www.montereycountynow.com JULY 16-22, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 5 831 What did Monterey County’s LGBTQ+ community do for connection before Pride festivals, Instagram and dating apps? There were bars, sometimes. There was Santa Cruz, just up the road. And there was the gay press—small, homemade and essential. “Papers are reflections of their times,” says Kathy Lo, local history librarian at the Monterey Public Library, standing over a reading table in the California History Room, tucked in a corner of the upper floor. Spread across the table are archival issues of two publications: The Paper, a bi-monthly magazine that ran from 1994 to 1998, and Manifesto:—the colon is part of the title—a monthly that followed from 2000 to 2004. “I like to look at the advertisements,” Lo says, flipping through a feature called “The Gay Tribe,” about the community’s interest in body modification, and a report on CSU Monterey Bay’s gay club, All in the Family, whose slogan read: “Closets are for clothes; come on out!” There’s a travel agency, Four Winds Travel, urging the Peninsula to “get used to it” while advertising a Mardi Gras trip to Sydney and “lesbian cruises.” There’s a hair salon called Heads Up. There are movie reviews, poetry, tattoo art, a profile of Bill Clinton, and an interview with now-State Senator John Laird, one of California’s first openly gay mayors. “You can really get a sense of what businesses chose to advertise,” Lo says. “Grassroots publications, by the community for the community. They were started because there was an authentic need.” The collection—more than 60 issues between the two titles—was passed to the library in 2025 after the death of Joe Johnson, a longtime local librarian who retired in 2014. CSUMB holds an overlapping collection as part of its own digital exhibit on local LGBTQ+ history, though Lo says the library’s holdings run deeper. The Paper began under the Monterey County AIDS Project, funded by a grant from the State Office of AIDS as part of an HIV risk-reduction campaign. Its mission statement, printed in volume 1, issue 1, promised “to inform and give voice to the concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups and individuals of Monterey County in order to contribute to the growth, stability and cohesiveness of that community to the benefit of all its members.” For years, it was the region’s only gay newspaper— news, opinion and poetry about AIDS and LGBTQ+ life on the Central Coast. In 1996, MCAP’s grant funding lapsed and The Paper split off as an independent commercial newspaper. Wes Kashiwagi took over as publisher that year, also serving as co-managing editor. Under him, the operation shrank to something close to a oneman show. He later republished the paper’s back issues online at kashiwagi.com. Both The Paper and Manifesto: were distributed free. This year, the California State Library awarded $750,000 statewide to preserve and expand access to California’s LGBTQ+ history. Monterey Public Library received $6,418 of that to digitize The Paper and Manifesto:, opening the archive up to researchers, students and anyone invested in the region’s queer history. By the 2000s, LGBTQ+ publications like these were migrating online, and for the Central Coast’s homegrown gay press, that migration was effectively the end. “Monterey is so important for history,” Lo says. “The early collections here are part of the country’s foundation. And now, we will find space for these publications, as part of history.” The presence of the collection in the California History Room and its digitalization open doors for future scholars of local LGBTQ+ history, providing evidence that those people and the places they patronized were here. Lo hopes that soon she will start receiving questions about the collection. There’s a line in The Paper’s January/February 1998 “Publisher’s Note” that reads almost like a time capsule. Praising what currently is the Monterey County Weekly, the editors wrote: “The Paper bows to the editorial team at the Coast Weekly, whom our editorial team openly envies for their willingness to cover topics that make even our toes curl. When a mainstream publication beats the gay press to the punch on a topic as hot as gay dating, we can’t help but smile.” Nearly three decades later, it’s this alt-weekly’s turn to return the favor. Out and About Local LGBTQ+ newspapers of the past testify to the long history and strength of this community. By Agata Popęda “Papers are reflections of their times.” TALES FROM THE AREA CODE MELISSA MEJIA Kathy Lo (right), local history librarian, and Avery Allen, assistant librarian at Monterey Public Library, browse issues of The Paper and Manifesto:, which were donated to the library in 2025.
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