Fifty years ago the gay bar — that foremost location for so much dating, friendships, political organizing, and times both fun and challenging — gave birth to the B.A.R., when the first copies of the Bay Area Reporter were set atop cigarette machines in San Francisco watering holes.Since those early, heady days of what was then called the Gay Liberation Movement, the bar rag evolved to become the undisputed newspaper of record for the Bay Area's LGBTQ community, distributing 20,000 paper copies each Thursday, and of course available 24/7 online.According to Michael Yamashita, a gay man who has been the paper's publisher since 2013, the paper has never missed an issue deadline — not even when threatened by the Loma Prieta earthquake in.