role-playing.
Gay Community News sold mainly in Victoria, initially for eighty cents, rising to $1 the following year and $1.50 by the third year, and circulation never rose above 1,700. It was not published during the January holiday period, or September, when most of the activists in the publishing collective were busy attending the annual national homosexual conference. Motions passed at these conferences were published in the October Gay Community News. There were only three pages of advertising in the first edition— initially selling at $100 for a full page, though rising to $150 three years later—and this never rose above five pages. Production costs were about $1,400 an issue in the first year, and the magazine failed to cover these costs, needing to bridge its revenue shortfall with fundraising events and donations. No wages or office rental was paid, so volunteer collective members had paid jobs or other income and worked on the publication from home when time allowed.
Attempts were made to improve circulation: themes were adopted with general interest topics such as parents, sport and the performing arts; a venue guide was introduced, and a range of new columns appeared that focused on lifestyle, poems and even short stories. In February 1981, Vadasz started to write the regular “From Under My Desk” column on page four, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the odd and the terrible snippets in the news. A national push was undertaken at the end of the first year, and, for a time, modified New South Wales and Queensland editions were published. Commercial distributors Gordon & Gotch were contracted to supply newsagents, but they pulled out when sales remained low. By the end of 1982, there were only twenty-six outlets nationally that stocked the magazine.
Despite its earlier reluctance, the collective discussed ways to increase advertising revenue, triggering discussion on what criteria would ensure that such advertising remained consistent with “the values” of Gay Community News. Carr, who was a member of the collective, recalls intense “ideological arguments” at the time, particularly over “pictures of naked men” in sauna advertisements. After one such image appeared, it was condemned by a letter writer who said that such “sexist adverts, exploiting the human body as a sex object” had no place in the magazine. Editorial coverage of the gay bar scene initially contained a negative slant: the problem of alcoholism was highlighted in one article, and concern was raised over the prevalence of drag performance in the scene and how it could be “offensive [showing a] lack of feeling about the oppression of women”.A boycott of one Melbourne venue over its anti-lesbian door policy was prominently covered, as were suspicious fires burning down gay venues in Sydney.
A year after starting the magazine, in stark contrast to these generally negative views of the commercial scene, Vadasz wrote a review of a soon-to-open gay sauna and described it as “a logical extension of the commercial trend … which has recognised the needs, fantasies and resources of the gay male population [and] is bound for financial success”. His views were clearly changing, setting up a series of internal debates within the collective. In one internal collective document, Vadasz argued, with others, that the magazine’s commitment to “providing coverage of movement events for activists [tended] to distract it from its other obligations”. He urged Gay Community News not to preach to the politically faithful but instead take an “educative role” that took “the interests and sympathies” of a broader readership as its starting point. Vadasz also challenged the collective’s rejection of so-called “patriarchal” decision-making structures and work organisation, bemoaning this “tyranny of structurelessness”, and urged adoption of job descriptions to ensure someone took final responsibility for tasks. The matter came to head in 1981 when “demoralisation and exhaustion” led to a thinned down May edition and no June edition. The collective’s structure was subsequently changed to a fixed membership of twelve people, each with a specific, though rotating, job description.
A crucial ideological shift was taking place at this time among gay activists generally, with previous Communist Party member Craig Johnston now arguing that gay rights could be accommodated within a capitalist system. Also influencing discussion was the work of gay law reform campaigners such as Jamie Gardiner, who criticised the “strong and regrettable tendency among many who style themselves ‘gay activists’ to despise ‘reforms’ and those who pursue them”, and activist Phil Carswell, who questioned the knee-jerk inclination of those who “pour unwarranted scorn [on the bars] where a lot of us receive our introduction and an ongoing interaction with gay life”. He wrote that they were not just places to cruise for sex but also “a meeting place, a place to draw support, and … a place of refuge”.
The outcome of these debates was a lessening of emphasis on the need for radical restructure of society and the increasing acceptance of building and defending the gay community as the project to push forward political rights. Such a shift allowed media publishers to combine political action with the natural synergy that existed between promoting and building community, and its provision of editorial content, advertising revenue and distribution outlets. Vadasz’s aim became to redesign and repackage Gay Community News to attract advertising from the gay venues that had effectively boycotted the magazine and achieve a popular readership. He wanted to put the magazine on a business footing “running itself and paying for itself”, with editorial content that reflected the interests of a larger non-politicised audience instead of “pure political rhetoric”. He arranged for the Gay Community News collective to be restructured into the Gay Publications Co-operative to seek short-term funding under the Victorian Government’s Co-operation Development Program. He was encouraged by a previous $75,000 grant won by Gay Community News‘ affiliated typesetting cooperative Correct Line Graphics and successfully applied for a further grant of $59,402 plus a loan of $11,360. This new grant assisted with office costs and three staffing positions, including Vadasz as magazine editor. Approval of this funding triggered not only a change in management structure from collective to cooperative but also a change in editorial direction with the name Gay Community News last appearing in December 1982, replaced by OutRage.
Vadasz argued that a fresh image and new name were needed to attract venue advertising, and the new board argued that change was needed to reach “in order of one million homosexual women and men in Australia, who are in crying need of [an understandable and relevant] gay liberation publication”. Others in the collective saw OutRage as “a closet name”, and the new cooperative structure as “appropriating as private property something that was in the public domain”. Two key small “l” liberal members, Gary Jaynes and Helen Pausacker, left the publishing team in protest over the changes.
