R.I.P.
Gay Black Female Magazine "GBF"
1990-2006

7/5/2010 - Why bother with the documentary film The GBF Story? Well my friends before the internet, before Craigslist, before ipods and ipads, there was Gay Black Female Magazine. It was towards the third quarter of 1990 and also getting started on the scene was ULOAH, At the Beach and The Lesbian News was around too. At least I think they all were. The Gay & Lesbian Center was a small hole in the wall on Highland Ave in Hollywood. Yeah I remember.

The true and only hot spot was the Catch One on Pico. When I arrived on the scene in 1984 the Catch One was the place to "catch one". There was also a male spot in Inglewood called Papa Bears and a few other hole in the wall spots. The Beef was another spot for guys and only few know about that! What about Flamingos on Sunset hot damn!

The Catch One was where all the women were on Thurdays, Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays. With the house music thumpin' on Friday and Saturday nights it was a crazy line around the corner. For the most part in the mid to late 80's I went periodocally to the Catch One, house parties etc. but it was like I wanted to have conversations but with people full of booze, weed and music that wasn't happenin. I tried to dance and have conversations but it didn't work. I wanted to "catch one" and trying to make it happen at a club wasn't it.

At that time LA Weekly was around and still is, however at that time personal ads and 900 numbers kept the magazine alive, now weed clincs and porno ads keep it alive. Anyway I used to read the LA Weekly and The Recycler (replaced by Craiglist in my opinion) for their personal ads. You could reply by 900 number or place an ad with a box number. In the beginning I called a few folks but they was lying just like me about whatever a person can't see over the phone. So instead of contacting women I decided to place my own personal ad in the LA Weekly.

I got a few hits from women and men, but I wanted a sista and most folks was something else. At that time LA Weekly and the Recycler used acronyms like GBF for gay black female, GWF, GWM, GBM etc. which was fine by me because at that time I was still in the closet....in my mind at least.

One day I was with somebody I met through the personals and we went to San Francisco. I realized it wasn't a love connection and thought about how could I meet the woman I wanted to meet. At lunch I scribbled a one page brochure and showed it to the woman and she thought it was a good idea, so when I got back to back to Los Angeles I constructed a one page brochure entitled G.B.F. just like the acromyn in LA Weekly, with the words Gay Black Female beneath. However the second printing I removed gay black female and just called it GBF. I figured that some women would know what it meant if they read LA Weekly or the Recycler...

flip side

All of the ads in the brochure are mine and made up of a portion of what I was looking for in a female. Maybe one or two of the ads were real, I can't remember. The vendor ads were real and some of the ads were bogus. Initially I did not add my name or who published the brochure. At the time the home computer was used, but not as popular as it is now. Microsoft Office did not exist and I think I did the original brochure in Word Perfect and the operating system was DOS. I printed out 400 blue brochures and dropped them on a female crowd leaving the Catch One Club about 3am in the morning. I noticed that some sista's dropped or crumpled the brochure (I promptly picked it up). Some stuffed the brochure in their pocket and some were reading it. Some guys wanted one as to not be left out. Over the next few days I was surprised by the response....

more coming....