Background
Paul F. Lorch was born on May 10, 1932 in New York and grew up in the Bronx. He attended Regis High School in Manhattan, a private, all male, Jesuit secondary school. His parents were Paul F. Lorch and Olive (nee McArdle) Lorch and he had an older brother Frederick and a younger sister Olive. Mr. Lorch graduated from the University of Toronto. Prior to moving to California in the late 1950s, Lorch served in the U.S. Army. In 1963 he received an MA in English from California State University, Sacramento and in 1964 joined the faculty of the American River Junior College as an English teacher. While living and teaching in Sacramento, Lorch made frequent trips to San Francisco where he eventually moved.
Between 1973 and 1984, Lorch was a contributor to the San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter (B.A.R.), the oldest continuously published lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender weekly newspaper in the United States. He used the pseudonym Paul Francis. Hartman, writing a series of columns titled “The Men in My Life.” In 1976, Lorch became the editor of B.A.R. and later wrote for the San Francisco Sentinel, a weekly newspaper established in 1974 to serve the LGBT communities of the Bay Area, and had a regular column called “Culture Clash.” In 1981, Lorch was appointed to the 15-member Commission on Personal Privacy to study discrimination against homosexuals by California State Governor Jerry Brown.
Lorch gained notoriety for his opposition to closing San Francisco bathhouses to stem the spread of AIDS. He published an “enemies list” of 15 gay men and one lesbian who supported bathhouse closure in an infamous April 5, 1984 B.A.R. editorial which he signed “Killing the Movement.” Lorch was adamant that outlawing gay spaces would be akin to “killing the movement.”
Lorch died on July 21, 2012 at his home in Guerneville. He was 86.
Collection
The Paul Lorch Collection includes articles written by Lorch for the Bay Area Reporter and the San Francisco Sentinel, newspaper clippings, book reviews and an unpublished manuscript that document San Francisco’s Gay Liberation Movement and Paul Lorch’s life between 1960 and 1990. The collection also includes photographs from a San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day parade, short stories by Lorch that appeared in the Sacramento State College Review and numerous articles written by others such as Kevin Starr’s interview of San Francisco Police Chief Charles Gain that was published in the San Francisco Examiner on June 25, 1977 and a January 1982 article “ACLU Champions Gay and All Civil Rights Causes" from Sacramento’s first LGBT newspaper - MOM. . .Guess What!
Access
The research material in the collection is available to view by appointment.
