The San Francisco Public Library (SFPL), which is facilitating digitization of past issues of the San Francisco Bay Times, recently confirmed that every issue of the Bay Times published from May 1978–June 2012 will be available to the public by the end of 2025 at https://digitalsf.org/
Since the issues from July 2012 to the present are at the San Francisco Bay Times website (https://sfbaytimes.com/) and ISSUU (https://issuu.com/sfbt), this means that every issue of the paper since its inception in 1978 will be freely accessible.
At present, in addition to those more recent papers, the historic issues from May 1978–December 1993 are at California Revealed: https://bit.ly/448YcL7
Federal defunding of the Institute of Museum and Library Services has jeopardized the future of California Revealed. The good news, however, is that, thanks to the efforts of Cristina Mitra and Dee Dee Kramer of the Hormel LGBTQIA Center at the SFPL (Kramer is also the Manager of the SFPL’s DIGI Center), the content will migrate to the Digital SF site in the coming months. This site has improved search and other functions, which will benefit everyone from historians to educators to all those desiring to read about the past several decades of LGBTQ+ news, events, and more.
Finalizing this project has been a longstanding goal of the present San Francisco Bay Times publishers, who desire both to preserve the materials and to make them as freely accessible as possible. When the original publishers of the Bay Times, Bill Hartman and Ronald Schembari, launched the paper back in 1978, most people did not have computers. When they published the Coming Up! events-focused issues, readers used to tape the pages to their refrigerators to keep up with the latest happenings.
We still take pride in our hard copy print issues, which are printed by a global leader in environmentally-conscious practices, such as using vegetable-based inks, energy efficient lighting, recycled paper, and more. We also appreciate the convenience and additional features of digitized multimedia, which will help safeguard the near five decades of the San Francisco Bay Times for generations to come.
Published on June 26, 2025
Recent Comments