BOB ROSS, publisher of the Bay Area Reporter – the queer community's version of the Associated Press wire service – has outlived his competition once more. The very last issue of San Francisco Frontiers news magazine hit the streets Thursday, Aug. 8, after an eight-year publication run.

This is a sad state of affairs, not simply because Frontiers employees are now out of a job. The closure also means that San Francisco's queer community will be an all-but-one-newspaper town.

San Francisco is one of the most economically, culturally, sexually, and racially diverse locales in the world. The city possesses quite possibly the most fractious, contentious, entertaining, bloody-minded, affectionate, bitchy, caring, and politically engaged queer community on the face of the planet. And it will now be represented by one paper.

This is not meant as a slap at the BAR, which absolutely represents an important slice of the queer community. The BAR does what it does well, but it simply cannot speak to, or for, all sectors of a community that has such a vast spectrum of opinions.

San Francisco Frontiers, since its founding in 1994, offered a much-needed complementary and competitive alternative to the BAR. As a magazine, it was able to get into a greater depth in its features. There was a nightclubbing section with maps for tourists and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. The paper strongly supported the local arts, drama, spoken word, and dance scenes, spotlighted local and renowned artists, and even had a cabaret column.

In its news and endorsement front, San Francisco Frontiers offered a more progressive take on local and international affairs than any of the other queer papers. It covered development battles during the dot-com bubble and reported on vocal queer opposition to the Bush administration's warmongering response to Sept. 11. It noted that queer Muslims do exist and raised hackles by writing about queer activists in Palestine who are critical of Israel's militaristic foreign policy.

At one point in the '90s San Francisco supported three to four queer papers and numerous zines. There was the San Francisco Bay Times, run by Kim Cosaro, which was widely regarded as the leading left-wing, queer, lesbian, activist paper taking on the powers that be. There was the San Francisco Sentinel, owned by bar proprietor Ray Chalker and a paper whose politics and coverage veered from solid reporting to, well, conservative and eccentric discussion of issues. There was San Francisco Frontiers and Ross's centrist-to-conservative (at least in terms of the local queer community) BAR.

Some welcomed queer and AIDS activism; others opposed it. Each was unique in its own way. Said one correspondent, "Wendy Nelder was right, there is something in our water, particularly in the faucets of every single ... publisher in San Francisco. They're all extremely peculiar."

The Sentinel self-destructed. The Bay Times is severely reduced in size, scope, and influence. San Francisco Frontiers is no more. Given the vibrancy of the queer community, why has this happened? Was it simply the current economy? Was it that the papers are not good enough? Was it internal problems? Or was it that there was not enough community support – not enough people putting their advertising dollars where their desire for a queer community newspaper should have been? In other words, if you like having a variety of community papers, what were you doing to support them?

Probably some of all of the above reasons were responsible. Which brings us to another important question. Come on folks: Anybody with cash and vision want to a start a quality queer paper? There's a ready-made team in place. Doesn't the community deserve more than one view of what it means to be queer in the Bay Area?