Local Queer Media: From Golden Age to Renaissance

At the end of the twentieth century, the Twin Cities queer community read, listened to, and watched what some might call a golden age of local queer media.

In the late 1970s, they could listen to Fresh Fruit Radio and pick up a copy of GLC Voice on the way out of their local gay bar.

As the Twin Cities approached the millennium, the golden age arrived as the queer community read Equal Time, Focus Point, and Lavender Magazine. They watched GAZE TV. They paged through the zines Holy Titclamps and Womyn Who Masturbate. They continued to listen to Fresh Fruit Radio, which is still on the air today—now the country’s longest-running queer radio program. They picked up copies of the alternative newspaper The Reader for its “Q Monthly” section (which later became its own publication).

These publications did not all exist simultaneously, but many overlapped. And when one shut down, another soon followed.

“There were a lot of [publications],” said Robyn Dochterman, editor of Equal Time. “Reading them was like shopping for the kind of queer person I thought I was—or wanted to be. In fact, the ‘80s and early ‘90s were a time when the whole community seemed to be figuring out what it wanted to be, and be seen as.”

Queer media provided ample options for queer folks to discover themselves.

Some gravitated to GLC Voice for its confrontational approach, dubbing itself “news and opinion for gays, lesbians and civilized straights.” Its founder, Tim Campbell, never shied away from a fight. In an article after his passing, the Star Tribune reported that his arguments with Minneapolis City Council Member Barbara Carlson often nearly ended in slugfests. He even set the Minneapolis Civil Rights Department on fire.

“GLC Voice had serious value as a way to engage in current controversies—many of them stirred up by Tim,” said Claude Peck, a former producer at Fresh Fruit Radio and former editor of Q Monthly. “Equal Time arrived as a more ‘responsible’ newspaper, with reporting of local news and coverage of people and culture.”

Dochterman said that Equal Time and queer media profiled LGBTQ+ people who explored polar regions or who had amassed exquisite collections of Dayton’s shopping bags. Readers could learn how to buy a house with a queer-friendly realtor or connect with attorneys to help them navigate discrimination. From 1986 to 1990, the Equal Time production manager was Alison Bechdel, the up-and-coming artist of Dykes to Watch Out For and future recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award.

GAZE TV founder Brad Theissen said that he “interviewed community activists and leaders so that their own words told their own stories.” He presided over a small media empire including Twin Cities GAZE Newspaper, GAZE Magazine, and GAZE Guide. The TV show earned an award for its coverage of the 1992 AIDS Quilt at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. When Brian Coyle, the first openly gay member of the Minneapolis City Council, was hospitalized due to AIDS-related complications, Theissen was the last person to interview him from his hospital room at Hennepin County Medical Center. Theissen reported that Coyle’s final words of advice to the community were about safer sex practices.

Q Monthly featured cover stories like “The Myth of Gay Affluence” and “The High Cost of Living with AIDS.” In addition to features and long-form articles, readers enjoyed a blind-item gossip column, an events calendar, and a monthly Q&A.

How the AIDS crisis made queer newspapers essential

But while the search for identity fueled the explosion of local queer media, the AIDS epidemic mandated it.

Mainstream media approached the crisis by ignoring it, sensationalizing it, or publishing op-eds blaming the LGBTQ+ community for the “gay cancer.”

There were exceptions, according to Dochterman. The Pioneer Press won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for its “AIDS in the Heartland” series.

Arguably, it was an exception that proved the rule.

“The AIDS crisis made LGBTQ newspapers crucial in the late 1980s and into the 1990s,” said Peck. “They covered in granular and essential detail news of experimental drug therapies, safer sex practices, grief, and activism. This life-and-death information was not readily available in the mainstream press.”

The demand for media reflective of queer life paired with the mandate for it due to AIDS created the infrastructure to maintain it.

“[There was] support from readers and advertisers,” said Peck. “There were systems in place to produce content, to make and distribute newspapers, all of which provided a varied GLBTQ media world in the last two decades of the 20th century that was robust for a metro the size of Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

Dochterman underscored how important advertisers were to the sustainability of that system.

“There was a big enough audience and a big enough group of advertisers that the math worked for quite a while,” she said. “We were becoming a desirable demographic and there weren’t many ways to reliably reach that demographic.”

Zines, on the other hand, packed a punch without wanting or needing to be institutions. They wove together community information, comics, concert reviews, and erotic literature. In the early 1990s, Larry-bob authored, edited, and published on almost all these topics in his zine Holy Titclamps. In the mid-1990s, the Womyn Who Masturbate Collective published an eponymous zine about sexual health, feminism, tampon alternatives, and, yes, masturbation.

Shock closures, from GLC Voice to Lavender Magazine

But the problem with golden ages is that they always come to an end.

In the summer of 2026, Lavender Magazine shocked the LGBTQ+ community when it shut down with no warning after thirty-one years.

But the shock closure of a queer publication isn’t new.

In 1992, Campbell surprised everyone when he suddenly closed GLC Voice.

Equal Time was forced to close in 1994 after it had transitioned from a biweekly publication to weekly. Advertising sales couldn’t keep up, and they took on too much debt.

“The sales infrastructure couldn’t support it,” said Dochterman. “The board believed it was unethical to continue publishing. I was at a conference in St. Louis when the board made that decision. I’ll never forget the shock of getting that phone call. I think the community was just as shocked as I was.”

