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-Seattle Gay News has been around for 50 years.
We're celebrating that anniversary of 50 years
since Seattle Gay News, here at the Seattle Public Library.
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-The University of Washington Libraries,
we created this exhibit
and we displayed it in our Allen Library in March,
which was the actual anniversary
date of Volume 1, Number 1 of the Seattle Gay News.
And then community members
told Seattle Public Library about it,
and they asked if they can host it.
So now it's a traveling exhibit.
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-We really captured everything from,
you know, the first marches for equality to,
you know, the AIDS epidemic...
And we literally covered everything from the first
reports of gay cancer.
So in a lot of cases, the only evidence that existed
is in the pages of the SGN.
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-My camera has gotten me into a lot of rooms.
And it's and it's all thanks to Seattle Gay News.
-Oh my god,
there's a story I wrote!
I wrote that.
So that's an interview I did with RuPaul,
who I've known for 32 years.
-When I first saw one of the panels,
I just thought, “Wow, this is like a synthesis.
They have synthesized the essence of what's
being told in the paper.”
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-So it's really wonderful
to know that all this work that we did
is really going to result in a permanent collection
that's going to be able to be accessed
anywhere in the world, because every page
of these issues, going back
50 years is being photographed and digitized.
Can you imagine?
We're talking about thousands of pages.
These old newspapers are becoming brittle.
They're very fragile.
And so now we can be sure that they're they're preserved.
-It's been really, really fun to see everybody
come out and celebrate a newspaper in 2024.
It's just so great to have a newspaper
celebrated at a public library.
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