The University of Washington's archival team is hard at work cataloguing and saving innumerable Seattle Gay News issues from previous decades. These will be preserved in collections and made available on microfilm for future researchers. Jessica Albano, the university's news librarian, has worked hard on this project, with feedback and support from SGN publisher Angela Cragin.
The effort was inspired by Marcellus Turner, the former chief librarian for the Seattle Public Library. After SGN publisher George Bakan passed away, Turner wanted to ensure that the paper's history be archived and available for the future, so he reached out to Cragin the SGN and the UW Library to start the process. Since then, it has transformed into a larger project involving stakeholders from across the state.
At the UW Library, Albano works with staff and volunteers to archive the papers. The team includes participants from the Seattle Public Library, MOHAI, the Washington State Library, the Seattle Municipal Archives, and HistoryLink, each taking on roles to preserve the SGN's legacy.
Said Albano, "Some of us are there every meeting, and some of us come and go with the agenda," but the turnout has created a successful ad hoc group. For example, when Bakan's storage unit of newspapers was threatened, the Seattle Municipal Archives housed crates of issues. And as the papers are organized, the Washington-based encyclopedia HistoryLink has been collecting information to add to its knowledge base.
The next step is putting every issue on microfilm. This is a reliable and long-term means of preserving images of each page for current and future researchers. After putting the SGN's archive in this form, Newspaper.com will make possible the digitization of issues so that they can be viewed and searched online in the Washington Digital Newspaper Collection, a project of the Washington State Library. Albano hopes that once these issues are fully archived, microfilmed, and digitized, they will be used to craft stories about the SGN's legacy.
"I think it's important to preserve and document all aspects of a community and not just the dominant majority in the community, which in terms of newspaper history was usually a white male story for a really long time," Albano said. She recalls that newspapers like the SGN, as well as those run by women and people of color, have often been left out of community narratives.
Albano also noted that messages of solidarity between marginalized communities stood out to her while archiving old issues, like "promoting building partnerships with people of color... just as minority groups."
Documenting the SGN's history also preserves information that informs our understanding of Seattle's Queer community, including the changing arts scene and maps of businesses, as well as hate crimes and prejudice, particularly through the paper's weekly updates detailing the history of HIV/AIDS. Albano said that the hate crimes against Gay people related to AIDS can be viewed parallel to those today against the Asian American community during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the SGN's well-documented history gives us an opportunity to learn from that.