Chris Cash is one of the 2022 inductees into the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame. Cash is the founding publisher of Southern Voice (SoVo), the LGBTQ newspaper of record for Atlanta and the southeast. In 1988, Cash and a small group of volunteers launched a bi-weekly paper buoyed by the activism and optimism of the National March on Washington the previous year. Within a few years, SoVo had become an integral part of the LGBTQ community and a nationally recognized and award-winning publication. At its height, the newspaper employed dozens of staff members, writers, photographers and cartoonists. The now weekly SoVo carried national advertising and distributed more than 25,000 copies per week in Atlanta and throughout the southeast. Cash attributes the success of Southern Voice to its practice of offering news and imagery of both women and men; limiting sexual and alcohol advertising; and “being a paper you could read on MARTA and take home to Mom.” In 1997, Cash sold the paper to Window Media which declared bankruptcy in 2009. Within days she held a community meeting to choose the name for a new LGBT newspaper to fill the void left by SoVo. The name Georgia Voice was chosen and Cash and two former SoVo employees launched in March, 2010. GAVO continues to publish in print and online.
