Get Used to It: Ep. 51, "Gay Media"

my [Applause] [Music] hi i'm sheila kuhl welcome back to get used to it i say welcome back you didn't miss the first hour we're just actually starting out but we've been around for five years and we're happy to be back talking to you today as usual we have some incredibly intelligent people talking about an incredibly interesting subject for the gay and lesbian community and this one has to do with the so-called gay press or at least the treatment of gay and lesbian bisexual transgendered and we don't know who's coming next issues questioning that was it questioning people in the press we only know i think as will rogers said and i'm paraphrasing what we read in the papers and the question is what papers are we reading and therefore what are we reading in those papers now that i've been incredibly confusing let me introduce you to my wonderful guests today first judy weeder who is the editor-in-chief of the advocate news magazine a 30-year-old publication devoted primarily to gay and lesbian issues and primarily for a gay and lesbian audience maybe judy is the first woman ever to serve as editor-in-chief of that magazine and that could be a whole show in itself hey judy welcome welcome to get used to it thank you ernest hardy who is a freelance writer who writes primarily for rolling stone for the la weekly and for hip-hop magazines and writes about race and sexuality and its impact on our larger culture i guess and vice versa welcome ernest we're happy to have you here thank you glad to be here thank you and finally george biaggi who is the associate uh publisher of the gay and lesbian times which is published in san diego but serves southern california he was the former editor of that paper i guess we consider that a local paper because it only goes to 1 12 of the population of the country which is what southern california has believe it or not welcome george happy to have you here glad to be here judy we'll start with you uh some of the issues that i raised uh somewhat jokingly but not really uh in my introduction uh and i guess the the first question or and you can answer it any way we want go anywhere you want is why would we have gay and lesbian press rather than just attempting to write about our issues and have them read about in the mainstream press well i think as far as the advocate is concerned at being 30 years old this press existed before stonewall so you're talking about something where there was a time believe it or not with all the press we're getting right now there was a time that that was the only place you could write about gay and lesbian issues so you're in this magazine you're talking about something that has evolved and evolved and evolved to the point where we are now trying to compete with a world that has changed and um something that people will not shut up about let alone um you know there was a time you simply couldn't talk about anything that was going on with gays and lesbians unless you did it in the advocate you know then other gay and lesbian publications came along and then of course right now it's uh everywhere you go we have to figure out well what is for us what what should the advocate be covering what can we do that's going to be different and make this paper still so relevant to our readership which is an ongoing very difficult problem well but why is it important to our community to have this kind of a thing i mean it's it's a news magazine right right and it's a national magazine right how is it different from time magazine because we are only dealing with issues in the world that affect this readership even if we are going to look at something that's happening with president clinton we're going to look at something that is about the gay and lesbian issues our spin on it our view of it if it's being covered in time magazine you're still being covered from the outside looking at us rather than us looking at it from our own point of view and bringing to it all the history that the advocate would have as a as a news gathering organization for all these years so what is the difference i mean what is can you say that we have a point of view as opposed to yes i i i definitely think that does it go beyond we're okay i think it certainly does in the sense that where everything is really about the the the uh determination to have equal rights in this country and so that whatever we're examining we're looking at it you know with that kind of an overview and saying well is this fair don't don't we need to educate our own readers about what this could really mean to us what the impact of this is going to be that's the kind of thing time magazine why are they going to bother doing that you know they're only having a small population of their readers who who care who are interested even the the interview they did with ellen degeneres um if you if you look at it it's a one-page q a that does all come down to yep i'm gay whereas if we could have that interview that we are we have been going after for a very long time with her it will be very very different because there are questions that gays and lesbians have about ellen that nobody is asking do i hear in something you just said that some of us are not all that anxious to be uh profiled in the gay press yeah i i think so i mean i can't i don't want to necessarily say this is you know an ellen degeneres situation but i think that we are amazed at the advocate the response that we get from people people who are out people whose work everybody knows about and who are not necessarily you know in the closet or worried about that that's a whole other situation for the advocate but people who are out would be much happier profiled in some mainstream