There is a December 1993 magazine sitting in the archives of the African-American Research Library on Sistrunk Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale.
On the cover is RuPaul. Six months earlier, he had released Supermodel of the World, become the face of MAC Cosmetics as the first drag queen in the brand’s history, and put a Black drag queen on MTV in heavy rotation for the first time. He was at the absolute peak of a breakthrough that most of America was only beginning to process.
The magazine is BLK. It was the first Black gay magazine in America. It published 41 issues between 1988 and 1994. And the complete archive of every single one of those issues is here, in Broward County, on Sistrunk Boulevard.
Almost nobody knows that.
The Man Who Built It
Alan Bell had already made history once before BLK existed.
In 1977 he founded Gaysweek in New York City, the first mainstream weekly lesbian and gay newspaper in the country and the first gay publication owned by an African American. It ran for 104 issues over three years before closing in 1979.
When Bell returned to Los Angeles he founded Black Jack, a club for Black gay men built around safer sex education at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. The club produced a monthly newsletter. The newsletter outgrew itself. And BLK was born.
Bell named it deliberately. The capitalized abbreviation BLK followed a tradition in Black publishing of racially indicative titles, the way Ebony, Jet, and Sepia before it wore their identity on the cover. But the framing went deeper than a name. BLK was designed to be a Black magazine for gay people, not a gay magazine about Black people.
That distinction was the entire point.
The Gap Nobody Else Was Filling
The mainstream gay press of the 1980s and early 1990s centered whiteness by default. Publications like The Advocate spoke to a gay America that was assumed to be white. The Black press, for its part, largely avoided homosexuality altogether, caught between cultural conservatism and the pressure of respectability politics within communities already fighting for their lives on other fronts.
BLK existed in the gap that both created.
It covered the HIV and AIDS epidemic directly and unflinchingly at a time when Black gay men were dying with almost no targeted public health response and almost no media coverage that acknowledged them as a community. It interviewed poet Audre Lorde. It profiled Carl Bean, founder of the Minority AIDS Project. It covered careers, culture, politics, entertainment, and identity for a readership that was being failed on every front simultaneously.
The first issue was 16 pages, black and white newsprint, distributed free to Black establishments and LGBT venues across Greater Los Angeles, with a circulation of roughly 5,000. By the time it closed in March 1994, BLK had grown into a 40-page full color magazine with a paid subscriber base, national advertising, and global distribution reaching 37,000 readers.
Forty-one issues. Six years. One of the most important publications in the history of Black queer media.
December 1993
The RuPaul cover is dated December 1993. It was one of the final issues before BLK closed.
Supermodel of the World had been released that June. The single had reached the Billboard Hot 100 and entered heavy rotation on MTV, a genuinely remarkable achievement for an out Black drag queen in that era. RuPaul had just become the face of MAC Cosmetics, the brand’s first ever drag spokesperson.
BLK put him on the cover not as a retrospective. Not as a career summary. As a dispatch from the present tense, in real time, for a readership that understood exactly what that moment meant and had been waiting for it longer than most.
That is what this magazine understood that the rest of the media landscape did not. The community it served was not a footnote. It was not an afterthought. It was a readership with history, with culture, with stakes. And BLK treated it accordingly.
Why It’s in Fort Lauderdale
The African-American Research Library and Cultural Center on Sistrunk Boulevard exists because of one man’s refusal to accept that Broward County didn’t need it.
Samuel F. Morrison, then director of Broward County Libraries, visited a similar institution in Atlanta in the mid-1990s and came home with a clear intention. In 1995 he presented his vision to the county commission. The community raised $20 million. The library opened on Sistrunk Boulevard in 2002.
Inside are artifacts, archives, and collections spanning centuries of African and African diaspora history and culture, including materials that exist nowhere else in South Florida.
Among them is the Alan Bell Collection. All 41 issues of BLK magazine. Every cover. Every article. Every dispatch from a community that refused to go undocumented.
Fort Lauderdale is home to one of the most complete archives of Black queer media in the country. Most people in South Florida have no idea.
RUMOR VS. RECORD
RECORD: At its peak BLK had a paid subscriber base, national advertising, and global distribution reaching 37,000 readers. It was modeled deliberately on the format of TIME and Newsweek, not as a community newsletter but as a legitimate national magazine.
RECORD: BLK published 41 monthly issues between 1988 and 1994, well before the public internet. Alan Bell had been publishing queer media since 1977. The infrastructure, the editorial ambition, and the readership all existed long before social media made it visible.
RECORD: The National Museum of African American History and Culture does hold BLK issues. But the complete Alan Bell Collection, all 41 issues, is held right here in Broward County at the African-American Research Library on Sistrunk Boulevard. Fort Lauderdale is home to one of the most significant queer Black media archives in the country.
RECORD: The December 1993 issue came out six months after RuPaul released Supermodel of the World and became the first drag queen to sign with MAC Cosmetics. BLK wasn’t celebrating a legend in retrospect. They were documenting a community member in real time, for a readership that understood exactly what that moment meant.
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
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