Amongst Gay News's early "Special Friends" were Graham Chapman of Monty Python's Flying Circus, his partner David Sherlock, and Antony Grey, secretary of the UK Homosexual Law Reform Society from 1962 to 1970.
Sex between men had been partially decriminalised for males over the age of 21 in England and Wales with the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967.
It campaigned for equal rights in employment (notably in the controversial area of the teaching profession) and the trades union movement at a time when left politics in the United Kingdom was still historically influenced by its Nonconformist roots in its hostility to homosexuality.
But under the influence of its features editors, Howes and Hennegan, it also excavated the lesbian and cultural history of past decades as well as presenting new developments in the arts.
[2] Two of the paper's news staff, Michael Mason and Graham McKerrow, later founded the London weekly newspaper Capital Gay which was launched in June 1981.
In the first year of publication, editor Denis Lemon was charged and fined for obstruction, for taking photographs of police behaviour outside the popular leather bar in Earls Court, the Coleherne pub.
[4] At this conference Mel Rosen, of Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York, declared "I hope you get very scared today because there is a locomotive coming down the tracks and it's leaving the United States.
Smith again agreed to distribute the paper, noting that its circulation figures of approximately 20,000 copies per issue made it financially attractive.