magazine or newspaper but the advocate it's like oh that's very gay you're really gay if you're in the advocate and that's like that just comes with a history you could talk about you know um internalized homophobia you can talk about a lot of things when you have um you know when that situation comes up for us because i'm constantly puzzled at the people that turn us down or the people that aren't available and then we hear they'll do something else that suddenly they had time for when they didn't have time for this magazine well i guess it would seem you were you were saying something about your the the wholeness of your life being exclusively about being gay i mean i can only i can only imagine because wouldn't bother me you know to uh to be written up as as i have a number of times and you know the gay press right but i can i guess the notion must be this magazine is only about gayness and if i want to make a statement that i'm not only about gayness as i guess some people do that there might be some some fright to it well i think that the assumption is is that this makes you all and only gay whereas again i think that when you have a magazine that is hauling this family tree of history along with every interview everything every contemporary thing that happens sort of resonates with you know with the saga of aids the saga of stonewall you know as as really as which is a different situation from being a five-year-old magazine or something more contemporary something that was born in the 90s there is that feeling that they are suddenly going to attach themselves to the whole landscape of having been gay or lesbian and for some people that's a big thundering thing to take on and i think that sometimes we we hit resistance around that i'm not necessarily saying that's how we present people in the magazine it's just the feeling they bring to the magazine how do you make decisions about uh the balance that you might strike between uh sort of the positive stuff that our community really sort of needs to read about itself and feel good about itself and the truth sometimes or an incisive critique i mean you're a news magazine how do you make those decisions well first of all we are a news magazine so um the engine or the drive should always be the news if something's happening in the news i don't say oh that's just a little unpleasant i'm not going to put that in the magazine but i might go for a viewpoint or talk to a columnist or some of the other things that that are in the magazine that can change color and add some kind of balance to what's going on in the rest of the magazine now of course you're putting this together within a two-week cycle so i have to figure it out as it's as it's unfolding because again it's the news which is so different from i mean i've worked in a lifestyle magazine and it's a completely different puzzle you are making more decisions i'll do a little fashion i'll do a little travel i can lighten it up this way i can look at drugs i can look at you know this scene in that scene and and and put together something that's very well balanced with the news magazine things are coming up and you need to report it investigate it analyze it you know that's the the mission statement of the advocate so what i would do then to to answer your question is i might you know go for a photo essay or a or a columnist or a commentary that would either come at it from a whole other point of view do something very funny about it um try to to get a sort of on the other hand feeling about it also what we choose to represent you know for the photograph and it might help a little bit but um i i try for balance sometimes you are you know what's coming up is grim and you need to go with that because ultimately it's the truth what about if the if the news is some major disagreement in our community oh i mean there's a critique of some of the gay press that it's you know that it essentially bashes our own as though that was something that we should avoid right and certainly we have gotten um a lot of angry uh responses for the fact that we do not sit there and stroke our leaders or our organizations and we don't just go yeah you know whatever you know just you're you're lovely and you're doing a grand job and we wouldn't dare mention that you also screwed up the funding or you did this or you did that we have often been um accused of not being supportive enough and and since i've been editor-in-chief i try very hard to also because i walked into a situation in which every gay leader was like oh and now what are you gonna do to us you know we've been eaten up and spit out by the advocate for years which i'm not necessarily saying is true but i certainly think that our job is to be very incisive and honest and clear clear-eyed about what we're reporting because i think you can get you can make up your own mind if people are giving you the facts i certainly think that if somebody is attacking the hrc i also want to hear from elizabeth burge and if somebody is saying wonderful things about elizabeth birch then i want to hear from you know somebody who is have some doubts about what's going on because i think that's what the reader should have i think we whether we like it or not we should be informed how about you ernest what do you see your role as being i mean this is i don't know whether we'll get into maybe whether you chose not to specifically work um in the gay press not that everybody in the world has to but how do you see what you do in writing about as you said about race and sexuality in the larger context well that's a broad question yes i'm constantly sort of re-evaluating what my role is and what my own challenges are as a writer what i bring to the table and