Because I was once quite the gay-press guy, and that began in Chicago, they asked me for 600-800 words. I wrote some drafts but in the end, all that's needed is a few sentences:
The paper version of the venerable Windy City Times was done in by the internet, the smartphone, the mainstream media's embrace of LGBTQ news, the success of the LGBTQ movement and, in the end, by COVID-19.
The goal of everything we did was to create a world where LGBTQ is unremarkable. Apart from the attempted backtracking on trans by the current administration, which courts have mostly blocked, we have pretty much done that.
You can get married, you can't get fired for being LGBTQ, you're all over the TV, the pride parade is many cities' biggest annual event, and go ahead and kiss your spouse at the airport.
Goodbye, dead-tree WCT. You did good.
Rex Wockner was based at Outlines ( now Windy City Times ) from 1988 to 1993. His work from around the world appeared in hundreds of gay newspapers from 1988 to 2011, and included going to the Netherlands in 2001 for the dawn of marriage equality, reporting from the first LGBT pride events in Moscow and Leningrad in 1991, and covering the U.S. political conventions, ACT UP, marches on Washington, California's Proposition 8, and New Orleans after Katrina, as well as local news in Chicago.