George Bakan’s sudden death last June left a plethora of SGN back issues, over 47 years of Seattle’s LGBTQ history preserved in the weekly paper (Image courtesy Angela Cragin)

Weekly newspaper Seattle Gay News has been reporting on issues within the LGBTQ community in and around Seattle for nearly five decades. Publisher George Bakan was at the helm for more than 30 years, and when he died on June 7, 2020 — in the middle of working on the next week’s paper — the people who love SGN knew just what to do: Preserve the past and move into the future.

SGN is the nation’s third-oldest LGBTQ newspaper, and after Bakan’s death, SGN organized a campaign to help keep the paper afloat during the pandemic. The Seattle Public Library and other organizations took note, and organized an ambitious archiving project that would take about a year to finish. Now nearing completion, 47 years of SGN archives will be available at the Seattle Public Library, University of Washington, and several other libraries across the United States.

The SGN archives document “the history that mainstream media did not cover,” says Bakan’s daughter Angela Cragin. “The paper captured all of that, [including] all the names of victims of the AIDS epidemic and what was happening in the community, a community that was shunned for so long. It truly is important history.”

Cragin lives in the Tri-Cities, and is self-admittedly out of the loop when it comes to Seattle’s LGBTQ communities as well as journalism. Bakan must have had a reason for designating her as the heir of his publisher role with SGN, even if she didn’t understand why at first. “He said to me a number of times, ‘Hey, when I die the paper is yours.’ I don’t know anything about papers, I didn’t, and now I do,” she said. Continue reading →