at this moment i think there's a sort of common denominator of banality and covering issues that affect minority communities whether it's of color sexual orientations what have you and i feel for instance that there's been a sort of co-opting of a lot of language from the feminist movement from the gay rights movement from the civil rights movement that the language is co-opted but the ideas behind it and the reasons behind the movements are sort of either still ridiculed or ignored and but you'll have the language put forth so you'll have something like um right wingers after president clinton using language or feminism saying we know we're supporting women's rights that's why we're doing this and that's an example and i feel that i sort of have a responsibility to bring the actual ideas to the table and explain why it's not just new language that's necessary but the actual exploring of ideas behind the language so are you struggling with your editors as well as um you know with your communities or uh are your communities going you know right on right on and well it's both actually be surprised i mean i think human beings have a natural desire to fit in and make as few waves as possible so quite often the very communities that you're writing to represent will be some of your most hostile um you know readers i mean at the same time a lot of editors will think that you're being self-serving or that you have some sort of you know limited political agenda if you if you step up and say well actually we need to expand this idea or the interpretation that you're putting on it is not at all what i intended well if you talk about oppression and liberation uh people are going to think you have a political agenda but your community is not going to want to admit that they're oppressed and need to be liberated right right they're just trying to fit in right right kind of what you mean yeah that yeah but haven't we seen an explosion sort of in the mainstream press of at least some interest in us i mean first of all they didn't as kate clinton once said they didn't spit up when they used the word gay and lesbian i mean i think there's been an interest but um sort of going back to what judy was saying before when when time magazine covered ellen degeneres um that article was very unfulfilling i mean i thought um a lot of a lot of the coverage i've seen recently um in terms of why why the show has seemingly failed and the criticism has been very interesting to me i mean you'll read things where people say oh but we're you know this issue is tired why are we why would we be laboring at this point you know the writer will say i have lesbian friends and they think this show is boring it is no it's not worth going into this blah blah blah and again i think it's one of those things where the language of progressive political thought is used to mask someone's own homophobia or their own discomfort with the subject but they sort of present themselves as come on we're over this issue let's move on and that's not really what's going on so what do you think you're doing in your writing um hopefully okay what do you hope you're doing in your writing hopefully bringing as i said before bringing the actual issues to the table i mean there is a reason why ellen's show is relevant there is a reason why um i mean i really hate to go back to hiding behind children because i think in our culture right now anyone who's making a political or cultural point always says it's for the children but having said that um it's for the choice that's what i always say but having said that i think it is for the children in a lot of in a lot of ways and not just the children who are 16 or 17 but also the children who are 40 years old and haven't really reconciled a lot of issues within themselves and i know a lot of grown women who were just like terribly moved by by ellen's um coming out episode in the subsequent episodes and didn't feel that she was belaboring a point you know that um the process of her getting a girlfriend the process of her um having discussions with her friends who are sometimes uncomfortable and other times sort of flippant i mean these are all great sources of of comedy and i think for the most part the show handled it fairly well um and i think a lot of the backlash that you saw in the mainstream media was people's discomfort with the subject matter to begin with and it wasn't really a fair critique of the writing or the acting or the whole project you know but in terms of the work that you do say with the weekly i mean intern because you're you write fairly often for the weekly and as well as for rolling stone right um do you feel that you are allowed to and encouraged to express sort of your the fullness of who you are and how and what you want to say i don't i'm not looking for only a yes or no but it's interesting to me it really varies i mean i personally feel that there's a huge i don't want to say backlash but you know the the idea of identity politics has really taken a real beating in the last few years and i think um i think homophobia and racism and massaging in this culture are still very very strong and they are masks and they're they're um very insidious and i think my responsibility as a writer writing about culture is to try and pull back the mask and and there is a lot of resistance now because everything is so incredibly bottom line driven and editors don't want to you know offend publicist don't want to offend advertisers you know don't want to um upset celebrities or what have you and it's it's a constant battle to get real ideas and to bring all that i think i have to offer as a black man as a gay man and the very distinct perspective i think that offers me um on