Bridging Communities

50 Years of Collecting at Georgia State University

OutTV Atlanta, a half-hour weekly news and entertainment show focused on LGBTQ+ life, aired in Atlanta and Savannah on Thursdays at 9:00 pm, and ran from 1999 to 2000. The brainchild of Michael B. Maloney, the show was supported financially by Maloney’s family and friends, and the majority of the staff were volunteers. As producer of the show, Maloney saw that most other coverage of LGBTQ+ life involved night clubs and drag queens, and he wanted to focus on “ordinary” gay people who were firefighters, attorneys, and regular members of the community. The show ran for 52 weeks and ultimately ended because of lack of financial success. However, Maloney had the foresight to save all the show’s video, and, with the help of a Digital Library of Georgia subgrant, over 250 hours of OutTV Atlanta footage has been digitized and indexed and it is available to researchers via Georgia State University Library’s Digital Collections, LGBTQ Institute’s Mike Maloney Collection of OutTV Atlanta Video Recordings. An oral history conducted with Maloney is also available in the Special Collections’ reading room. In it, he states, “I’m thrilled that Georgia State has taken the time, the effort, and the expense to do this because I think in the future, when young people can look at this, look back and see what things were like then, what people were talking about, and how we got to where we are today, that it will mean something to them. I think it will affect young people. If I’d have had that when I was younger, my whole life would have been different.”