At an emergency staff meeting, an angry and defensive Bakan made it clear that he wouldn't resign--the solution proposed by his staffers--nor would he be change his management style or personal hygiene habits.
"And he was surprised when I resigned," said Matthew McQuilkin, 24, the self-confessed ringleader of the SGN staff revolt and the author of the letter (the full text of the letter can be read at thestranger. com/2000-11-30/extra.html).
McQuilkin moved to Seattle in June '98 after graduating from Washington State University. While he worked at SGN, McQuilkin had difficulty convincing people to take him seriously. "For many newsmakers, readers, and advertisers," he explains, "there was a stigma associated with the SGN."
Seattle Gay News' only other full-time writer, Michael C. Bradbury, 28, also resigned after the staff revolt. Born and raised in Bellevue, Bradbury had also worked at SGN for just under two years. While nominally a staff writer, Bradbury found himself assigning stories, copy editing, and functioning, for all intents and purposes, as the paper's editor. "I took on a lot more responsibility than I should've had to," Bradbury says.
Bradbury believes that his experiences at SGN--both good and bad--helped prepare him for his new role as publisher and editor of Seattle Gay Standard, "Seattle's premier LGBT newspaper," which debuted on November 10 and operates at 29th Avenue East in Madison Park. McQuilkin is the new paper's culture editor. Asked if they started Seattle Gay Standard to put SGN--and George Bakan--out of business, both Bradbury and McQuilkin issue slow, deliberate denials. "I'm not very comfortable answering that question," McQuilkin says. "I want to avoid SGN-bashing." He prefers to talk about his new project. "With Seattle Gay Standard, we want to provide the highest-quality GLBT newspaper in the Pacific Northwest," he says--which isn't setting the bar too high.
"I don't harbor any ill will toward the SGN," Bradbury says. "Most major cities have at least two gay papers."
In fact, in Chicago, a city with at least two gay papers at any given time, there's a precedent Bakan might find alarming. Bradbury has been in touch with the staff of Chicago Free Press, a gay newspaper founded by disgruntled staffers who walked out of Windy City Times after a similar dispute with that paper's publisher. Shortly after Chicago Free Press started publication, Windy City Times folded. (Windy City Times has been revived, though it is a shadow of its former self, and Chicago Free Press is now Chicago's dominant gay paper.) "They actually have been a tremendous help," Bradbury says of his contacts at Chicago Free Press. "They gave me some good advice."
Bradbury is aware that past efforts to start a second gay newspaper in Seattle have failed. Twist, 2002: The Next Generation, Qink (which stood for "queer ink," but everyone read it as "oink"), and a Seattle edition of the Portland-based Just Out have all come and gone. "I don't know if other people who've attempted gay papers in Seattle had a journalistic background," Bradbury says. "It's been a long time since a gay newspaper around here was taken seriously."
Being taken seriously as a newspaper will require Seattle Gay Standard to do something that SGN or any of Seattle's other gay papers have not been willing to do: risk offending the city's gay and lesbian activists by reporting the news, not just regurgitating press releases from community-based organizations, activists, and AIDS Inc. "Gay activists have certain expectations," said Bradbury. "They want community papers to be an advocacy press." Bradbury insists that Seattle Gay Standard will place more importance on news reporting than advocacy.
But the first three issues of Seattle Gay Standard have been short on local news reporting. For example, the paper has yet to weigh in on any controversial issues (such as the behind-the-scenes controversy over efforts to build a gay community center), sticking instead to gay press staples like national news roundups and arts reviews. More troubling, in the second issue, a full-page ad for the Seattle Men's Chorus ran directly across from a full-page story on said chorus ("Seattle Men's Chorus is bigger and better than ever"). Meanwhile, Ego, a new dance club that bought an ad in Seattle Gay Standard, earned a rave review in the culture section. But the writing is good; the paper has two solid columns (3hree Guys Out and Baggage Claim); and, unlike SGN, someone at Bradbury's paper knows how to use a spell checker.
So how's the personal hygiene at Seattle Gay Standard?
"I run a professional organization," laughs Bradbury. "And that means everybody at Seattle Gay Standard bathes regularly."
