Before Monterey County had its own Pride celebrations, it had an LGBTQ+ newspaper.
First, there was the Monterey Lay Out, a short-lived periodical published out of Carmel that ran in the mid-1970s. Then, there was the paper — literally. The Paper became the county’s flagship periodical and published from 1994 until 1998. It was printed on the Monterey Herald’s presses, reaching a circulation of 3,000 copies at its peak.
The Paper went through several iterations, and sprouted from an education and prevention grant for promoting HIV risk reduction from the state Office of AIDS to the Monterey County AIDS Project, which was absorbed by the now-defunct Central Coast HIV/AIDS Services in 2009.
At the time of The Paper’s publication, it had been less than 20 years after California repealed its laws against same-sex activity. But stigma still surrounded coming out — and was only compounded by the beginning of the AIDS crisis.
“About a third of the content of the paper was to have been focused specifically on safer practices and healthy behavior,” said Joy Rubey, The Paper’s former executive editor.
She was also the Monterey County AIDS Project’s executive director from 1988 to 1997. And to her, The Paper’s mission was broader than education.
“Really, we wanted to create a sense of community,” she said. “And let folks know that they mattered, that their lives were valuable, that their sexual identity was respected.”
So The Paper functioned as a community watercooler for LGBTQ+ locals in Monterey County. Beyond the page, The Paper facilitated relationship-building — from its digitization in the nascent Internet age reaching people far outside the Monterey peninsula and Salinas Valley to its leadership helping organize the county’s first big Pride celebrations and marches.
“I think what people really wanted to know is how the community could come together, how we could actually make the … LGBT community more visible, and that was really critical,” said former publisher, co-managing editor and so-called “Grumpy Layout Queen” Wes Kashiwagi.
“It’s a trade-off between happiness and security”
When Rubey at the Monterey County AIDS Project decided to use the state grant for a newspaper, she said the social environment was much different than today.
Namely, “there was an awful lot of stigma about people with HIV.”
“We had a lot of folks at the AIDS Project who were rejected by their family and friends, people whose work was threatened by their people's reaction to their gender identity and their orientation,” Rubey said.
So her hope in starting the periodical was that she could reach community members whose physical safety was at risk and didn’t have as much concern practicing safer sex when the activity offered therapy and affirmation.
“There were plenty of people telling the gay community what they should or shouldn’t be doing,” she said. “What we wanted was the members of that community to have some ownership about the issues that were being discussed … and to articulate the needs for that community in terms of building a sense of security and belonging.”
Among the other factors keeping people in the closet, despite the decriminalization of same-sex activity, were class and geography. Kashiwagi called being gay at the time “very much a middle-class activity” and pointed to the fact that “everything you do is public knowledge” in a small city like Monterey.
“If you have the freedom to not worry about money or keeping a job, you could be as out as you wanted to be, because no one had a gun to your head,” he said. “If you didn’t have as much money … it’s tough, because anything that they can use to get rid of you, they will.”
He recalled that for many, being visibly out was a “trade-off between happiness and security.”
One of The Paper’s recurring contributing writers, John Laird, who served two terms as Santa Cruz mayor in the 1980s, said representation in state halls was few and far between.
“When I was elected the first time in Santa Cruz in 1981, we formed the National Association of Gay Elected Officials,” he said. “I think we called it Lesbian and Gay Elected Officials at the time. In 1985 … there were only 15 of us in the United States.”
The now-state senator was then part of the Peninsula Professional Network, which Laird said wasn’t as out in the community compared to groups in Santa Cruz.
And while the AIDS crisis had spurred the creation of more support groups on the peninsula and in Monterey County, he called The Paper “one of the first major public-facing LGBTQ+ things in Monterey County.”
Before The Paper, Rubey said the county’s gay community “felt kind of fragmented.”
“Even though The Paper couldn't cure all of that need for coming together, I think it helped,” she said. “I think it allowed people to communicate, or at least to raise among themselves certain issues that led to a stronger community.”
Offered page space for the full spectrum of community conversations
The Paper, per the original Monterey County AIDS Project grant’s mandate, published information about HIV research and safer sex tips. But it also functioned as a community watercooler, with a community calendar in each issue, a personal classifieds section, an advice column and — of course — local, state, national and occasionally international LGBTQ+ news.
Craig Wenzl was an outreach coordinator for Monterey County AIDS Project's Man-to-Man, a gay and bisexual men’s safer sex and general support group. He moved to Monterey from Arkansas in 1996, and recalls finding out about The Paper.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this is great — they [the local LGBTQ+ community] even have their own newspaper,’” he remembered.
Wenzl called it a “very, very valuable resource.”
“Back then, everyone would grab The Paper when they were leaving a bar or MCAP [Monterey County AIDS Project], or John XXIII AIDS Ministry [another AIDS support organization] or wherever,” he said.
Sections rotated and content varied: For example, there was much more creative writing in the first few issues of The Paper, from poems to prose.
Intra-community controversy was stoked in The Paper’s pages, too.
An impassioned piece from Deborah Aguayo-Delgado, “Gay White Male … Not!”, called for greater accessibility and outreach from LGBTQ+ organizations to communities that were racially, geographically and financially marginalized, saying “older, white and gay” people primarily ran the show.
“Invisible people who live on the fringe face huge obstacles to acquire the tools and esteem to assert their needs or issues and challenge the established power structure,” she wrote.