In its first year, OutRage continued to aim for a gay and lesbian readership, with alternating male and female front covers, and recruited lesbians with media skills onto the cooperative’s board of directors. By the end of its first year though, it had failed to achieve self-sufficiency, was unable to generate the sales it envisaged and was still dependent on the uncertain continuation of government cooperative grants. The scene was set for the next split, one even more fundamental in shaping the magazine’s future direction. Vadasz says that editions featuring a man on the cover sold better and that the editorial situation was an impossible juggle trying to accommodate the different attitudes of lesbians and gay men towards sex. A series of “acrimonious” meetings failed to find a solution that both balanced the budget and appeased everyone’s political beliefs, and the board agreed to close the magazine unless a group stepped forward with a plan to take it over. The only proposal presented at the 21 December 1983 board meeting was to turn OutRage into a gay men’s magazine and, despite women being in the majority, was accepted six votes to one. This was followed by the immediate resignation of all four women board members, declaring that “the future of OutRage as a viable concern [had] looked bleak [but now it was] teetering towards the political oblivion of yet another cocks and bums extravaganza”.
During this year of turmoil, a larger drama was also unfolding: the arrival of the AIDS epidemic in Australia. In May 1983, OutRage decided that someone had to become the magazine’s in-house expert on the disease, and that task fell to Carr, who for the next decade wrote a succession of articles on AIDS, and at this early stage arguably knew more than anyone in Australia about the disease. When the Victorian AIDS Action Committee (the forerunner to the Victorian AIDS Council) was formed in 1983, five of the twelve founding management committee members were also involved with OutRage, including Vadasz and Carr. From 1984 to 1986, Carr was vice-president of the AIDS Council and president from 1986 to 1987. He was a member of the Victorian Ministerial Advisory Committee on AIDS from 1989 to 1992.
OutRage‘s circulation grew steadily from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s when it peaked in 1995 with an Audit Bureau of Circulations figure of 11,216. The number of pages also peaked at 116 that year, up from an initial 48, and the cover price peaked at $6.50 from an initial $1.50. In December 1986, the organisation was privatised and OutRage published by Gay Publications, a division of Australian Media Co-operative Enterprises Ltd. The major shareholders were Vadasz, Gardiner and marketing manager, Sinon Hassett. By the end of the 1980s, OutRage largely abandoned its role as a news provider, unable with its long production times to compete against the rise of the local free gay newspapers. Instead, it became a feature-based magazine with glossier paper and more colour. Its publishers used OutRage as a springboard for a range of other publishing ventures and to promote mainstream business interest in the pink dollar. By 1993, the company’s annual turnover had grown to $4 million, with OutRage advertising contributing $420,000. Vadasz lost control of OutRage in 1999 when Gardiner sold his shares in the business to Sydney-listed company the Satellite Group that in turn went bankrupt less than two years later, and the magazine closed. Vadasz started a new marketing company, Communication Factory, and from 2008 worked as chief operating officer at the Australian Conservation Foundation.
In its three years before transforming into a gay men’s lifestyle magazine, the publishers of Gay Community News used it to play a crucial role in unifying the efforts of activists involved in direct campaigns against opponents of gay rights. Articles were written that encouraged involvement in these campaigns, as well as articles that broadly politicised and informed readers. The collective’s initial anti-capitalist and anti-pornographic views, though, alienated the magazine from a potentially wider readership and the growing pool of advertising dollars that existed from the late 1970s following the growth of a commercial gay sector.
The decision to redefine their political objectives towards community building allowed the publishers of OutRage to resolve in part their financial tension by opening greater access to new advertising revenues and readership. The subsequent decision to narrow the editorial focus and appeal more strongly to male readers alone was also done in an attempt to resolve the ongoing financial tension. In doing so, they jettisoned much of their original political opposition to capitalist and patriarchal practices, inviting both criticism and praise, yet, for the publishers of OutRage, they were unable to see an alternative solution, arguing that the only option was closure of the magazine or a limited publishing presence as a small-circulation newsletter.
Conclusion
A key difference in the trajectories of Camp Ink and Gay Community News was that the publishers of Camp Ink accepted the seeming inevitability of their magazine’s demise, whereas the publishers of Gay Community News embarked on dramatic actions to reposition their magazine so it could survive. This no doubt reflected the attitudes and energy of the key individuals involved, and it also reflected the significantly changed environment within the gay community from the start of the 1970s and the end of that decade.
Left-wing ideas advocating broad structural change in society were strongly held in the early 1970s, as was the belief that achieving such a new society was possible. With the decline in the 1970s of the Left and its optimism for change, it is easy to imagine the despair of Camp Ink‘s publishers. For them, options other than closing would not have been apparent.
During the slightly later period in which Gay Community News found itself, there was a more developed gay commercial world and a changed thinking that allowed the publishers of Gay Community News to more readily embrace it. Instead of the radical transformation of capitalist society, the agenda now shifted towards building and defending the gay community—both its commercial and non-commercial elements. A more specific political focus developed around issues of law reform, opposing police raids on gay venues, condemning street violence and tackling the challenge of AIDS. Further financial pragmatism and frustration over perceived differences in sexual viewpoint between gay men and lesbians saw the end of the feminist agenda for OutRage, which alienated many activists and lesbians. Yet the alternatives seen by the publishers were closure or irrelevance. If either had occurred, the ongoing crucial roles played by OutRage in terms of tackling the AIDS epidemic, building community and reader confidence, and convincing mainstream businesses to engage with the gay community may not have occurred to the extent that it did.