Gay Star was the official publication of NIGRA (the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association) until 1987. NIGRA paid for the printing of the publication and the postage for distribution. All the work that went into the magazine, writing everything from poems to news items from around the world, was done by volunteers. So was the collating of the magazine and the posting of them out to individual subscribers, to shopSeand to fraternal organisations.The shops included, the Other Place, Cork; Bookworm Bookshop, Derry; Books Upstairs, Dublin; Greenleaf, Bristol; the Peace Centre, Birmingham; Wedge Bookshop, Coventry; Blackthorn Books (now Littlethorn), Leicester; News from Nowhere, Liverpool; Frontline, Manchester; Mushroom, Nottingham; the Independent Bookshop, Sheffield; October Books, Southampton; Bookmarks, Compendium, Gay’s the Word, and Houseman’s, London. There were also West and Wilde, Edinburgh, and the bookshop at the Alternative Energy Centre Machynlleth, Powys, Cymru (

Wales to the English monoglot). A Different Light, Washington DC, expressed an interest in stocking Gay Star, as did a number of outlets in mainland

Europe but the postage costs were prohibitive.The major outlets were – inevitably – in
Belfast, where two thirds of the population of the relevant region reside. These included the premises run by Cara-Friend, in

University Street
, within the Carpenter Club premises, Long Lane, and in

Cathedral Building,

Donegall Street
(for the past twenty years). The Carpenter Club, Long Lane, has already been mentioned (see Jeff Dudgeon’s History of Gay Belfast the inverted commas presumably provided by the original publishers). upstart was distributed in the other discos the most long-lasting being that at the Limelight, Ormeau Avenue, run by Patrick James a contributor to GS and upstart.

The biggest single outlet was Just Books bookshop (the latter word is not redundant), as there was a cafeand also Print Workshop in the same premises, (

7 Winetavern Street

, in downtown

Belfast). Print Workshop, essentially Dave and Marilyn Hyndman, printed many Gay Star’s, at essentially cost (and less!) price. This was, to put it mildly, a great help, especially as immediately after the
Strasbourg effort NIGRA had very little money in the kitty. Ann Gleaves typeset the material to go into the journal, sometimes from very scruffy bits of paper, of irritatingly different sizes, for tiny amounts of money. We were later allowed access to the type setting facilities in Print Workshop (Ann, from the west of England, spent a deal of time and effort in the late 1980s type setting the only daily Irish language journal L ). {This is quite important the begrudgers are always whinging about Unionism’ as if it waSean uncommon matter in NornIrl this connection just screws it up especially aSeann was very fond of GS she committed suicide in 1992, but that’s not relevant here. Could you e-mail this to me, I may remember other compromising’ material. We need to defeat the begrudgers before they even get their first wind. (No, I’m not being paranoid I’m a full-time noid).}Later in the 80s we had access to Athol Books’s DTP and printing set-up, essentially for nothing. We paid for the processing of plates’ for printing and for the papers. The rest was a matter of our own time and effort. This is embarrassing from a trade union perspective (but the people producing the paper were members of ASTMS (later ) and GMB, at the time) and the costs were even less than those we paid out to Print Workshop. They were not unlike Print Workshop’s efforts superfine examples of the printer’s art. But the latter gave us the (back handed) compliment that they were readable (meaning legible’ possibly. . .). Print Workshop, with Dave and Marilyn, and some other Just Books personnel morphed into Northern Visions, a video-based set-up {I don’t like set up’ but can’t think of the proper’ word} which also runs a radical radio station featuring, among others, PA MagLochlainn, current President of NIGRA. In our Athol Books phase the (largely young) people at Cara-Friend’s Saturday afternoon Drop-in’ found themselves helping to collate GS. It must have been an odd an introduction to the Gay life-style’ their motherSeand pastors almost certainly hadn’t warned them about the dangers of an afternoon’s labouring. NIGRA exchanged Gay Star with Antenne Rose, and Tels Quels, Belgium, Fritt Fram, Norway, Der Andere Weg, Germany, Homophonies, Paris, Seattle Gay News, and Christopher Street, USA, The Body Politic, Canada, Pink Triangle,
New Zealand. There were also, over the years, Quare Times, from Cork and Dublin, Identity, Out and GCN (Gay Community News),
Dublin. We exchanged advertisements with Gay Times,
London, and Gay Scotland. We had good relations with the other GS’, and still have with ScotsGay, and its (former) editor, and proprietor, John Hein. There were also exchanges with the (British) Gay Christian and Gay Humanist groupSeand the Gay Youth Movement’s Gay Youth. GSeand later upstart were distributed to Gay Centres in Cork, Derry, Dublin, Dundalk, Edinburgh, Galway, Glasgow, Limerick, London, Manchester, Monaghan, and New York (among other places). They (especially upstart) were set to and / or exchanged with many groups in Britain, in Aberdeen, Ayr, Carlisle, Dumfries, and
Dundee. And to the ethnic’, health-awarenesSeand religious groups, from the south Asian HIV / AIDS support group Naz, to OutRage and the LCGM (Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement).upstart got help in kind’ (mostly cheap or free printing) from NIGRA (the source of most of the personnel involved) and the Old Museum Arts Centre,
Belfast. The most sustained and fruitful (from our point of view, anyway) was with Unison (the public service union the biggest in the
UK). We are very grateful for a number of years in which we did not have to worry about quite how the journal was to be paid for. It made deadlineSeand production much less problematical than they would have been otherwise.We also got equipment from the BBC’s Children in Need charity on account of our outreach to young Gay women and men. This was in regard to an emphasis on health (mainly AIDS education) and another emphasis on the bullying of school students. There was also help in cash and in kind {is this correct?} from the Red Nose Foundation.

