In late December 2025, reporter/editor/publisher Paco LaChoy announced that his one-man publication, The Reno Gay Page, had released its last issue.
Among that issue’s headlines:
“Man who caused storytime to end suing county and OUR Center”
“SCOTUS says no to overturning” (Gay marriage, that is.)
“OUR Center Vandalized”
It was clear that the flow of LGBTQ news was by no means slowing down—but two weeks earlier, LaChoy had moved to Oklahoma with his partner of six years, who had started a new job there.
‘Newspapers have always been in my blood’
If you count the Gay Page’s predecessor, the Sierra Voice, which LaChoy launched in 1993 (and a few readers who spoke with the RN&R definitely do count it), this leg of his run as an independent journalist lasted 33 years. But his penchant for news publishing goes back decades further.
“Newspapers have always been in my blood,” LaChoy said in a phone interview. (“LaChoy is a given name from the gay community,” he explained. It’s the only name he goes by publicly.) He grew up in the east San Francisco Bay Area with a journalist mother who worked for a Hearst newspaper in Oakland. His grandparents gave him a Tom Thumb typewriter, a metal toy typewriter popular in the 1950s and ’60s.
“When I was probably 10 or 11, I did a street newspaper,” LaChoy said. “Back in the day, there wasn’t a lot for anybody to do.” The neighborhood kids would make their own fun, hosting street carnivals, pet shows or lemonade stands, and he would report on them.
As an undergrad at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the early 1970s, he published a daily, mimeographed newspaper called the Morning Desert Free Press.
“It just contained campus news, but it was daily, and sometimes it was one page, sometimes it was two pages—it just depended on what’s going on,” LaChoy said.
As a schoolteacher in Battle Mountain in the early 1980s, he launched the Reese River Valley Times. “It competed against the Battle Mountain Bugle,” he said. “Mine was done on a typewriter.”
‘Nobody else would cover any of that’
LaChoy said that in 1993, while he was working on his doctorate in journalism, he and his classmates each received a $500 grant to develop a publication for a marginalized group. That’s when he launched the Sierra Voice, the Reno Gay Page’s precursor.
The most affordable printer he could find was the Lahontan Valley News in Fallon, 60 miles from Reno, so he would drive there to drop off the paper—in the form of dot-matrix prints, rubber-cemented onto tabloid-shaped sheets of paper—and drive back to pick it up the following day.
On the first-ever pickup run in October 1993, LaChoy met Anne Pershing, the paper’s editor and then-president of the Nevada Press Association.
“They took me into her office, and she’s sitting there reading the paper, and it was only a four-page tab,” he recalled. “They introduced me, and she put the paper down, and I sat down, and she said, ‘It’s a real newspaper!’ I don’t know what they were expecting. … I was always at everything with a notebook and a camera.”
Still, Pershing’s approval put some wind in LaChoy’s sails. “She was probably my best mentor,” he said.
The two other LGBTQ publications in Nevada at the time were The Bohemian Bugle, published in Las Vegas and covering Reno topics only sporadically, and the Reno Informer, which LaChoy called “primarily a bar rag,” so there was a hunger for more LGBTQ-specific, Reno-area news.
“Probably until 2019, 2020, our community wasn’t well respected or accepted,” LaChoy said. “Now all the TV stations cover it; the newspaper covers it. You know, it’s on the radio stations.”
The Sierra Voice appears to be the only publication that covered then-Gov. Bob Miller’s 1994 visit to Bad Dolly’s, a lesbian bar on East Fourth Street, to oppose a group that was trying to ban gay people from being teachers, doctors and lawyers. It covered the AIDS Memorial Quilt’s Reno stop on its national tour in 1995 and the first local gay pride celebration, held in Wingfield Park in 1997.
The paper discussed countless topics over the years. For B Fulkerson, a longtime local activist, one in particular came to mind: “When A Rainbow Place, the first LGBT center in Reno, got started (in 2000), there was extensive coverage (by LaChoy) of the goings-on there. Some of the support groups that were offered and some of the other events you could never read about anywhere else. Because Paco came from the community, he was really embedded in the real community happenings and knew where the events were, particularly in the drag community, in the court community.” (The “court” is the Silver Dollar Court, a drag and charity organization whose Reno branch started in the 1970s and is still active.)
