Bob Ross, 69; Publisher of S.F. Newspaper Oriented Toward Gays
Bob Ross, 69, publisher of the influential San Francisco gay-oriented newspaper the Bay Area Reporter, died from complications of diabetes Wednesday in a San Francisco hospital.
Ross was a San Francisco chef in 1971 when he and a friend, Paul Bentley, decided that gays and lesbians needed better community information than that provided by the gossip sheets dispensed in bars.
But they also knew that’s where the gay community got much of its information, so they named their newspaper Bay Area Reporter (BAR) and distributed it free in bars.
The paper later became known for helping to give a face to AIDS: In 1989, Ross devoted eight pages to publishing 610 photos of people who had died of the disease. Nine years later, the paper’s banner headline read “No Obits.” For the first time since the start of the epidemic, there had been no AIDS obituaries in the paper for a week.
A New York City native, Ross moved to San Francisco in 1956.
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