The Spectator, the San Francisco Bay area's adult tabloid for nearly 30 years, has ceased publication, due in large part to increased competition for sexually oriented advertising as well as the flagging American economy.
Spectator, which has been employee-owned since the death of its last sole owner, Harry Margolis, in 1987, has had a checkered history almost since its founding in 1978. The paper has changed management several times over the years, and was helmed during most of the 1990s by Kat Sunlove, a long-time free speech activist now employed as the legislative affairs director for the Free Speech Coalition.
Sunlove and partner Layne Winklebleck, who served as the paper's publisher and circulation manager respectively, sold their shares in 2001 to Dara Lynne Dahl and Vann Hall, who valiantly tried to keep the paper's finances in the black despite growing competition for sexual advertising from several local freebie papers such as the Bay Guardian, SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, as well as similar ads on the Internet.
"We just got back from vacation and heard the news," Sunlove told AVN.com, "and we were very distressed about it. We knew for a long time, a couple of years maybe, that they've really just been bumping along, and we kept hoping that these new owners would make a go of it, but I guess it's not going to happen."
The paper's most recent owners, Terri and Heath Hall, who had bought Dahl's shares several months ago – Vann Hall had ceased involvement with the paper's operations more than a year ago, though he still owned shares – had instituted cost-cutting measures and taken other steps (such as cutting the paper back to biweekly publication) to try to stop the money hemorrhage, but by late October, they had given up.
"A meeting was held on Nov. 15 with the owners," recounted Dave Patrick, the paper's senior editor and chief photographer, "and I was hopeful that Vann would step up to the plate and show everybody that he would do so much better than Dara and that Spectator would prosper, but he doesn't have any money right now, and I guess he decided that there were just too many problems to deal, so basically what came out of the meeting was that no one was interested in picking up the ball, and the publication would die."
Spectator grew out of the Bay area's first "underground" newspaper, the Berkeley Barb, which began publication shortly before 1967's "Summer of Love," and was sold on city streets for 25 cents by an itinerant work force composed largely of hippies.
"I was the staff photographer for the Barb beginning in 1975," Patrick recalled, "and by October, 1978, they were having trouble getting some of the mainstream advertisers they would have liked to get, like Bill Graham, who was putting on all these rock concerts – we couldn't get him to advertise. People said, 'We like the politics, we like the paper; we don't like the sex ads.'"
"At that time, the sex ads were a pull-out section called the Midsection, and they would tell people, if you don't like the sex ads, pull out the Midsection and throw it away and then read the politics. But the people that were trying to sell the advertising said, 'Hey, why don't you take that Midsection and put it in another publication, and then the Barb can be pure, just for politics, right?' So they tried it, and the Midsection became Spectator on October 5, 1978."
"The Barb lasted for two more years," Patrick sighed. "It ceased publication on July 3, 1980, but The Spectator was going great guns because it had the base of all the sex ads, and the advertisers liked it even better than The Barb because there was less of that political stuff; there was more sex."
Spectator gradually became much more than simply an advertising vehicle, however.
"The paper played quite a substantial role in the history of the San Francisco sexual community," Sunlove said, "and in the broader sense, I would argue that we played a part in the whole First Amendment rallying cry across the state and beyond, because we had a readership that extended out into a lot of First Amendment groups and even some legislators. We reached into a lot of areas that you wouldn't necessarily have expected and I think the intelligent voice that the paper represented, at least in our tenure, was a good one and an important one in the Bay area."
Many sex-positive activists wrote columns for Spectator, including Sunlove herself – her column "The Kat Box" debuted in 1981 – stripper-turned-sociologist Dr. Carol Queen, and author/photographer David Steinberg.
But with the evolution in the general public's attitudes towards sexual subjects in general, which took flight in the mid-1990s, Spectator faced increasing competition for advertising from more mainstream publications.
"The Bay Guardian, for instance, began taking far more explicit adult ads than it had ever done before," Sunlove recalled. "That product, as well as SF Weekly and the Internet, all played a big part in undermining the viability of the organization, but I think with really hard work and careful management of the money coming in, the cash flow, the company really should have survived."
"The paper grossed over $1 million a year for a while," Patrick noted – quite a feat considering the forces allied against the publication, such as legislators anxious to pass laws targeting Spectator's newsrack business, which eventually forced it to publish two editions, a milder one for newsrack sales and a more explicit one for in-store sales and subscribers.
"I feel proud of Spectator magazine and the role it has played," wrote Winklebleck as part of an exit editorial for himself and Sunlove. "We have earned the respect of many of the sexual communities in the Bay Area. We have helped provide a voice for sexual minorities. We have played a part in the empowerment of sexworkers. We have participated in the often vibrant discourses of the radical sex communities. We have had a key role in providing an interface between sex communities and the mainstream public."
Hopefully, that's how Spectator will be remembered.