culture bringing that to the table is very difficult because most of the media whether it's mainstream or so-called alternative at this point really wants press releases and it's not a matter of simply saying you know does the gay press simply no is the gay press guilty of going gay is good it's not it's not that simple i think across the board there's a real dumbing down of political and cultural concerns and well some of that i mean i feel the same way because a million things will happen in a week in sacramento and i won't find them anywhere anywhere um i won't find them in specialty i won't even find them in people's newsletters right and it's partly because a lot of it goes on behind and they're not exactly closed doors but there's just not very many people who show up to listen even though they're open doors and so simply to get some kind of information out much less something that wouldn't just be called a spin but an analysis which is sort of different from a spin and we kind of look to the fourth estate to be interested and to you know to ask the questions but it's interesting to me that what the times has done in not just in san diego because we get the times the gay and lesbian times in l.a and orange county et cetera is looks to me like it tries to include not just local news but also international news and national news etc but tell me what you think the difference is or why why do you do a local gay paper as opposed to national or or publishing in a sort of to a broader community i think there's probably three reasons why we we tend to focus on local events and local happenings and the need for a local paper one is to hearken to the children aspect is what we do for the children there are many people that are coming out of the closet and people that live in an urban area lucky enough to have a local gay publication that's sometimes their first entree into the into the community i know that when i first moved to san diego and was coming out i would deliberately go into hillcrest every thursday and pick up every single gay publication i could get my hands on and at the time san diego had three at times we've even had four it's a kind of a strange phenomenon but we've always had multiple publications and i would read it from cover to cover it was the first opportunity i had to read about something gay happening in my neighborhood and it's a free publication so we go to many different distribution outlets so someone can walk into a coffee house uh undercover run over pick up the paper fold it stick it in their pocket and get home and learn about the community and when they do that the nice thing about local publications is we will print things that would never make it into the mainstream press that would never get into the ut and i'm talking about a bake sale for an aids agency to sports scores from a softball league to events of the imperial court to things that are happening at clubs to self-help groups that are happening at the center things they would never get elsewhere we get to do that on a weekly basis and give everyone kind of an outline of what's happening in their community that week so it's invaluable and i think it gives folks a sense of the community that they're they could be a part of even if they haven't taken that first step into the community uh also i think from the aspect of our advertisers the people that support a free publication in the gay community we're extremely loyal we when someone supports our community and we know that they're putting putting themselves out on the line whether it's a gay owned or a gay friendly company we'll feel comfortable going to their business we know we can take our lover our friends our family to their business and not feel ostracized or feel like we can't hold hands when we go into the business and it's been amazing over the years how mainstream the advertising base has become car dealers and restaurants that aren't even in the gay ghetto so to speak um want to uh want to tap into not only the community's wealth but the community's feeling of um belonging and a sense of uh fact that there is a loyalty factor to folks that that support the community so i think for people coming out uh it's important i think for uh notification of those that are supportive of the community it's it's uh it's certainly important but it's more than just a newsletter with you know absolutely we're having meetings at six o'clock right we do international news national news regional news and then city news so uh there's a lot out there and i think that's another important point is there's a vibrant happening gay community all across the world that folks are interested in and it's it's great stuff and you can page through our publication any week and find out what's happening in dubai and what's happening in des moines and what's happening you know on delaware street you know so it's uh it cuts across the entire spectrum of happenings and and it's not all happy news i mean sometimes it may be a a series of gay bashings that happened in thailand and it may be an aids agency closing down in new york city or it may be uh you know a hate crime that happened in hillcrest we don't you know dress up only the good stuff we we kind of trot everything out there and uh i think there's a responsibility especially for the local press to report the good and the bad we have a motto um at the gay and lesbian times we don't want to read about something happening in our community outside of our community there would nothing nothing would make me more disturbed on a thursday to pick up the union tribune and find out something happening with one of our local organizations that wasn't necessarily good that we didn't even get a chance to review