Several letters to Aguayo-Delgado, who was also then a member of the Monterey County AIDS Project, appeared in the following issue, taking issue with her arguments and asking The Paper to make a statement of editorial impartiality.
The editorial caused one contributing writer, Wes Davis, to step away from The Paper for months before returning.
There was ample humor, too — Kashiwagi took over as publisher in 1996 after the grant funding lapsed. The Paper became nearly a one-man show, and as Kashiwagi did more and more work, he took it upon himself to slip secret messages into its pages, particularly in writers’ names. One such writer was Anna Diplosis, after the English rhetorical device anadiplosis.
“I was hoping someone would say, ‘Hey, knock it off or something, right?’” he said. “It was to kind of ease the pain and suffering of having to do everything.”
But he also ensured The Paper covered crucial local stories.
“My goal … was to make sure it [The Paper] was inclusive, that it actually really focused on local issues as well as national issues,” he said. “What I wanted it to do, was to be — or at least appear to be — an institution, so something that people could trust.”
One story he remembers covering is a gay bashing incident outside the After Dark, a former gay bar and community haunt in Monterey that closed in 1999.
“We were asking questions just as well, I think, as the local news agencies, because we had more at stake,” Kashiwagi said. “I actually arrived just after the beating, and it was shocking … It looked like someone had thrown raspberry jam all over his face.”
The Paper’s initial coverage devoted several pages to a timeline of events and original reporting, including Kashiwagi’s first-person account of the aftermath, the survivor’s response and an account from a local bartender who had received death threats for talking about the incident.
“The Paper gave the news that people want to know … [like] what happened exactly, in detail, not a 30-second blurb on the news,” he said.
Relationship-building off the page
Today, there’s a range of Pride celebrations in Monterey County, with marches in the Salinas Valley and the Peninsula itself. They stand on the shoulders of the work of older LGBTQ+ generations and Monterey County residents — including those who wrote for and ran The Paper.
“The Paper … brought together people that had just been operating in their silos in Monterey, and it was just a transitional thing that was very good,” Laird said. “I think it played a role in the transition to what we know as the modern LGBT movement in Monterey County.”
Kashiwagi acknowledged The Paper had its limitations — especially with a predominantly English-speaking staff.
“The crowd at Franco's Norma Jean [in Castroville] would often be bigger than at the After Dark, so we knew there was a [Spanish-speaking LGBTQ+] community,” he said. “How to reach them, I didn't know. That's my own limitation.”
But it was not apolitical, and instead called the community to action.
One short-lived section, the “Armchair Activist”, listed different ways people could support LGBTQ+ struggles around the globe. Local, regional and state legislators’ numbers were published every issue, with frequent mentions of the importance of reaching out. Similarly, election guides written by staffers focused on politicians’ response to LGBTQ+ community issues.
Nor was it separate from community events — and the Internet. Kashiwagi created an AOL dating group for The Paper’s readers, and brought an abridged version of The Paper online to increase its reach.
“I was using [my skills from Sony] to further The Paper's distribution basically worldwide, if people wanted to see it, especially in a fairly closeted community like Monterey at the time,” he said. Over 90,000 people visited the site.
And Wenzl, the former Man-to-Man outreach coordinator, kept The Paper’s legacy in sharing events and news alive through a Yahoo group — gaymonterey@yahoogroups.com — and said he had around 800 people from Monterey County and surrounding areas until Yahoo sunset its Groups function.
“That's what I was doing after The Paper died,” he said. “People would give me information about events and things they had happening that they wanted me to post to the group.”
For Kashiwagi, his proudest moment in leading The Paper was helping organize and cover the county’s first Pride celebrations alongside local drag queen Diana McGuire, a.k.a. Scott Steinman. The first large Pride event in the county was at the After Dark in 1995, and reportedly had 400 people attend — ”300 more than I thought would show up,” Kashiwagi quipped.
“People contribute[d] their pennies, their change, to help fund it ... People just randomly brought food, like a potluck, and it was pretty incredible,” he said.
When he helped put together the first Pride march down Lighthouse Avenue in 1996, he said people asked the organizers why it wasn’t just siloed in the After Dark like previous years. Kashiwagi’s response: “The more people that are willing to be visible, to be out in the community, to be out to their friends, their family, the safer it is for all of us.”
To Rubey, the former executive editor and Monterey County AIDS Project executive director, The Paper is an example of how “there’s great power in community.”
“When people come together to promote change, they can accomplish more than trying to make those changes come about themselves,” she said.
The Paper can still be read today, thanks to its staff: Former Paper staff members Matt Friday and Bruce Carlson donated copies to the Cal State Monterey Bay library, and Kashiwagi republished the online issues of The Paper earlier this June.
That archiving, Wenzl said, is crucial. He recalls having grown up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and wanting to learn about the history of gay life in the city after coming out in 1987.
Without that preservation, “your history is gone, so you just have to pick up from scratch and go with the community as it is," Wenzl said. “So I’m glad, so glad, that Monterey is doing this.”
Copies of almost all of The Paper’s issues can be found online through the Cal State Monterey Bay library. The university also curated a digital exhibit about local LGBTQ+ history, of which The Paper is part.
Cal State Monterey Bay holds the license for KAZU, and our studios are on the CSUMB campus.
June 28, 2024: This story has been updated to clarify McGuire's names, Wenzl's move from Arkansas to California and Man-to-Man as an initiative of Monterey County AIDS Project.
