On 26th June, 1981, Graham McKerrow and Michael Mason (a former director and news editor of Gay News) published the first issue of Capital Gay. It was London’s first city-wide gay newspaper.

The free paper was published weekly and distributed through pubs, clubs, bookshops and other gay-friendly outlets. Despite it’s name, it’s distribution area also included Brighton.

In April 1983, following the collapse of Gay News – Britain’s only national gay and lesbian publication – Capital Gay announced it would ‘temporarily’ extend it’s distribution area to selected gay clubs in areas such as Nottingham, Manchester and Newcastle. The aim was to provide an ’emergency’ news service until such times as a new national gay and lesbian publication emerged.

It never happened: candidate publications such as Gay Reporter, the New Gay News and (unsurprisingly) HIM magazine all catered exclusively or predominantly to a gay male market. And so, in July 1985, Capital Gay announced that it was reluctantly ending its out-of-London distribution.

The very fact that it had extended its distribution in the first place indicated how different Capital Gay was from the other publications of that period. Specifically, it sought to serve all sections of the community, not just the most lucrative markets. It actually sponsored London’s Lesbian and Gay Switchboard and, with the emergence of the HIV/AIDS crisis, ran the world’s first weekly column on AIDS, written by Julian Meldrum.

As a result of that column, Capital Gay is credited with being the first publication in the world to use the term HIV (so says the Oxford English Dictionary, no less!).

Of course, not everyone saw it’s existence as a good thing. In 1987 the paper’s offices were the target of an arson attack. Unbelievably (or, there again, perhaps not), Conservative MP Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman stated that this was a good thing. When challenged about her extremist position in Parliament she expressed no remorse:

“I am quite prepared to affirm that it is quite right that there should be an intolerance of evil.”

Twisted Tories notwithstanding, Capital Gay enjoyed a relatively long life, folding four days after it’s 14th anniversary, on June 30th 1995.