on our own or to give our own spin and i think the spin is an important is an important concept that we think about our own community and we have views of our community much differently than those that have not been exposed to uh the inner workings of the gay and lesbian community so it's very important for us to be able to give our spin on an issue uh from with our insights and i totally agree with you with regard to what's happened with ellen uh i think it's a great show i think it's a funny show i think it's a very touching show and i'm disturbed by people in the gay and lesbian community that tell me it's too gay or too lesbian i'm thinking how can a show be too gay or too lesbian she's a lesbian she's coming out when i came out my entire life was about being gay those first couple of months i mean i remember phone calls to my mom she'd be like do you always have to talk about everything being gay and but mom this is what this is what's happening and i think the show is right on the money i think abc has done a lousy job of promoting it and i think the fact that they're using this ratings guys is a is their own fault they haven't done anything to help the show out and i know ellen's frustrated and i hope that another network's going to pick it up well it's interesting because we've all we've also if you all insist on talking about ellen and her show which of course when we re-run this show in a year everybody's going to go well it's all different now but it's fine it's fine because we you know that is not print and yet it's made such an impact culturally that it almost sounds to me like it was it was the most important cultural event nothing that happened in print but what happened in print afterward was interesting because those critiques were not critiques that you saw on television those critiques were critiques that you saw in print absolutely right people were quoted as saying this this is and around coffee tables and you know whatever but um i i wonder i i love the style of the game lesbian times but it's also kind of snapshots of international and national news it gives us a sense i think of truly of community but i don't know whether there's any attention paid to the the question of analysis where i do see analysis and i wonder if you think this is something not done by any of the other um you know more national press is where something happens in san diego right or around in southern california get a long sort of news analysis of it sure because you've got your own homophobes right right down there oh absolutely absolutely and i mean that that's the the venue of a local community paper where you can expound on something even through a series of you know four or five weeks and follow a story from start to finish and interview all the interested parties on both sides and and do an analysis uh we had an example kgtv the local abc outlet um went undercover at a men's bathroom in at san diego state and they uh they took a camera into a stall based on information they got off the web for this webmaster who lists all the public sex places in the united states in the world that you can go to find quick anonymous sex they actually took a camera into a stall filmed people exposing themselves or having sex and then ran it all over during sweeps weeks which supposedly happened on a lot of abc affiliates across the country we were able to take a step back interview the webmaster interview the woman who did the story for kgtv interview their uh the head of the news department talked to a to a psychotherapist about what's going on there post anonymous interviews on the web to ask people that actually do participate in this kind of sexual encounter why they do it and then also to print an expose on what the law is with regard to public sex you'd never see that in the union tribune you would just see the the dirty part of it the sensationalized men are having sex in bathrooms again well there's a lot more going on here a lot of it has to do with the closet a lot of it has to do with uh you know easy access through the internet you know which has changed a lot of a lot of the ways that we deal with uh with news but that's something that you you know that we get to do um carte blanche we we can we could devote 30 pages that if we wanted to and then the advocate you know also was picking up this information saw your paper and we're in the process of taking which is also a good way to discuss the difference of what we do is taking because they did an in-depth about what was happening exactly what he just said and we see it happening all over the place now and the advocate not only can take it to a national level but see what the trend is and why now why now would that be okay and we sat around last week and we said why now well when you have 2020 talking about some woman accusing the president of groping his genitals and this it's like hey the doors are open people want more more more more so suddenly you know gay is always a hot thing to go for and we'll really get down and dirty on this and i think that that's a great example of showing both why we need the gay press because we have our own spin our own angle and our own way of looking at it and also how the local press helps the national press look at something that's happening and saying my god this isn't isolated this is happening all over the place what does it mean well it's interesting though they think we're all about sex anyway and i guess in a way it's not a you know a wrong critique or analysis because the frankly at bottom the only thing that distinguishes us is who we're having sex with or if we want to expand it sort of affectional preference or whatever but i think all people are dealing gay straight