The year that San Francisco’s oldest surviving LGBT newspaper printed its first issue, sodomy laws were abundant throughout the country, San Francisco public employees could be fired over their sexual orientation, and police harassment of gay, lesbian and bisexual people was just starting to abate.

AIDS hadn’t yet struck. Legendary gay rights activist and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was still alive. And the idea that gay and lesbian couples would someday be able to legally marry — let alone print wedding announcements in the Bay Area Reporter — would have seemed preposterous.

“It was a totally different time,” said Terry Beswick, the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society who worked as an assistant editor at the Reporter in the 1990s. The newspaper “validated us and our community at a time when not much else did. It helped us speak amongst ourselves, but also proved that we’re here, we exist. ... If you took the BAR out of the gay community, I don’t know that it would function the same way. It’s become like our coral reef.”

The Bay Area Reporter, which began as a community and culture publication, published its first issue on April 1, 1971. In the 45 years since, it has evolved to become an enduring local news source and advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

Reporter to get a makeover

One of the oldest LGBT newspapers in the nation, the Bay Area Reporter outlasted many that came after it. But some in the community worry about its future as technology supplants traditional media, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender spaces vanish.

In coming months, the weekly newspaper will undergo a makeover, redesigning its website and altering the size and layout of its print publication to cut costs.

They will be the first changes to the paper’s format in decades.

When Bob Ross, a gay rights and, later, an AIDS activist in San Francisco, founded the Bay Area Reporter in 1971, it was not the first LGBT newspaper to arrive in San Francisco. The more radical LCE News, published by a gay rights group known as the League for Civil Education, was being circulated in gay bars and throughout the burgeoning Castro district.

As more LGBT people flocked to the city, their stories grew, along with a demand for LGBT-focused media. Several newspapers emerged, each with their own personality and readership.

The Bay Times had a greater focus on women and lesbian issues, the Sentinel was more unpredictable, and the Bay Area Reporter was more conservative and in line with the gay establishment, sometimes to its detriment, Beswick said.

Lack of obituaries

As AIDS ravaged the gay community in the 1980s, the Reporter filled its pages with updates about the “gay plague” and hundreds of obituaries. Advertisements for funeral homes, medical services and companies seeking to purchase life insurance policies for cash abounded.

When AIDS activists got arrested protesting at City Hall, the Bay Area Reporter would splash it across its front page, Beswick said, while other newspapers, like The Chronicle, would print a small story, buried inside.

In August 1998, for the first time since AIDS began to devastate the gay community, the paper did not have a single death to report. It was front-page news: “No obits!”

“That was huge news when it happened, but now it happens pretty regularly,” said news editor Cynthia Laird, who has worked at the paper for 20 years. “The issues have shifted.”

In the 2000s, coverage of the same-sex marriage debate in California and around the world began to dominate the newspaper’s pages.

Today, Laird said, transgender issues and the evolving — and aging — face of the LGBT community have become some of the paper’s central areas of focus.

Gay institutions vanishing

Sometimes, it seems the paper is covering the very trends that endanger its existence: wakes and funerals for gay institutions that are becoming fewer and farther between.

The Lexington Club, San Francisco’s last remaining lesbian bar, shuttered last year. Esta Noche, the city’s only Latino LGBT bar, closed the year before that. The city’s oldest gay bar, Gangway, will follow suit soon.

The Castro neighborhood is no longer the gay mecca it was in the 1970s and ’80s, with more LGBT people escaping San Francisco’s sky-high rent prices for the East Bay and beyond.

Some worry that LGBT media companies could be next.

“I’ve had people ask me why LGBT newspapers are necesssary,” said Akilah Monifa, the co-president of the Northern California chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. “But homophobia still exists. We just saw a very clear example with (the massacre in) Orlando, and that’s why we need it. We need to be able to tell our stories and report on our news in a way that someone not as integrally involved may not be able to. That need still exists, and it will always exist.”

But in recent years, one of the paper’s biggest challenges has been internal: keeping the publication in LGBT control.

In 1996, Ross, the paper’s founding publisher, formed a charity, the Bob Ross Foundation, that allowed him to invest in a range of nonprofits, particularly organizations that benefited the LGBT community.

When Ross died in 2003, the foundation maintained ownership of the paper. But due to tax regulations, it had to divest 80 percent of its ownership by this year.

Many readers and members of the LGBT community worried the paper would be sold and cease to be majority-LGBT owned and operated.

“I am concerned about the BAR and its future, and I think we’ve kind of taken for granted that it’ll always be here and it will always be in gay hands,” Beswick said. “If I had the money, I would buy it, just to keep it that way.”

‘Always going to be a need’

In 2013, then-Publisher Thomas E. Horn and Michael Yamashita, general manager at the time, announced that a new company, BAR Media Inc., would acquire 100 percent of the stock of Benro Enterprises, through which Ross’ foundation owned the newspaper.

To accomplish this, they made a deal with Todd Vogt and Patrick Brown, who were then shareholders in a company that owned the Examiner and SF Weekly.

The transaction left 51 percent of the company in gay hands: Yamashita, now the publisher, owns 31 percent, and the Bob Ross Foundation maintained a 20 percent share.

Vogt and Brown, who are straight, own the other 49 percent. The two have since ended their relationship with the Examiner’s parent company, Yamashita said. They remain “management advisers” to the Bay Area Reporter and sit on the board of BAR Media Inc.

Despite the financial challenges of running a newspaper in 2016 — including increased online competition and decreased advertising — Yamashita said readership has grown. The paper, which prints 29,000 copies, has a readership of more than 120,000 in print and online.

Yamashita is confident the Bay Area Reporter will be around for years to come.

“As long as there are still people in the world trying to kill us, discriminate against us or outlaw us, there’s always going to be a need for community to advocate for our rights and safe spaces for socializing,” he said. “And I think today that need is still quite urgent.”

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae