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“Burst down those closet doors once and for all, and begin to fight!”
That rallying cry from former San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, an ardent advocate for gay rights and the first openly gay public official in California, was a two-pronged call to action: LGBTQ+ people, come out, and let your strength in your identity propel you to advocacy for your rights.
Coming out has always been a deeply personal process tied to safety and other marginalized identities — especially when it comes to one’s nuclear family, workplace, immediate community and structural violence. And it means many different things to different people.
For Milk, coming out was an essential step on the path toward justice and rights for LGBTQ+ people. To him, it revealed that LGBTQ+ people have always existed and defied the misconceptions of straight people.
When Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, a flush of anti-gay initiatives were passing through the California Legislature. One of the most highlighted was spearheaded by John Briggs’ 1978 campaign to ban openly gay teachers from working in California schools, which mobilized LGBTQ+ people across the state.
One of them was Sacramentan Linda Birner.
A Sacramento State alum, she had already been politically active in women’s advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women. But the Briggs initiative and the “No on 6” campaign were the impetus for her to start what became one of Sacramento’s first — and arguably most prominent — LGBTQ+ newspapers: “Mom… Guess What!”.
“Every generation has its John Briggs,” Steinberg told a crowd of people at a June 6 panel — a partnership between the city and the Center for Sacramento History that drew over 100 people — honoring the paper and Birner’s work. “Ron DeSantis comes to mind.”
Birner, who was 29 when she founded the paper, told CapRadio that she “wanted to start the paper as fast as we could, because the election was coming up in a couple of months, and I wanted to make sure everybody was educated on what it was about what he was trying to do, which was get all these school teachers fired.”
“I felt really good when we won that [No on 6 campaign],” she said. “And we also won Sacramento handily.”
But the paper wasn’t also just a response to anti-gay sentiment in electoral politics: Among her many hopes for “Mom… Guess What!” was that it could affirm to LGBTQ+ Sacramentans that there was nothing wrong with their sexuality, give them ideas of things to do outside of bars and help them self-advocate.
“It was just a voice,” Birner said of the newspaper in a KCRA segment in 1978. “To give us a place to talk, a forum, and it’s also a place for the straight community, to educate straight people, that we are just everyday, normal people.”
The paper’s name is a nod to the leading question-and-answer of coming out, assuming your mom is the first one you tell: “Mom, guess what?” “What?” “I’m gay!”
And from 1978 to 2009, “Mom… Guess What!” focused on life at the other end of coming out, covering a wide range of topics, from Sacramento opera and art reviews, ballot measures and policies, the AIDS epidemic and more.
A July 1980 edition of "Mom... Guess What!" shows photos from Sacramento's second pride parade.Janelle Salanga / CapRadio
‘Mom… Guess What!’ crucial part of Sacramento’s LGBTQ+ community, politics
Because it was so wide-ranging, the paper served many purposes. While it covered national news, much of what was within pertained specifically to Sacramento. Staff found ways to localize statewide and national issues to the local community, sharing information about how goings-on in the Capitol, like the Briggs Initiative, could impact the LGBTQ+ community.
Former Sacramento Bee publisher C.K. McClatchy also served as a mentor and editor while Birner got her sea legs as a publisher, helping connect her to bookkeeping services and printers. The paper was printed in Tracy, Auburn and Paradise at various points.
Still, while producing thoroughly reported and edited stories, “Mom… Guess What!” was a newspaper with an explicit point of view. The paper, and Birner, served as the ear to the ground about LGBTQ+ experiences in the Sacramento region for other community and city groups — she was able to communicate community concerns on multiple levels, not just through the paper.
Birner helped found a political action group with seven others to raise money to donate to “gay and lesbian supportive people running for office.”
That group and its “great big sit-down, glorious dinners” put her in contact with legislators, local community leaders and business leaders, along with city council members and mayors like Anne Rudin. Current mayor Darrell Steinberg, too, was part of said dinners. And she was also part of the Sacramento Police Department’s advisory committee for over a decade, helping with training panels and advising on issues related to gays and lesbians.
