Parting Glances: 9,135 days later!

This week's issue of Between The Lines marks the kickoff of our celebration of 25 years of our dedicated, meaningful, challenging, rainbow-community outreach publication.
Whew! Who would have thought it possible? (Did you?)
I proudly — and, of course, as always somewhat modestly — note that I have been with BTL since day one when co-publishers Susan Horowitz and Jan Stevenson took previous publisher Mark Weinstein's radical faerie advocacy publication in a radical new direction for all concerned.
I remember our first meeting to discuss the direction the paper would take under Jan Stevenson and Susan Horowitz's leadership. Mark and his supporters advocated a strong, militant, in-your-face approach. Something along the lines of earlier Gay Liberation newspapers of the late '70s and '80s (Tim Toy and John Kavanaugh were proud, innovative promoters).
Horowitz, who, once prominently involved in the Stonewall Riot scene in New York 1969, felt BTL should be a source of news about the vital progress our community is making, its positive events and its personalities. Importantly, news of its varied, nationwide and worldwide interests as well.
Radical militancy would not be the paper's primary focus — Susan also brought to BTL her extensive journalist/publication/printing background honed in the New York LGBTQ scene.
I began writing my Parting Glances columns in 1993, and again modestly say I have written over 500 columns — approximately 305,000 words total so far — and never missed a deadline, a comma, an asterisk or an after-hours conjunction.
Whether or not at my advanced age that means I'm AC — anal compulsive — is open to psychotherapeutic — albeit nonsexual — group discussion with grammatically correct therapist Joe Kort.
My Parting Glances columns usually run about 600 words. They originally began at about 150 words and were devoted to brief overviews of the outstanding past LGBTQ events of the then soon-to-be-ending 20th Century. How time flies!
Before joining BTL I was writing an occasional story for an earlier LGBTQ newspaper, Ten Percent, and had done an interview with Stevenson, then first executive director of the Affirmations LGBTQ Center.
Stevenson asked me later if I would be interested in writing for BTL. I said yes. Why not? And during my tenure as a writer of history, Detroit background, coming-out personalities, humor, drag queens and the notorious Sister Scatterpin — now running a gift shop on the Isle of Capri — I'v met many creative, dedicated colleagues:
Dr. Tim Retzloff, Cheryl Zupan, Jason A. Michael, Michelle Brown, Todd Heywood, D'Anne Witkowski, Kate Opalewski, Eric Rader, Ann Cox, Eve Kucharski, Chris Azzopardi, Kevin Bryant ….
And here's a real plus for BTL readers. Within a matter of weeks all 1000+ issues of BTL will be accessible online for fast reading reference, local history and, so importantly, remembrance of past trials, tribulations, triumphs — before Trump, and pretty-boy Pence.
And! I modestly invite my PG readers during our BTL 25th Anniversary year to read Parting Glances: The Best of Charles Alexander. (Been there. Done that.)