11 mins
Putting The First GCN Together 1988
No: 1 FIRST THINGS FIRST
My first professional journalist job was with Out magazine, Ireland’s first attempt at a commercial gay magazine, which ran from 1984-1988. It overlapped with my time as the National Gay Federation’s president, standing for election to Dublin City Council, co-running the world’s second International Lesbian and Gay Youth Congress, and the destruction of Dublin’s gay hub, the Hirschfeld Centre; an unforgettably mad, hectic, exciting and difficult period in my life.
In 1986, at the age of 26, I found myself out of work and owed several months’ wages. Out was beset with administrative and financial problems and would struggle to publish its later editions. When the Carlow & Leinster Times refused to print its penultimate issue (having taken offence at a safer sex ad), it was the death knell for the mag.
I had some long conversations with my dear friend and close political colleague, Catherine Glendon, about getting an alternative, newspaper-style project off the ground. We both felt it was hugely important to have a platform for our own stories and a mechanism to promote positive images at a time when none existed in Irish popular culture or the media. Remember this was a time when many newspapers still felt compelled to use the word gay in inverted commas, for chrissakes!
In time we persuaded our colleagues on the board of National Gay Federation to publish the A3 newspaper. Slated for Autumn 1987, publication was pushed back when Catherine died of a stroke in August that year and then the Hirschfeld Centre was torched in November. Without the funding stream from Flikkers Disco and on a ridiculously modest budget of IR£300, we made the difficult decision to charge 10p for the first edition.
By the time GCN was published in February 1988, people - all volunteers - were exhausted, our friends and lovers were dying from AIDS with shocking regularity and many others emigrated from the brutal social and economic poverty of the country.
From the get-go, I always believed in the paper and had a very clear vision of what it should and could be, so much so it consumed me utterly in the first two years and actually contributed to the breakdown of my relationship.
The early years were hard, fractious, at times disappointing and exhausting. But it was worth it in the end and I’ve no regrets, seeing the great publication it became.