Once the HIV/AIDS epidemic began, the paper began producing a regular HIV/AIDS column, headed up by Sonya Cox. The column provided information about resources, the virus’s impact on the community and ways to come together to take care of each other while honoring those lost.
Usually, Birner said, the column spanned a full page. And the “devastating” epidemic was personal for the newspaper’s staff.
“All of us were involved with taking care of people … visiting at the hospital and dealing with people’s last moments,” she said.
And the newspaper also became a crucial source of insight into LGBTQ+ Sacramentans’ experiences with the epidemic.
“A lot of times, when we’d go to City Council meetings, we’d be sitting down in the audience just taking notes, and when we looked up, they’d be holding MGW, reading MGW,” Birner said. “I think they really used us as a resource, and if they needed more information, they would contact Sonya or one of our doctor friends.”
Politicians, like Stan Hadden, aide to former state Senator David Rorberti, would frequently come up to Birner to discuss issues, which often connected “Mom… Guess What!” to unique coverage opportunities.
“One day, Stan convinced Roberti that the LGBT flag ought to be flown over the Capitol and [had] never been flown over the Capitol,” Dennis Mangers, a political and LGBTQ+ activist who founded the Sacramento Gay Men’s Chorus, remembered during the panel. “Knowing in advance from Stan what was going to happen, Linda sent a photographer to record that moment.”
Alongside electoral politics, an issue could span information about local gay and lesbian theatre — like La Theatre Lesbian productions at the Sierra II Community Center — to grassroots successes, like a potential boycott of local radio station KWOD 106 after a DJ’s use of homophobic slurs that was averted after the station met a coalition’s demands.
“Mom… Guess What!” also highlighted other outlets’ coverage of LGBTQ+ issues, one way to take local publications to task for their portrayal of community concerns. The KWOD story, for example, shouts out the Sacramento News & Review’s and the Sacramento Bee’s coverage of the averted boycott.
Janelle Salanga / CapRadio
Frank Lawler is a former editor at “Mom… Guess What!”, who confessed that he started there because his boyfriend broke up with him and he “was a little bored” at the June 6 panel.
He credits the paper for building a strong Sacramento LGBTQ+ community, especially with its community calendar and classifieds at a time without Internet, email and social media.
The paper — which focused on events outside of bars — predates the Lavender Library and the Sac LGBT Center, both Sacramento community third spaces separate from alcohol.
“We didn't really have a real community to find each other, or to organize anything until ‘Mom… Guess What!’ came along … besides going to bars,” Lawler said. “It was really important to have a community newspaper that kept us in touch with each other and with what was going on in our world, as well as in the larger community.”
Anyone could submit to the community calendar, which Birner said regularly included over a hundred items.
“Sometimes I think you need to give people ideas [for sober things to do], like ‘Pack a picnic, and turn right here, left here, and sit on this rock and look around,’” she said. “A lot of people just did it. People would call us back and say ‘Well, we did that. Here’s the photograph and what we did,’ and we could tell they were on the right rock.’”
And through advertisements and news coverage, the paper helped spread the word about LGBTQ+-owned businesses the community could patronize. And its ads were also a testament to allyship in the face of homophobia. Straight people ran ads in the paper to signal support, and if a straight-person-owned business carried the paper, it was a sign to LGBTQ+ Sacramentans: You have an ally in us.
“Mom… Guess What!” issues contained a disclaimer to this end: “Not all advertisers are gay owned and operated. Some are straight owned, but they are supportive of the gay community.”
Ads in "Mom... Guess What!" featured both LGBTQ+ owned businesses and businesses whose owners were straight.Janelle Salanga / CapRadioBirner said she was sick in the hospital in mid-2004 when she handed over the publisher's reins, effectively retiring. They went to Jeffry A. Davis, according to the paper’s old website, who ran the paper for 2 years before two mergers — one to absorb local paper Q-Ragg to save it from going out of publication, and another to create Guess What Media, LLC, with Terry Sidie, the owner of Faces Nightclub.
Though the merger was intended to help keep “Mom… Guess What!” running, the paper sent its last issue to print in December 2009. The latest issue at both the Lavender LIbrary and on the “Mom… Guess What!” site is from Dec. 1 of that year.