whatever are dealing with sex as something that's a big old deal to them and so that yes here we are with this one little quirk that doesn't uh you know that they can grab onto and what should it be it should be sex what would they care if it was who we ate dinner with or who we went to the movie you know that's nice nobody cares they care about sex no matter what you're talking about in the press i mean that's what sells papers literally but does it go ahead i was also going to say that i think judy was saying at one point they were sitting on the table and asking why but i think when you have you know elton john being knighted and ellen on the cover of magazines and you know all these different characters on sitcoms coming out and blah blah blah i think again that goes just part of the backlash that um you have no you have to be reminded the public has to be reminded of how horrible this all really is if if all these normal faces if the pop star you fly after 20 years is skin and he and his lover are showing up at movie premieres if you know rupert everett steals a movie from julia roberts and middle america is saying he's the man that we love then not that it's anything else if we remind them how horrible they really are they need to reconcile something with what they've been taught for years and years and years ago so i think i think there's always like the sort of checks and balances mechanism in the media that's perverse and negative but it exists um you know a step forward to step back that sort of thing well it also gives us a chance to say something about what they're doing which i think is what you were and that's what's been missing i think you know it's very we try to explain to kgtv you know you didn't take it to the logical conclusion of talking to the people that were actually doing the acts why are they there why if you're a married man and your your wife is waiting for you to come home and your kids are there why are you stopping off at a university and having sex in a bathroom they but they don't want to hear the answer because then they might have to do it it lubricates them right exactly well we had in in terms of media and press when the kunan thing exploded this year and this is maybe another good example of what do we do and why should we do anything if the press was all over at the mainstream press we had the advocates sat there and said wait a minute they're on the cover of time with kunan they're on the cover of newsweek with kunan and orvisashi one or the other but that was the story even new york magazine was doing trophy boys what should we do and we can't ignore it what's for us that's going to be different and we wound up doing probably one of our most important cover stories this year on how the press was handling this murder and the fact that he was be calling being called a gay killer that you know tom brokaw was going on television call calling him a homicidal homosexual i mean like oh that's wonderful you know i mean what about a disturbed man who happened to be gay uh the way that it was handled was so revealing about where this country is at about gays and lesbians and that did happen right on the right on the heels of ellen right on all this wonderful glorious isn't it wonderful proud came this oh but excuse me just what you're saying let me let us point to the nightmare of what they're really like and it was kunan city and we had to we did the one thing as a gay press that the straight press could not do which was to look at the press and how they responded to this man and to this murder into this tragedy there there is a difference though sometimes i was gonna i mean ernest was right we want to explore what it's like being the first woman to be uh editrix in chief of the uh of the advocate um because it looks to me like a lot of the gay publications really are about sex or at least the way in which things are approached in terms of who the audience is i mean you know the okay i look at the ads and i think well this is not the lesbian news so i'm not going to look at all these ads but and i you know and i may look at the ads in the lesbian news but it's sort of the same thing now in the straight culture it's also the same whether you use a lot of sex and sexuality to sell stuff but i know that there has have been some struggles for you at the advocate is it how is it being the first woman editor there and well i think it's it's undiscussable actually but um you know i think that for me i have to uh deal with i mean deal with the fact that i'm that i have a publication that is at best in this in this ratio 70 percent men uh 30 women and that readership for the women has not really grown uh with me at the helm no matter what we do it doesn't seem to really grow i think that to be really really honest with you that i have a certain amount of feelings that are just puzzled about what women what gay women want um what do they want and i i recently you were there i gave a speech at the los angeles gay and lesbian center when when the advocate was honored in which i i sort of held up this cover story that we did this year on lesbians and breast cancer and um we were very proud of it you can only imagine nobody would do such a thing we did it and what i found happened really is like a you know walking illustration of where the gay men and gay women are at it was basically that the men looked at the big breast and hadn't even what is that it doesn't look like a penis it's not it's not them it's not them their narcissism wasn't being you know they couldn't look in a mirror and see themselves so they sort of walked by the cover and the women complained you know it was too perky it wasn't politically correct so it's so negative you know