In 1971, gay activists in East Lansing demanded protections in the city government’s hiring process from their City Council. They came, they fought, and they won: East Lansing’s early 1972 civil rights ordinance was the first of its kind in the country.
By TIM RETZLOFF We have only glimpses of earlier generations of same-sex couples because for so long society forced those we today understand as LGBTQ+ people to live largely in secrecy. …
The minutiae of queer life rarely make it into the Lansing State Journal or other mainstream media. Small everyday details can best be found in sources generated by LGBTQ+ people themselves, and often signal subtle and meaningful changes in the making.
A pair of Lansing State Journal headlines capture the paper’s evolving coverage of Lansing-area queer folk in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The headline on the front of the Lansing State Journal on July 25, 1972, might be described as cheeky: “City’s Night Life Can Get Real ‘Gay.’” The accompanying tagline, “Perversion Downtown Varies,” carried a darker message, at once moralistic and salacious.
Headlines in the Lansing State Journal in the 1950s, then simply the State Journal, tell a skewed story about people we now understand as LGBTQ. In the decades before Stonewall, the proverbial “first draft of history” of journalists was decidedly slanted in the local mainstream press, as it was in newspapers across the country.
