by Holly Valero
It was the late 1980s. A time before email, the World Wide Web, desktop publishing, cell phones, and sadly, spellcheck. Today’s LGBTQIA+ was missing more than a few letters and symbols.
I was a 21-year-old lesbian in search of a normal life working as the night shift disc jockey at WTTC radio, a 500-watt AM/FM station in the rural Pennsylvania town of Towanda.
Dreams of making more than $3 an hour and maybe even finding at least one lesbian my age took me to Concord, New Hampshire. It was there, in my mid 20s, that I began writing The Straight and Narrow, a monthly column series documenting the politically turbulent 1980s. The global AIDS epidemic coincided with early LGBTQ activism. The result was widespread fear, a lot of intolerance, and internal community strife.
Despite AIDS casting a national spotlight on the gay community, the lesbian population in the face of that epidemic simply disappeared. I wanted to remind the world – and lesbians – that we were still here, still queer, and still trying to get used to it.
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