Remembering Mike Salinas
I freelanced for the late B.A.R. news editor Mike Salinas in the 1990s, sending him political and AIDS-related stories from Los Angeles. As a former mainstream journalist, I often argued with him when he included activist terms under my byline; he once inserted The Betrayer in a Bill Clinton photo caption. But we worked well together.
Salinas was also insightful. He called me an environmental reporter because I wrote about fundraisers in a you-are-there style. He was right. I imagined my reader as a homebound person with AIDS who had tickets for the event but was too sick to go. I imagined a partner or friend reading him my coverage so that a person living with AIDS could picture himself there. Mike got a chuckle over the fashion fundraisers. One time I thought Sandra Bernhard was wearing a mustard yellow shag-carpet jacket strutting down the runaway. Luckily, I was seated next to a gay guy from the Gap who said she was wearing gay fashion designer Is
Fifty years ago the gay bar that foremost location for so much dating, friendships, political organizing, and times both fun and challenging gave birth to the B.A.R., when the first copies of the Bay Area Reporter were set atop cigarette machines in San Francisco watering holes.
Since those early, heady days of what was then called the Gay Liberation Movement, the bar rag evolved to become the undisputed newspaper of record for the Bay Area s LGBTQ community, distributing 20,000 paper copies each Thursday, and of course available 24/7 online.
According to Michael Yamashita, a gay man who has been the paper s publisher since 2013, the paper has never missed an issue deadline not even when threatened by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.
Yeah, we ll toot our own horn. We ve come a long way from when the first issue of the Bay Area Reporter rolled off the presses (or a mimeograph machine in the back of a gay bar) 50 years ago April 1, 1971. It was no April Fools joke. The paper had a purpose to bring the LGBTQ community together, at least as far as letting us all know what was going on and we continue to fulfill that promise. It hasn t always been easy. It definitely hasn t been without controversy or occasional missteps. But here we are, 50 years later, in the midst of another pandemic, continuing to inform queer readers on issues that matter to them.