An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News
by Amy Hoffman
University of Massachusetts Press. 166 pages, $22.95
CURRENTLY THE EDITOR of the Women’s Review of Books and a long-time political activist, Amy Hoffman has written a highly readable memoir of a brief but formative moment in time: her four years, from 1978 to 1982, working at Boston’s weekly newspaper, Gay Community News. Hoffman—who had been a volunteer at the “local socialist-feminist journal” Sister Courage—was hired as a features editor, becoming managing editor by the time she left. Apparently one of the few applicants suitable for the job, or at least the one who unwittingly said the right things about an arty nude cover scheduled to run at the time of her interview, she quips in her new book, An Army of Ex-Lovers, that “nobody on the paper had any journalism experience, but that was only a minor obstacle.”
GCN, whose scope and influence extended nationally—founded in 1973, it was arguably the nation’s first gay weekly—was organized as a collective, with gay men and lesbians working together in (relative) harmony.
