by Joe Courter
The first Iguana appeared in October 1986. It was an outgrowth of the merging of three activist mailing lists at a time when there was a high level of local organizing stimulated by the world we were seeing unfold during the Reagan administration.
I was producing a newsletter for the Humanist Society of Gainesville for years and had amassed a solid mailing list for them. The second mailing list had developed from the increased local (and national) organizing activities opposing Reagan’s Central America policies. The third came from a newsletter put out by the local Quaker organization. A merge and purge of duplicates resulted in a list of about six or seven hundred names. For the first five years the Iguana was a mailed-out newsletter only, multipage and photocopied to the people on this list.
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