Gay Scotland was an LGBT magazine published – directly or indirectly – by gay rights organisation, the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group (SHRG) (later Outright Scotland) between 1982 and the early 2000s.
SHRG had originally launched in 1969 as the Scottish Minorities Group, and this organisation had published a foolscap-sized members-only newsletter SMG News from January 1971. As part of the rebranding to SHRG, from November 1978 SMG News was reformatted as an A4-sized newsletter called Gay Scotland: this was a text only publication, reproduced (with variable quality) as cheaply as possible using a Gestetner duplicating machine. The editor until mid-1981 was Glasgow-based Paul Brownsey.
With no successor editor in place, SHRG's National Executive Committee – at its October 1981 meeting – approved the idea of a revamped Gay Scotland, recognising that the then-newsletter could be greatly improved in terms of content, reproduction and design. The first issue of the new-look, glossy bimonthly Gay Scotland was published at the start of March 1982.[1], although its new editor Ian Dunn in fact produced a four-page "Issue 0" dated November 1981 to help give attendees at a SHRG "national forum" event, held in Edinburgh, a sense of what the publication would look like. [2]
Initially, the copies of the new-look Gay Scotland sent out to SHRG members as part of their membership package included a central "Pink Pages" insert covering specific SHRG news and activities. This practice was discontinued from issue 4 (September/October 1982), to enable the inclusion of a central "Yellow Pages" pull-out covering "Scene" and cultural/arts listings.
As part of later reorganisation – especially once SHRG relaunched as Outright Scotland – the publisher of Gay Scotland was, by the 1990s, Calosa Publishing Ltd and, by 2003, Outright Scotland Community Press Ltd—both companies wholly-owned by Outright Scotland.
At the time, the magazine was an important source of information for LGBT readers across Scotland. Through the HIV/AIDS epidemic it provided its readers with contemporary debates around HIV and AIDS, to keep them informed on latest healthcare developments and to debunk myths.[3]
As the first publication of its kind in Scotland, Gay Scotland went on to inspire future publications produced specifically for the country's LGBT+ community.[4]
A near complete run of Gay Scotland (excepting "Issue 0") can be found at the National Library of Scotland, while copies are also part of the Lothian Health Services Archive in the collection of the Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard.[5] [6]
List of LGBT periodicals
LGBT movements