i mean they didn't want to be like breast cancer it was v and we had some really important things in that story that we had done a lot of investigating you know and came up with a couple of things that were specifically for lesbians and the you know the saga of what you do about breast cancer and why lesbians were getting it we did a lot of research i don't know who read it i really don't know it was very frustrating for us again this is not like a a cause the advocate is not a cause it's a business and we have to respond in some way to the marketplace i really believe that the marketplace tells us a lot about ourselves i think that men in general i mean i'm very pleased that you were talking about ellen because i have been surrounded very often by gay men who are like i'm bored i don't care this isn't about me and you know and really don't like the show so this was very encouraging for me but um you know by and large i think that men are just much more supportive when i was the editor of genre magazine which is i guess another show um i you know i i was amazed men would do photography for free they would write for free they would you know it's like support throw their money at things they're big tippers they you know there's there's just more that looks like them and they'll support that and the women really sit back and say i don't know i'm not sure is it possible to write for men and women in our community i mean it seems like such an uneasy alliance to me anyway i give us a lot of credit for trying i mean you know we're sort of dear we at least use the word racism we're a little worried about it we're going to try to do something about it and we worry about sexism but and we're going to try to work together because we're we're a community that communicates essentially could bridge just about every gap right because we have nothing in common except the sexuality and so we come from everywhere but is it possible i mean in your own writing ernest i think any minority community it's going to be an ongoing struggle to to define what is meant by community and it's always going to shift and change and it's not it's not it would be so easy if you could say this is a community and these are the issues that affect it and this is how we're going to cover it and present it etc but the bottom line is you know when you have people of different from different classes we have people from different um educational backgrounds we have people of different races it's always going to be a push and pull um when you have you know the gay community i mean i don't know i don't know if there is going to ever be an easy answer to to that question and and in all honesty i think there probably shouldn't be because the struggle will spur growth i think both in individuals and in the community and it keeps you on your toes and it's in it and it is a challenge and it can be awfully frustrating um especially when you know that you're doing your best and when you really are trying to reach out to a variety of um members of of a community well gender has always been a a huge divider in in a lot of communities and it it uh it's a question i don't know in our community whether gay men have a better sense of who they are and what they care about than lesbians do because i remember there was a huge gathering of lesbians where we were going to try to figure out now what is the lesbian agenda and at that time it was very difficult to separate issues from the larger feminist agenda because so many of those issues were about us and then there was a different spin as there are for women of color the question of you know can you work was not the issue for women of color it was how to work equally because all women of color were working and had to and the same thing i think with lesbians we had health concerns and you know concerns about children but i don't know of a publication that uh that we feel very well served by the lesbian news fills that niche and tries to but there's still a lot of critique you know of that how does that it's frustrating for me because we go round and round with this uh at our editorial meetings is how can we better serve the women's community and you know we've added a couple of columnists we've added a social columnist we just picked up the lesbian notions column which is really well written and nothing will break your heart more than when you've done a couple of cover stories and some features and uh some arts reviews on women and then a woman will call in and say you know you really don't have anything in that paper for me i don't think you're and what i'll do is i'll pick out the paper and say let's go through this together and 90 of the stories in a gay and lesbian publication that are newsworthy are general interest stories if there's an aids foundation that opens or if uh if there's a hate crime or a pride festival they're usually they cover both genders and then you can sit down and count the number of stories that you have and i'm sure you probably do the same in yours and sometimes it's about 60 40 it's certainly better than what the readership is you know our readership is about 75 25 and i can tell you to a person or to a story we have more than 25 percent general interest lesbian-based stories in our in our publication but the perception is reality and if someone doesn't think that we're doing a good enough job we need to keep trying to you know to get them better represented but i'm a little bit encouraged by uh the younger i think it's more generational i think maybe during the 70s when the feminist movement was kicking in and the lesbians were identifying this agenda the men were busy you know getting high and and you know and uh having sex and do and you know