In 1998, City Pages publisher Mark Bartel stunned everyone when he axed Q Monthly, despite the publication operating at a profit with $200,000 in annual revenue.

But Fresh Fruit Radio and Lavender Magazine persisted into the twenty-first century, soon joined by Twin Cities Gay Scene in 2006. A new print quarterly arrived in 2023, Better Homes and Dykes. According to its website, the zine featured “a variety of content from various Minneapolis/St. Paul collaborators including quizzes & games, media reviews, handy-butch wisdom, write-in laundry advice, sports content, and reader photo submissions.”

Queer radio finds a home on AM950

Deep into the century, an innovation in queer radio began on AM950 Radio in Minneapolis.

In 2016, transgender author and legal advocate Ellie Krug began hosting a weekly radio program, Ellie 2.0, on the progressive talk station. It focused on human rights and idealism, before Krug rebranded the show to The Illegal Trans Woman in 2024 as a response to Trump’s reelection. The show advocates for transgender humans and their allies.

In 2022, AM950 Radio began production on The Downright Upright Show, hosted by out host Philip Anthony. The weekly program focuses on community affairs through interviews with community leaders and elected officials, with dedicated coverage of the LGBTQ+ community.

In 2023, The Gaily Show debuted on AM950 Radio as a weekly culture and entertainment program. In January 2025, AM950 Radio promoted it to a daily one-hour news and talk show. The Gaily Show is now recognized as the only daily LGBTQ+ news program on the radio in the US. It also partners with several LGBTQ+ newspapers, including the Washington Blade, Windy City Times, The Buckeye Flame, Dallas Voice, and The Lookout.

In 2024, Twin Cities Pride launched its own weekly radio program on AM950 Radio, Twin Cities Pride AMPLIFIED. It was hosted by Executive Director Andi Otto and Executive Assistant Rina Heisel. It billed itself as “a program dedicated to all things LGBTQIA+, both in the Twin Cities area and beyond.”

But by the summer of 2026, Lavender Magazine, Twin Cities Pride AMPLIFIED, and Better Homes and Dykes had shut down.

A national squeeze on LGBTQ+ media

The closings came at what The LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project called a “critical inflection point.” A 2025 initiative of the Local Media Association and News Is Out, The LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project charted as many LGBTQ+ media outlets as it could find across the United States.

Their findings were stark. Eighteen states had no LGBTQ+ media. National advertisers, responding to Trump’s reelection, started pulling their advertising.

As for mainstream media coverage, according to Peck, “[it] tends to heavy up in June during Pride, and to coast uneventfully the rest of the year. I don’t think any large media outlet here has a reporter covering LGBTQ news as a beat. So stories go unchecked, news unreported, profiles unwritten, organizations unexamined.”

Archives

Where to read these publications

Most of the titles in this story are out of print. These four collections hold them.

• Jean-Nickolaus Tretter CollectionTwin Cities LGBTQ+ periodicals, zines and the GAZE-TV tapes, at the University of Minnesota.lib.umn.edu
• Minnesota Historical SocietyGLC Voice and Positively Gay are digitized and viewable at the Gale Family Library.mnhs.org
• Quatrefoil LibraryVolunteer-run LGBTQIA+ library on East Lake Street holding periodicals, books and zines.qlibrary.org
• Queer Zine Archive ProjectSearchable archive of queer zines, including Larry-bob’s.qzap.org

Links checked September 17, 2026

The renaissance: where Minnesota queer media stands now

And yet, a renaissance may be percolating.

Q Minnesota launches this month as both a monthly print publication and digital news source.

Twin Cities Gay Scene is celebrating its twentieth anniversary by hiring a new managing editor and contributors, while expanding its coverage areas and creating a queer directory.

The Porch is a new newsletter that its founder Jay Miller styles as “a new place to discover Minnesota’s LGBTQIA+ community.”

The Gaily Show has expanded to Chicago, Madison, Atlanta, and Phoenix, as well as weekly in Seattle and Amherst, Massachusetts. For nonradio listeners, it launched a corresponding digital publication.

Fresh Fruit Radio continues its historic run on Thursdays at 7 p.m.

The Illegal Trans Woman airs in Chicago on WCPT 820.

Queer zines have made a serious comeback with the “QUEER! & ALIVE!” Zine Fest on November 21, 2026, taking place at three locations across Minneapolis, which also hosted the 2025 Midwest Queer Trans Zine conference. The volunteer-run radical bookstore Boneshaker Books hosts twice-monthly zine clubs and Sarah Evenson runs a zine subscription service called “Gay Mail Friend!”

Minnesota is witnessing a kaleidoscope of LGBTQ+ media evocative of its first golden age.

When asked about a favorite memory from that time, Peck recalled how important it was to have the full backing of RT Rybak, publisher of the Twin Cities Reader and a future mayor of Minneapolis. Peck also said, “It was so much fun. We focused on generating what we thought were the best story ideas and potential questions readers might have, often questions that we wondered about. It was cool to see a stack of Q Monthlys on newsstands each month.”

For Dochterman, a favorite memory was a piece she did on Jim Ward, a gay man whom MTV dubbed “the granddaddy of the modern body piercing movement.”

She said, “I spent the whole day shooting him piercing belly buttons, tongues, and all manner of genitalia. Before I left that day, I couldn’t resist asking him to pierce my clit.”