Another decade of issues from The Front Page are now hosted online. This new batch covers from 1997 to 2006, and contains over two hundred new issues! The pages will join a collection that already contains over 300 issues from 1976 to 1996. The addition of this collection stretches The Front Page’s digital coverage well into the twenty first century, up until its final issue.
The Front Page was a Raleigh based newspaper that centered LGBTQ+ experiences, articles, and stories. Its pages contained advertisements for LGBTQ-friendly businesses. Its’ Opinion section collected quotes from interviews with gay and lesbian celebrities. Its Calendar section detailed gathering times for groups, drag shows, and lectures. Often included are cartoons from artists such as Alison Bechdel and Eric Orner. These issues cover a period of increasing recognition for the LGBTQ+ community, but also increasing challenges. They are an essential insight into an often underrepresented history of North Carolina.
Thank you to our partners at Duke University and UNC Charlotte for nominating and working with us for these issues to be digitized. You can read previous blog posts about the history of The Front Page and its’ sister paper, QNotes here.
In honor of Pride Month we’re happy to announce additional issues of The Front Page are now online. These issues date from 1987-1996 and are added to issues already available from 1979-1986.
A Raleigh newspaper by and for the LGBTQ+ community, The Front Page covered national and local news. The paper’s tagline, “Celebrate – Active – Educate!,” reflects reporting on local social gatherings, issues that inspired action, and national and local news. Headlines are alternatively devastating and uplifting with coverage of hate crimes, discrimination, and the AIDS epidemic as well as community support, political victories, and legal triumphs.
Each June the paper covers Pride Month events. Parades, rallies, and festivals all celebrate the community amd commemorate what is broadly considered the seminal Pride Month event – a parade on June 28, 1970 on the 1-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.
The paper has been added with kind permission from the publishers and thanks to efforts by staff at the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Duke University. Click here to view the entire run of The Front Page.
The first 8 years of The Front Page newspaper, from 1979-1986, are now on DigitalNC. The Front Page was published in Raleigh for twenty-six years covering “news and happenings of interest to gay people.” The paper covered national and local news impacting and of interest to the LGBTQ+ community. There are ads for local businesses that were safe spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals, and a community calendar listed events. There’s also a Q&A column where letters from readers all over the state wrote in with problems or questions to recieve a broad spectrum of personal advice.
Q-Notes, a prominent Charlotte area LGBTQ+ newspaper and the one Front Page merged with in 2006, published a retrospective of The Front Page and an interview with the Page‘s publisher Jim Baxter in the July 29, 2006 issue. Baxter penned an article in IndyWeek shortly after the paper’s final issue, and it describes parts of his career and the history of Front Page.
The paper has been added with kind permission from the publishers and thanks to efforts by staff at the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Duke University. Digitization of this paper was funded by an IDEA Action Grant from UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries. Archived issues of Q-notes are available from our site, and you can view more current content at their site.
About
This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.
The 