LGBTQ Milwaukee History and GPU News Magazine Archive from 1979 to 1980

Gay People's Union

Archive

Gay People’s Union, GPU News magazine archive, 1979 to 1980, documents the LGBTQ communication and community-service system built by Milwaukee’s Gay People’s Union after the first decade of gay liberation organizing. The issues reveal how local LGBTQ infrastructure operated through periodical publishing, community-center activity, health services, legal defense, event notices, literary review, advertising, and movement debate, providing primary-source evidence for the study of regional gay and lesbian organizing beyond New York and San Francisco. GPU began from a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student organization and became a major force in Milwaukee LGBTQ life.

GPU News. Milwaukee: Gay People’s Union, 1979 to 1980. Four issues. Each measures 8.5 x 11 inches and contains approximately 40 to 50 pages including covers. Semi-slick magazine in stapled black-and-white pictorial wrappers. [1] GPU News. Vol. 9, No. 1. Milwaukee: Gay People’s Union, October 1979. Includes news, photographs, advertisements, features, art, local activity updates, gay liberation discussion, and literary review. [2] GPU News. Vol. 9, No. 3. Milwaukee: Gay People’s Union, December 1979. Includes a cover story on James Baldwin titled “Just Inside James Baldwin’s Head,” linking the periodical to Black gay literary history. [3] GPU News. Vol. 9, No. 12. Milwaukee: Gay People’s Union, September 1980. Continues the magazine’s coverage of local and national gay and lesbian politics, culture, and community information. [4] GPU News. Vol. 10, No. 1. Milwaukee: Gay People’s Union, October 1980. Marks continuation of the magazine into its tenth volume as a regional LGBTQ news and cultural forum.

GPU established Milwaukee’s first gay and lesbian community center, operated telephone counseling, created a venereal disease examination center, and organized legal-defense support, making GPU News part of a broader system of education, mutual aid, health, and political visibility. The Baldwin feature is especially significant because Baldwin’s writing pioneered depictions of men who loved men across lines of race and nationality, adding African American LGBTQ literary importance to the archive. Clean, bright wrappers and pages; overall very good. A focused Milwaukee LGBTQ periodical archive documenting how regional gay liberation organizations built media, service, and cultural networks at the turn of the 1980s.

Item #19178

Price: $400.00