upstart and Gay Star reviewed books from many sourceSeand was on the mailing list of numbers of publishing houses, some of them local (to Belfast or Ireland) and some specialised. They included large imprints e. g. Penguin and Viking, which sent us material of particular interest to Gay women and men to review. As did some now-defunct ‘houses’ like Brilliance BookSeand The Olive Press, GMP (Gay Men’s Press) and Ikon. There were also Athol Books, Blackstaff, Beyond the Pale, of Belfast. And specialised publishers like NALGO (National & Local Government Officers union, now a major section of Unison), NAPO (the National Association of Probation Officers), BASW (the British Association of Social Workers), and the British and the Irish versions of the CTS (Catholic Truth Society). We reviewed material from Junius (the erstwhile Revolutionary Communist Party), and Kelson (the – defunct – Revolutionary Gay Men’s Caucus).

Francis Boulton supplied books, as did AndreDeutsch, and Marion Boyars, the O’Brien Press, Marino, and the Cork UP (University Press – this designation will be used frequently – we list them here: Cambridge UP, Oxford UP, Manchester UP, Texas UP, Chicago UP). Dissident Editions of Ballyculter and the Northern Writers’ Co-operative of Manchester, sent us material as did Touchstone / Simon and Shuster, and Coronet, the Four Courts Press, and the Ulster Historical Foundation.

We ‘reviewed’ material from the NIO (NI Office) and the (UK) Home Office, and from the EU (and ILGA – the International Lesbian and Gay Association, in particular its European Office, in Brussels). And also CHE (the Campaign for Homosexual Equality – Britain (i. e. England and Wales)), the above named trade unionSeand professional associations, the Presbyterian and Anglican Churches. And the various Churches which opposed Gay Rights, mainly the Free PresbyterianSeand Free Methodists. (The ‘mainsteam’ Methodists in Ireland have an enlightened attitude to the Gay community).

We reviewed bookSeand films, from America, including material from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and others. We ‘did’ comics; largely the adventures of Major Power and Spunky, from Eros Comix / Fantagraphic Books, of Seattle. The Major and his close personal friend began their adventures in Belfast’s DV8 magazine and Underground Comix.

There were also travel books from Fodor, and Millivres.

Other publishers, in no particular order were, Cassell, Arrow, Corgi, Pimlico, Sinclair Stevenson, Bodley Head, Bantam, Chatto & Windus, Weidenfeld, Gollancz, Macmillan, (and Gill and Macmillan), Pan, Routledge, Picador, Fount, Fontana, NAL (New American Library) and NEL (New English Library), Hodder & Stroughton.

There was also Allison & Busby, and Amnesty International, Anvil (Tralee, Kerry), Appletree (The Old Potato Station, Belfast. Is this address just too good to be entirely believable?). The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and C4 (Channel 4 – UK), Berg PublisherSeand Berghahn Books, (both ‘Oxon’ along with the UP), Bloodaxe Books, of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Mercier Press, (Cork City), Columba (Kildare), Faber & Faber, David & Charles, and Drumlin Publications (Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim).

There was also Field Day (of, rather ostentatiously, ‘Derry’) in its capacity as a drama company (see below) as well as publisher, and Fortnight Educational Trust, and the Institute of Irish Studies, both Belfast (NI rather than ME). The (US) commercial, HarperCollins, Little, Brown, and McGraw Hill Publishing Ltd., were different from The Women’s Press, Onlywomen Press, and Attic Books (of Dublin), which are feminist. Belfast never quite got a similar book-publishing imprint off the ground, but there were the periodicals Women’s News and the ‘anarcha-feminist’ Gaining Ground. There was also material from the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group (SHRG), the Scottish Equality Network, and (the all-GB) Stonewall. The Plume, Pluto, Poolbeg, Prowler and de Blackland Press[es] were from different points of the geographical and political compass. Serpent’s Tail, Benedikt Taschen, I B Tauris, and Random House supplied rather different sorts of publication, as did Vacher Dod, Veritas Publications, and Verso, The X PresSeand Zed Books.

***
As well as books, upstart and Gay Star reviewed films, television, theatre, radio and music. We acquired videoSeand DVDs from the BBC (Cymru: Dafydd (a one-off drama); North East England (i. e. Newcastle upon Tyne): Byker Grove; London: Grange Hill; Fremantle Media / Thames Television: The Bill – these were ‘out-take’ from series). There were other programmes from BBCTVNI, and BBC Radio Ulster, and RT (Radio Teilif s ireann). UTV (Independent – Ulster Television) and Cistera Productions gave us material to review, as did Northern Visions, and LakmeProductions (Paula Crickard’s The Happy Gordons).

Patrick James’s documentary Queer and Here was broadcast on Radio Ulster and a play based on Jeff Dudgeon’s experiences in the course of the Strasbourg case, Only A Phase, by Rib Davis was broadcast on Radio4UK.

{We did other radio plays, I recall one by Ashley Pharaoh – of ‘Torchwood’ fame – in one of the single-sheet upstart’s}

Theatre reviews covered the repertory company of Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, Ridiculismus, Dubbeljoint, Field Day, and the groups that performed Martin Lynch’s various plays, he started out with the Turf Lodge Fellowship Community Theatre. There was also the Gantry Players which performed Brian Ervine’s Birth of a Queen, and other of his works. There were visits from the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company), the Abbey Theatre, the (UK) National Theatre, which were reviewed. The Scottish Opera and the Scottish Ballet loomed large in the theatrical life of Northern Ireland in this period. Scottish Ballet toured the region regularly in the 1970Seand ’80s: ‘cuts’ intervened in the ’90s. Other visits were from the one-person (Paul Johnson, Dublin) mandance and the very large San Francisco Ballet, the FeatherstonehaughSeand the Cholmondeleys severally and together were reviewed, as was Diversions (Wales’s Dance Company) and the Flemish Royal Ballet.

Scottish Opera shared review space with Studio Opera, which was forced, by ACNI (pron. ‘acne’?), the Arts Council of NI, into a shotgun wedding with the Belfast Grand Opera Society. The main virtue of the latter was a strong chorus. It was disbanded. The Studio Opera Group (founded 1947) tradition of small-scale productions was abandoned. The unwanted child, ONI (Opera Northern Ireland) has since died of neglect. This probably freed-up money to be spent on publishing even more ‘poetry’ of the sort that has afflicted The Province since the start of The Troubles (called ‘war’ by the hoi polloi).

Music making by the Ulster Orchestra and those of the students in Queens’ and at Jordanstown was reported. As was that of the Guildhall Camarata (an excellent band made up of students from the Derry area, who were studying in London colleges). There were a number of visiting orchestras, one of the best was the student band and choir from University College, Cork, in the early 1980s doing Honegger’s King David oratorio. The Irish Chamber Orchestra and the RT Symphony Orchestra were excellent. The Liverpool Philharmonic, under Libor Pesek was appalling giving sloppy performances of a programme that was cheap and cheerless. The Belfast audience, as ever, gave the visitors a rousing welcome and a standing ovation – we should have thrown (small) coins at them. The (amateur) Studio (Symphony) Orchestra went through a bad patch in the 1980s, but has been pulled together by David Openshaw the timpanist of the Ulster Orchestra, its current conductor. A band attached to St George’s (C of I), High Street, Belfast, gave a performance of Britten’s War Requiem with its own choristerSeand those of St Eugene’s (RC) cathedral in Derry / Londonderry, and St Something, Letterkenny.

Some people volunteered to go to Giro’s Cafe, (and rehearsal room), to report on their Friday night gigs; they have not been heard of since. Andrew Hastings wrote about heavy metal, Alistair Kerr, and Mark McKernon about disco. Martin Hewson wrote an interesting article about Diamanda Galas.