Definition: ‘upstart’ a gay magazine with an enquiring mind
Mission Statement: “upstart publishing” is a Gay community publication which provides support across all ages, all social levels, all genders, all ethnic communities and all faiths.
Origins of Upstart
An aspect of Gay life in Northern Ireland is that it has produced a fair number of publications. The first (probably) was Burnt Offering in 1974. It was a one-off and followed by the GLS Information Sheet. GLS was the Gay Liberation Society – technically a Society of QUB (the Queen’s University, Belfast) Students’ Union. It was edited by Brian Gilmore, who produced weekly editions for a number of years. Next came a (somewhat) more ambitious NIGRA News which contained articles written by members of NIGRA (the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association, and its affiliate groups) and Cara-Friend (and its affiliates). NIGRA News was replaced by Northern Gay,edited by Michael Workman. These mimeographed publications were quite short-lived, for a variety of reasons to do with the internal workings of the publisher, NIGRA. Next came Gay Star edited at first by Peter Brooke, then by Sean McGouran, and shortly after jointly with Terry McFarlane. GS was published from 1982 until 1992, and became a quite large ‘generalist’ magazine. Peter Brooke took the initiative to print GS in the standard way (offset litho). It was printed mostly by Print Workshop (which was part of the Just Books / A-Centre / Belfast Anarchist combine).
In 1984 GS was joined by the publication which became upstart. It began life as Update, and was produced because GS had settled-in to being a quarterly. People needed to be told about a number of urgent matters: the AIDS crisis, a police purge, and that the Europa was refusing to admit its Gay customers. In 1988 NIGRA ‘privatised’ Gay Star by giving the title to Sean McGouran.
upstart replaced GS as the main publication for (and in) Northern Ireland, and got a great deal of help from the Old Museum Arts Centre. upstart was photocopied at cost price, and also made available to its patrons. upstart was always a ‘free sheet’ though one edition ran to 16 tightly printed pages (it did have a pic of a shirtless Dani da Cruz Carvalho). upstart stopped publishing in 2004, the last four editions being produced by PA MagLochlainn and Andrew Campbell.
upstart and Gay Star have been resurrected as an e-mag: www.upstartpublishing.com in 2007. The name was originally Belfast Gay News, then Update, and became upstart because of a serendipitous slip of the tongue – and the editors were not at that time officers in any Gay organisations – the intention was to be somewhat oppositionist. The name is spelt in the lower case, not for punkish rebellious reasons, but simply because we could not fit-in an upper case ‘U’, or the whole title in the upper case. Among other NIGRA’s second President, Stella Mahon, wrote for these publications, and was supportive financially.
Other contributors were, Aelfric, Peter Brooke, Paula Crickard, Jeff Dudgeon, Verrucht, Anthony Weir, and a surprisingly large number of other people. NIGRA paid for the printing and distribution of Gay Star and its predecessor publications from 1978 to 1988 (prior to that it was QUB’s Students Union). Unison (the trade union) printed many editions of upstart from 1995 to 1998. It also printed a one-off NIGRA News (December 1996), and the NIGRA Annual Report for the above years. Another one-off publication dated from 1993, One in Ten, also the name of a short-lived youth group.
Gay Star was kept in touch with external affairs (this was before the internet) by a number of publications from around the world, from France, Belgium, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and various parts of the USA. Some of this material was subscribed to by NIGRA, and went into its library. But some were the result of solidarity action during the ‘Dudgeon Case’ at the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. Much of the money to finance the legal process came from outside of Northern Ireland, the island of Ireland, or the Islands of the North Atlantic / British Isles. Brighton was a large source of funds. But money was donated by people who lived on different continents.
upstart was handed out in most of the Gay venues in Northern Ireland – these included Delaney’s Restaurant, which became a Gay disco on Friday and Saturday nights for some years.