The paper today: Digitization, lessons learned
Past issues of the periodical are archived between three major places — Lavender Library in Midtown Sacramento, the Center for Sacramento History and the Peter J. Shields Library at UC Davis. (The Library of Congress has a sliver of issues from 1980 to 1983.)
The UC Davis library holds the majority of the newspaper’s estimated 585 issues, including all but one of the first 162 issues, while the Lavender Library fills in the gaps of the university’s collection with comprehensive volumes of the paper after 1989.
The Center for Sacramento History only recently jumped into building its archival collection of the newspaper, in 2021, when head archivist Marcia Eymann reached out to Birner.
“I had been talking to San Francisco’s library, the State library, the Sacramento Library … all different research places, and I couldn't say where I wanted to place archives,” Birner said. “And all of a sudden, one day, she [Eymann] called us out of the blue … and said, ‘We really want to have your collection.’ She was very emphatic and very excited. And she was like a little kid … and so I started coming in [to the Center for Sacramento History].”
The center organized the June panel celebrating the paper. And the event, during which archivists made a display featuring “Mom… Guess What!” issues in a timeline of milestones for Sacramento’s LGBTQ+ community, doubled as an opportunity to ask audience members to donate and seek out newspaper copies to flesh out the center’s collection.
“MGW served as an important source of news and events for the local LGBT community, and as a way to help educate the larger Sacramento population about the LGBT community,” said Eymann in a statement of the importance of having the newspaper as part of the center’s archives.
Archivist Sabrina Halecko said the center is already “in a good state of almost getting the full collection of newspapers.”
“Mostly, we’re missing things from the ‘80’s,” she added.
But a stretch goal for her as an archivist: “I would really love to find the photographer’s negatives, or their original prints, or some more administrative information of how the paper was run and the like.”
Ultimately, she and the center’s archivists are hoping for a full run of the paper so they can digitize it and everyone can access the collection from home. She added that the story of the paper is also an important Sacramento story — given how many community events and political actions it documented.
“There’s so many different facets to Linda [Birner] — we always joke around that ‘Sacramento is the smallest biggest town,’” Holecko said. “Everyone knows each other. It is so close knit … and she’s just so connected to Sacramento, and we want to show all the history of it.”
Archives of Sacramento's LGBTQ+ newspaper, "Mom... Guess What!" at the Lavender Library on Aug. 25, 2023.Janelle Salanga / CapRadio
While Outword Magazine stands strong as the Sacramento region’s primary LGBTQ+ periodical, Mangers, the Sacramento Gay Men’s Chorus founder and activist, said during the panel that the newspaper was a singular presence.
“We had a deeply closeted population of LGBT folks here,” he said. “But there was something about “Mom… Guess What!” that energized the community. It was a source of information, really truthful, honest information about HIV/AIDS when the mainstream press was distorting it to the small degree. It chronicled all of our arts and cultural and sports activities that had been going up and very quickly.”
Manger also reflected on LGBTQ+ issues today, particularly given Milk’s prior call to action to “come out.” To him, one of the biggest concerns is that “a lot of our younger people now believe that they live in an absolutely safe zone” because they’re in California.
“They’re trying to infiltrate our school boards and ban books that have any reference to us [LGBTQ+ folks], even attacking our drag queens,” Manger said. “We need to reactivate our community, as you [MGW] did in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. We need to somehow emotionally get to our young people and warn them that the barbarians are not in Florida. They’re at our own gates.”
Issues of “Mom… Guess What!” from 2005 to 2009 are available to view on the newspaper’s site.
To see past issues in-person:
Center for Sacramento History: 551 Sequoia Pacific Blvd, Sacramento
- Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., 1 to 4 p.m. by appointment only (contact [email protected] or 916-808-7072)
Lavender Library: 1414 21th St, Sacramento
- Hours: Monday and Friday 5 to 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 12 to 6 p.m.
Peter J. Shields Library: 100 N Quad, Davis
- Hours: Monday through Friday for walk-ins, 10 to 12 a.m. and 1 to 3 p.m.
- Because the issues are stored in Special Collections and some must be retrieved offsite, the library recommends planning your visit at least a week in advance.
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