From the Closet to the Cover by Sean Kennedy Every culture needs a press. It's a way for people of that culture to recognize themselves, a tool for building community, a means for relaxation and enjoyment, but above all, it's how they establish their collective voice in society. It's how the culture hears itself, so to speak, but more importantly, it's how the rest of the society hears the culture. That cultural voice, of course, often becomes political, and in the case of the gay and lesbian press, that's certainly true. In fact, the existence of the gay and lesbian press came about because of expressly political reasons. During the repressive, not to mention oppressive, 50s, when queers were still considered "abnormal" and morally reprehensible and even treated as second-class citizens by the vast majority of Americans (sentiments that unfortunately persist to this day), the journals gays and lesbians founded became refuges for so many people virtually exiled from their own country. As the years wore on, those refuges were transformed into platforms from which queers decried the oppression they faced at the hands of straight society -- and from which they constantly called for equal rights. Lisa Ben, a Los Angeles office worker, started her magazine Vice Versa in 1947, becoming the first queer publisher. Although it only lasted for a few months, the hand-typed, stapled pages were handed out at lesbian bars by the publisher herself, creating the first sense of community that many of those women ever experienced, aside from the bars themselves. It showed those women that there were others like them, who were normal like them despite what straight people thought. From that initial publishing effort, the gay and lesbian press took off. In the years after Vice Versa, three other queer magazines were started: ONE (Los Angeles, 1953), The Mattachine Review, and The Ladder (both San Francisco, 1955). More concerned with assimilating gays and lesbians into straight society, they still were important in creating communities of queer people as Vice Versa did. Not until The Homosexual Citizen was established in Washington, D.C., in 1966 did the first truly activist queer press begin. Quickly thereafter, queer magazines with a similar activist intent sprung up all around the country, ultimately creating such an insistent, forceful, collective voice for gays and lesbians that their demand for equal rights finally became impossible to ignore. Stonewall, the famous 1969 New York City riot (in which gay men physically defended themselves during a police crackdown on the bar they were in), happened in great part due to that burgeoning press, and the age of the modern gay rights movement began. Now, in 1998, there are several national queer magazines being published, the most prominent, arguably, among them Out, Curve, XY, and The Advocate. "All these magazines generally seem more like Junior Scholastic than Newsweek," said third-year Matt Chayt. Whether that description fits some, or any, of these magazines is ultimately beside the point. What matters is that they are out there, (pun intended) continually giving a voice to queer people -- a voice that Newsweek can't do because it distinctly appeals to straight people. It covers straight culture since its editors and writers are straight and since its readers are mainly straight. Proof of this is the recent 75th anniversary issue of Time, which didn't include any coverage of gays or lesbians at all. And that type of exclusion, prevalent in any magazine which isn't explicitly intended for gays and lesbians, is why gays and lesbians need magazines like the following. For all their relative quality, they are the only press we have. Out Combining the main components of national queer magazines, Out is understandably the best-selling gay and lesbian magazine (as it proudly states on the cover). It moves effortlessly from fashion to movie stars to fitness to politics to health, to even art and commerce. Its April issue contains a 30-page fashion section, but also a sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, thoroughly honest look at how young gay men feel about sex. "I've subscribed to Out since its proximate beginning," said Bryan Lindert, vice-president of U.Va.'s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Union. "Its columnists, like Michelangelo Signorile, write relevant and cogent prose." Signorile, the person who began the practice of outing prominent people from their closets back in the late 80s, provides the most consistently political voice in Out. In the April issue, for example, he takes on Sex Panic! and what he considers its dangerous support of risky sexual behavior among gay males. Always a passionate defender of gay and lesbian rights, he nevertheless criticizes other such defenders if he feels the need to. In a national queer magazine like Out that could use some more politics in its glossy pages, Signorile refreshingly leads the way. Available at: U.Va. Bookstore, Barnes and Noble. Curve Following a trend of sorts, Curve bills itself as "the best-selling lesbian magazine." It seems to want to be something similar to Out, only it doesn't quite make it. Instead, it looks from the magazine rack like a nondescript music rag. Its March cover story is about Susie Bright, the nationally-renowned "sexpert," a subject who sounds promising enough, but the article borders on boring. The majority of the contents unfortunately aren't very compelling, and there were no politics to speak of at all. Rather, you find articles on such terribly important topics as the lesbian music scene in the U.K., fashion that features "elegant suits with masculine lines," and how the home is the answer to harmony and health. True, not every queer magazine needs to be explicitly political in its contents, but we can't forget that we still have work to do when it does come to the political. Available at: U.Va. Bookstore, Barnes and Noble. XY XY is the kind of magazine that calls into question the fundamental importance of all queer magazines. Infamous for its nearly soft-porn photo spreads of young guys that seem to appear every other page, it's hard to see its value, at least politically. It's "probably the single most damaging thing to the cause of gay rights," said Chayt, only semi-jokingly. "It's okay that it's filled with those pictures and everything, but they shouldn't try to pass it off as serious reporting or anything." That the magazine does try to pass itself off as a serious publication, one intended to promote a positive vision for young gay guys who might be coming to terms with their sexuality, is what's most problematic about it. The photos by themselves are harmless: who could find two high school boys making out in the locker room, as pictured in the December 1997 "California" issue, anything more than merely corny? But the fact that XY expressly aims to benefit young men, while filling its pages with nothing more than those very young men posed with few clothes on in sexy encounters, only hinders that aim. "XY is crap," said Lindert, and that might actually be the final judgment of its value. (Besides, the models are obviously straight.) Available at: Barnes and Noble. The Advocate If Out is America's best-selling gay and lesbian magazine, then The Advocate is America's gay and lesbian newsmagazine. At least that's what the cover proclaims. In truth, The Advocate is a newsmagazine, one just as fine as Time or Newsweek, only it comes from a queer perspective. For that, it's invaluable: No other national gay and lesbian magazine has the specific news focus of The Advocate. Then again, The Advocate is also the only national gay and lesbian magazine that originated during the 60s, a decade that politically galvanized American queers to the point that they successfully forced their agenda onto the national scene for the first time. Clearly, The Advocate remembers its radical heritage, and it shows in its pages. The queer press of the 60s was vital to making gays and lesbians into a political group to be reckoned with, and The Advocate is vital to continuing that struggle today. The cover story of the April 14 issue, for example, is about the contestation of gay rights between gay people and their opponents. Titled "What's So Special About Equal Rights?," it examines the religious right's clever strategy of renaming equal rights for queers "special rights," a misnomer that implies gay people are demanding special protection instead of equality. The article is thorough and hard-hitting, but the rest of the issue is also. Of course, the cover story two weeks earlier, "Gay Oscar Hunting," was an almost embarrassing wet kiss to Hollywood. Chayt considers the magazine "decent" even while it strikes him as too "tabloidy." Those adjectives, after all, are the two sides of national gay and lesbian magazines these days: a mix between actual journalism and superficial froth. Granted, the froth might outweigh the journalism more often than not, but that can easily be said of straight magazines too. Queer ones are just more fun. Available at: Alderman Periodicals Room, U.Va. Bookstore, Barnes and Noble.

back to Decweb main