Michael Glynn, the American founder of Australia’s Sydney Star Observer, 1979.

The Author of This Entry

My name is Dominic O'Grady. I worked on The Sydney Star Observer as a journalist and editor in the mid-1990s and am now writing about Michael Glynn. I'd be very happy to hear from readers who may be able to contribute to this story. Please use the comment box at the end of this entry.

Michael Glynn

In 1979, a young American man named Michael Glynn founded a free gay newspaper in Sydney. He called it The Sydney Star, and he distributed it by hand to the clubs and bars in Sydney's gay ghetto around Oxford Street.

The newspaper Glynn founded went onto become Australia’s longest-running gay and lesbian publication.

Now known as the Sydney Star Observer, the paper has captured extraordinary moments in Sydney's queer history: the rise of gay consciousness, homosexual law reform, the emergence of the gay vote, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the impacts of AIDS, and sexual liberation.

Little is is known of Glynn's life before he came to Australia. He trained as a teacher in the USA and spent some time in New York before emigrating to Australia in 1971. Glynn later claimed in a newspaper editorial that the Stonewall Inn was the first gay bar he ever went to and that he was there on the night of the first Stonewall riot in July 1969.

Assuming he was in his 20s at the time of the Stonewall riots, Glynn would have been born sometime in the 1940s. Nothing is yet known about his early years.

By 1979, however, Glynn was a passionate advocate of gay consciousness. He was a businessman who urged his readers to 'think gay, buy gay' and he used his newspaper to build an understanding of gay community within Sydney.

Glynn was particularly smitten by the leather scene. He was a keen supporter of Patrick Brookes, the only Australian to win the International Mr Leather Competition, in Chicago in 1980.

Glynn's newspaper in the early 1980s supported the ultimately successful campaign in Sydney to decriminalize homosexuality.

In May 1983 The Star published one of the earliest accounts of AIDS in Australia and the newspaper went on to be a leading source of AIDS information with the Sydney community.

Michael Glynn sold his newspaper to a cooperative of fellow workers in 1984 and retired to the Blue Mountains with his lover, Steve Cribb. Towards the end of the following year, Steve was diagnosed HIV+. The couple moved back to Sydney in 1986 so that Steve could be closer to medical care. Steve died in November that year, aged 28.

Michael was also HIV+ and he survived Steve by another 10 years. During this time, he campaigned against anti-gay street violence and AIDS-related poverty. Glynn also loudly questioned mainstream conventional medical responses to AIDS.

Australian writer Gary Dunne recorded Michael's death in the 18 July 1996 edition of the Sydney Star Observer.

Dunne wrote, in part: 'Glynn was a lanky American with no shortage of chutzpah who played a significant role in the history of the Sydney gay community from 1979 onwards.

'He was a feisty long-term survivor who made friends and enemies easily.

'He passionately believed in the notion of a gay community based around a common lifestyle and identity, and was behind the push to send a team which included Bobby Goldsmith (who won 17 medals) to the first Gay Olympics in 1982.'

Two years before his death, Glynn spoke about life in retirement, telling Gary Dunne that he was writing a porn novel and his autobiography.

Both of those documents are lost, most likely discarded in the aftermath of Michael's death.

But the fact that Glynn thought about writing an autobiography indicates an awareness of his life as a story to be told. It's a life that has a narrative force and a degree of universality, spanning two continents and four extraordinary decades in gay history.

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