Editing In The Pink
1987
Lyn became involved in producing the Lesbian and Gay Community Centre’s newsletters. “They published a newsletter to update members about fundraising and so on and they used to have a Roneo duplicator, to run off a thousand or so copies - some were distributed around the scene. When the Lesbian and Gay Community Centre Aston moved to 291 Corporation Street in 1984 it started to produce a printed newsletter, it was typed and hand pasted and it was quite laborious to produce. When the Centre folded in 1987 the newsletter continued in the name of ‘In The Pink’ with a hardcore of 6 or 7 individuals and 10 or so others. This monthly newsletter was sent to all gay venues in the West Midlands with a print run of 2,500 paid for by advertising of the commercial venues and some of the social groups. It varied from 4 pages to 12 pages, contained listings of pubs & clubs and social organisations. The ‘In the Pink’ people were running out of steam so in 1987 I tried to take up an Enterprise scheme and get it out fortnightly. We produced In the Pink on a BBC B computer – the first major home computer. We would paste it up in A3 size and take it to a reprographic bureau to get it reduced to A4 size and we got it printed at a trade union resource centre in Digbeth. Switchboard operators would then collate the printed pages and fold it. I managed to do this on and off for about 3 years (until around 1990) before being finally driven out of business as it simply wasn’t profitable.”
Contributed by: Lyn David Thomas, 47