Why we need GCN
By Founder, Tonie Walsh
In 1988, with the support of NLGF, I set up GCN as a much needed information resource
for our Rainbow Society. While mainstream media tacitly encouraged our invisibility
it was crucially important that we – ourselves - document not only our own news
but celebrate in print our successes and failures, our dreams and aspirations.
With all that has been gained in the intervening years and notwithstanding the advent
of digital media, GCN’s role today is as clear and significant to me as it ever
was.
We love talking to each other, even when all we have to say is a wee bit of tawdry
gossip! We also need to celebrate and document our own LGBT community stories and
on our own terms, because if history has shown us anything it’s that no one else
will do it for us.
And for all our technological and social advances, there are people around Ireland
still living isolated, fearful lives. Access to GCN, indeed its very presence, is
an important tool to helping end confusion and ignorance; and to reminding ourselves
and mainstream Irish society that Yes! There is life on the margins! And hopefully
love and fulfilment, too!
As an historian I’m minded of the unique place GCN occupies in our fabulous and
occasionally tortured history. As one of the longest continuous queer periodicals
in Europe, GCN has itself become an invaluable historical document: A window, for
better or worse, on all that is great, good, sad, and even shabby in Irish LGBT
life and culture.
We owe it to each other, and the many thousands who’ve contributed (in whatever
way over the past twenty–two years), to see GCN through another couple of decades.
Tonie Walsh
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