“And the fundraisers,” Fulkerson said—”and food drives that the court would do every year, faithfully bringing thousands of pounds of food and delivering it to people who were sick or who couldn’t get to it. Nobody else would cover any of that.”
Filling a need
At first, LaChoy was unsure how much demand there would be for a small, LGBTQ newspaper. He had 1,000 copies printed and put them out at bars and other businesses, like Grapevine Books on Wells Avenue.
“All the copies in town disappeared within three days,” he said. “I increased it to 2,000, and eventually it was running 5,000 copies every time it was printed, and there would hardly be any left when I went to pick them up at the end of the month.”
One big reason for the early demand was this: “You have to remember in 1993, the sodomy law had just been done away with in the Legislature, and so that started changes,” LaChoy said. This was one victory in Nevada in a long movement to destigmatize queerness.
“I think that between both papers that we had—the bar rag and mine—we built community,” LaChoy said. “The community started getting more involved, being more out.”
Tony Pratt, who moved to Reno in 1991 and started reading the Sierra Voice as soon as it launched, agrees.
“Back when he started, we didn’t have social media,” Pratt said. “We really didn’t have (a place) where you could put up a poster for a drag event or charity event. … (In the paper), you could see different people, see what was going on in the community. … I could see where all the different charity events were and the drag shows or the car washes or whatever they were having at that point. … It really seemed to help drive attendance.”
Out of publication, but not for long
As much as readers appreciated the Sierra Voice, printing costs were expensive. LaChoy worked in the hotel industry all along to help the project pencil out. When the 2008 recession hit, the purse strings got even tighter as businesses struggled to pay their advertising bills. In 2009, he shuttered the paper.
In 2010, he resurrected it as The Reno Gay Page, which existed mostly online, still in the format of a monthly page tabloid. Some friends helped the new publication establish a presence on Facebook—still relatively new at the time—and LaChoy printed about 100 copies “so people could see that there was a paper.”
He continued working his day job and continued to be basically the sole reporter, editor and publisher of the Reno Gay Page until 2025.
“Yes, friends have helped at times, and that has been greatly appreciated,” he wrote in his farewell post.
What kept him working double duty the whole time was a mission he was determined to carry out: “Newspapers build community,” LaChoy said. “It doesn’t matter what community it is. But if there’s a newspaper reporting on the events and activities of that community and its people, it builds community.”
End of one era; beginning of another
LaChoy said he’s been wanting to retire from The Reno Gay Page for quite a while.
“And the community just kept saying, ‘You can’t. You can’t. You can’t,’” he said. “And then with the political climate at the present time, (The Reno Gay Page) was a very important piece to the community.”
But in December, the time finally came to close up shop.
These days, LaChoy is settling into his new hometown—Enid, Okla., population circa 50,000, with lower gas and housing prices than Reno, and what he described as “an adorable downtown. He’s still getting used to Central Time and the flatter landscape, and learning what to do when the tornado sirens go off.
“So far, I’m enjoying it,” he said. “And I found out that there’s even a gay pride celebration here in Enid. … This county is considered one of the reddest in the state. There are not all the protections in Oklahoma that there are in Nevada for gays and lesbians, but I think it’s very much a live-and-let-live place here, too. That’s my feeling so far.”
Naturally, he’s started working on a book about his time as an independent journalist. Its working title is 30-Plus Years and Thousands of Stories.
Northern Nevadans have been writing to thank him for his 33 years of service.
“I don’t think that I’ve done anything other than disseminate information,” he said, in response to the stream of accolades. “That’s my job. It’s what I like to do. When I’m upset, that’s what I do. I put together the newspaper.”
In B Fulkerson’s words, The Reno Gay Page “was a voice that uplifted the community, by a very well-respected member of the community. … Movements and communities, always, are made by ordinary people who do extraordinary things. And that’s Paco.”