Capital Gay

Despite its name, it was also distributed in Brighton and had a combined circulation, in the two cities, of around 20,000 at the time when publication ceased.

[2] The aim was to provide a news service for London and Brighton, particularly for users of the growing commercial lesbian and gay scene,[2] to provide a link between the political movement and the commercial scene, and to facilitate swifter political responses by the LGBT movement than had previously been possible.

It is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with being the first publication in the world to use the term HIV (the second being the international science journal Nature);[1][3] it also hosted the world's first regular column on AIDS, which was written by Julian Meldrum in 1984.

For some years, with no reliable information on the threat of AIDS publicly available in the medical or national press, Capital Gay widened its distribution to cover cities with large gay populations including Manchester and Brighton.

After being accused by Labour MP Tony Banks of legitimising the incident, Conservative Member of Parliament Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman was quoted in Hansard as saying: "I am quite prepared to affirm that it is quite right that there should be an intolerance of evil.