To celebrate Pride in 2020, the Archival team spotlighted a list of seven pioneering LGBTQIA+ publications, many of which were branches of grassroots organizations, including: ONE, a gay magazine in the 1950s and ‘60s that survived raids and obscenity bans The Lesbian Tide, spawned from a lesbian civil rights group and Transgender Tapestry, published from the 1970s to 2006, which reviewed titles like Tootsie and Dressed to Kill. You can now find contemporary reviews for early Oscar winners such as Gone with the Wind alongside recent retrospectives on the Tomatometer. Rotten Tomatoes’ Archival Curation, a branch of the team that gathers the film and TV reviews that make up Tomatometer scores, has been working for the last several years to bolster our historic records. When we see ourselves throughout history, imagining the future becomes more hopeful – something to fight for. Johnson, Leslie Feinberg, and Larry Kramer, we learn that there have always been people like us – not just looking for us, too, but looking out for us. It’s not uncommon for LGBTQIA+ people to go searching for ourselves in the archives. As part of the celebration, we’re spotlighting some of the work our archival curation team has been doing to bring more LGBTQIA+ publications onto the Tomatometer. In honor of Pride, Rotten Tomatoes is highlighting LGBTQIA+ voices under our Rainbow Tomatoes banner. (Photo by Christopher Street, Women in the Life, Drag, LadyLike, and Internet Archive)
