It hardly seems possible that the Gay & Lesbian Times is turning 20. Time truly does pass by at an alarming rate as you get older!

I was fortunate to be a part of the early years of the newspaper, way back in 1990, when both the GLBT community and weekly gay newspaper publishing were worlds away from where they are today. If it’s OK with you, kind reader, rather than waxing poetic about how far we’ve come as a community since, or how much gay journalism has matured over the years, I’d rather just take a few minutes to share some memories about what it was like to actually put together a weekly community newspaper back in the early ’90s.

Take a look at the finished product in your hand. Reduce the number of pages by two-thirds, take away the folded magazine format, remove the staples in the binding, and forget about the glossy, four-color cover. Picture instead your typical daily newspaper, only with newsprint rubbing off all over your hands: that was the San Diego Gay Times of 1990.

In the days before e-mail, the internet and digital cameras, all the articles, editorials, columns and letters to the editor found in the 1990 Gay Times were pretty much typed into two tiny Macs by the editor, two staff writers, freelancers who’d pop by the office at a pre-scheduled time, and interns. We greeted our first scanner as a gift from heaven. Imagine just placing an article on a machine that actually picked up and transcribed 80 percent of the words correctly! We were styling.

As for the photos, this was a truly Draconian operation. The poor bastard (sometimes me) in the art department stuck with photo duty was pretty much locked in a dark room for eight to 10 hours a day resizing and shooting half-tones of photos – photos that had to first be taken to the local photo store for developing. Once the half-tones dried, they were placed on a cutting board, sliced down to size with an exacto knife, and pasted on the “boards.” The same process was followed for every single advertisement in the paper.

And what of these “boards”? Back in “those” days, each page of the newspaper actually got spit out of the computer in four separate strips that had to be trimmed down, glued, lined-up and tiled onto a numbered board that would get delivered, hopefully (but not always!), in sequential order to the printers in Los Angeles. Often times, words were split in the middle, both horizontally and vertically, which made tiling very challenging and often resulted in some interesting finished projects, visually speaking.

If you flip through the current issue of the GLT, you’ll see a wide array of advertisers – from realtors to doctors, home furnishings to travel companies, dance clubs and restaurants. It wasn’t always that way. In the early days of the paper, we struggled to find enough folks within, and even fewer from outside, our community willing to advertise in an alternative newspaper. There were a core group of gay and lesbian bar owners, bath house owners, professionals and other small business owners who kept all the GLBT papers afloat – and we had four weekly gay papers back in 1990! As a community, we owe those early supporters a huge debt of gratitude for helping keep our GLBT publications in business.

When I look at today’s GLT, I marvel at just how far the Gay Times has come from those early days; and I look back with pride at having been a small part of this newspaper’s great legacy. There was a real sense of accomplishment and teamwork that we’d feel each Wednesday when we’d place the last of the boards into the box and send it off on that Greyhound Bus up to L.A. We’d then wait around eagerly on Thursday night for the truck to pull up out back with that week’s 15,000 copies ready for delivery (again, me – hey, I needed the money!). And each week we hoped that maybe, in some small way, we were making a positive difference in the lives of our readers, especially those who might be questioning their sexual orientation and were turning, for the very first time, to a GLBT publication for support and guidance.