Gay News, Straight Facts: the Alabama Forum as a Voice for Queer Activism in 1980s Alabama.

The Alabama Forum was the state’s longest running gay and lesbian special-interest newspaper. It printed monthly from 1981 until 2002 and was distributed for free at bars, bookstores, and businesses across the state. The paper was operated by Lambda, Inc., the state’s first public gay and lesbian civil rights organization. It acted as a platform for the gay and lesbian voice in Alabama. In the early 1980s activists used The Forum to reach gays and lesbians across the state, raise political consciousness, and eventually build a grassroots coalition of sexual minorities who wielded considerable political power. When the AIDS crisis struck, it was a one-of-a-kind source of early information on AIDS, transmissibility, and sexual health, subverting mainstream reporting on AIDS by providing critical perspectives from sexual minorities who were disproportionately affected by AIDS but underrepresented in mainstream media. Finally, The Forum helped forge social connections between isolated gays and lesbians across the Southeast and supported Alabama’s gay and lesbian economy by providing a platform where gay and lesbian-owned businesses could advertise to a niche audience. It supported gay and lesbian organizations through publicity. Thanks to enthusiastic publicity in The Forum, the Magic City Athletic Association (MCAA) grew gay athletics into a considerable financial venture for the gay community and became a positive point of contact between the gay and lesbian community and straight society. The Forum has been the subject of little academic study but serves as an interesting thread in the tapestry of media strategies in the Southern gay and lesbian rights movement. This historical analysis investigates and contextualizes three fronts of 1980s gay and lesbian activism as covered in The Alabama Forum.