The Sydney Star, observed
BY ANDREW M POTTS
July marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of what remains Australia’s most read gay and lesbian news source, and the oldest gay community publication in the southern hemisphere.
Coincidentally, its 1000th issue will hit the streets later this year.
But while the Sydney Star Observer is well known today as an institution in the Australian media, few know the story of its first publisher and editor and the circumstances of its coming into being.
In 1971, disgusted with his country’s involvement in the Vietnam War, American Michael Glynn travelled to Australia, and quickly fell in love with the place, seeing in it a “potential… to achieve a greatness unmatched by any other nation”.
But as an out gay man used to America’s big cities, he found in Sydney a parochial and disunited gay scene – but following the first Mardi Gras, one with a growing sense of self awareness. With just one gay magazine in the country, Glynn saw both a business opportunity and a way to help foster this emerging gay consciousness.
The first issue of The Sydney Star hit the streets on the night of July 6, 1979, with Glynn riding the buses along Oxford Street with a backpack to distribute it himself.
It was printed on credit, with promise of payment for ads from most of Sydney’s then gay bars. Next Monday, everyone paid up, and the Star has never missed an issue since.
Somewhat ironically, the name was inspired by a headline in the Daily Telegraph – a close friend of Glynn’s, a former Olympic skier, had killed herself and the paper declared that “Sydney’s Star” had gone.
Its first issue was merely intended as a fortnightly gay business and entertainment guide, with the credo “Think Gay, Buy Gay”, but a few news briefs were included to fill up the pages. Readers wanted more, and many started to send in their own clippings of gay news stories from around the world.
The addition of a letters page gave the community a voice and arena for debate and the transformation to a ‘real’ newspaper finding its own stories did not take long.
By 1983, the business was going well enough for Glynn to try to reproduce nationally what the Star had done for Sydney, and he launched the Green Park Observer as a sister publication. It was not a success, and Glynn lost a packet in the process.
A year later he sold the Star to its staff and retired to the Blue Mountains, but by April the business was no longer able to discharge its debts – including to Glynn, and the Sydney Star was put to rest, while a ‘new’ paper, with the same editor and staff, The Star Observer, combining both papers’ names, came out the next week.
Glynn felt cheated and would remain estranged from the paper for over a decade. However following the change to community ownership, in the years leading up to his death in 1996, he gave a lengthy interview to the paper and became an occasional contributor to the paper once again.
Thirty years since Glynn birthed it, what became the Sydney Star Observer remains Australia’s leading free-to-street GLBT publication- pink Australia’s newspaper of record. It continues not only to break the news, but to make the news, playing a crucial role in pressuring government and rallying the gay community towards the goal of final and enduring equality in this country.
Andrew M. Potts is the Sydney Star Observer’s political columnist.
You May Also Like