during the seventies the heathen keep dancing right but now i think these younger kids that are coming out in high school that have these support groups i notice at the euphoria coffee house it's guys and gals together they're they're doing things together the softball league the newer teams that are forming are co-ed and i'm thinking maybe maybe they're finally getting it these younger kids that are feeling more comfortable coming out in high school because they've got uh you know organizations that are gay and straight organizations together uh right they learn to work together earlier and they're criticizing us for this duality stuff you know because bisexuality is too limiting for them um they want to you know identify that this this question of sexuality is much more complicated and i think that the the latest movements that i've seen are very makes me feel very hopeful about it which leads me into sort of what may be the final question because i think it will we may have something to say about it what about the future what are the trends you said as a national magazine we have a chance to look around and see some trends we saw the as they they referred to it the other timothy mcveigh story in which it implicated questions about the internet and of course this was simply identifying somebody i i think on on aol and you know doing that kind of research to out him in in in the military and and get him out and that sort of backfired but trends that you see sort of coming in our community or in the larger world about our community well uh you know i think that a lot of things we've been talking about the visibility is is is a struggle for people and i think that many things like the internet and you know equal rights or being able to be in the military or being able to get married whether you want to or not personally these are things that um are absolutely essential because what they lead to is visibility what if you're in the army and you you know you're in there with somebody who's a homosexual you're going that you're going to have to deal for the first time maybe with oh that that's that's what this is all about and i feel that if um you know if we keep on pushing on these fronts that is going to be the most important thing that continues to happen which is that people feel safe enough in places to be able to come out and that is what changes everything i think the younger people as you're saying you know there may be many reasons why they're looking at you know of course all the old battles is a lot of baggage and they really just want to cut right through it the internet helps them whether you think of the internet as a grand closet or a great open space i mean there's there's different points of view about that i think that the again the the amount of experiences that people are having reading about seeing that keep this on the table and visible is is is clearly the trend sometimes it's horrifying because of the the nature or the spin that's going with it but still it's out there and i kind of believe that all the struggles like ernest is saying is fine as long as we just keep doing it you know more and more and more stuff will break loose um there's so many things one of the things that i find especially um heartening is young people of color who are coming out who at one point felt that they had to sort of cut ties with their racial group if they were going to be gay or lesbian are really very early on having this sort of synthesis of of race and sexuality um without near the drama or trauma that a lot of my friends and i seemed to have gone through and they're finding their they're finding support and and validation in places that you wouldn't expect i mean i see always like you know these groups where i live in hollywood these like groups of young gay cholos you know you see i mean there's tons of hip-hop clubs bringing up across the country now that are catering to a an urban you know black and latino clientele and these are gay hip-hop clubs and so i think um i think without necessarily putting it into vocabulary without necessarily having theories about it um identity is really going on with a lot of young people and it's just a natural thing for them and i think that's a really good thing and i hope that the the corporate machinery which is always so desperate for for a new thing and a new trend and you know gobbling up whatever is next um they're going to turn to that at some point i just hope that again the the ideas and the true relevance of it isn't isn't pulled away from from the surface um that's again that's another show i mean i've you know the whole notion of like a gay sensibility has already been so co-opted by the mainstream yet there's still so much homophobia so if if that machinery can actually pull both substance and style from some of these new occurrences it may or may not be another show because and i'm really struck by the fact that especially now most of what we know we we hear from people we don't know or we read something they've written that we don't know we see it on television we get it on the internet we we have opinions about it that we get maybe from our friends or in email or we may talk an email or even in chat rooms now but most of what we know the epistemology of it is really from people we don't know you know from our publications from fiction or from the fiction news that we kind of see on television and i think that if these ideas get co-opted in a way it will be because they're starting to have resonance kind of among you know among communities and starting to come back through popular culture it's so interesting how something will catch fire and uh and be an idea what do you see as these sort of trends the trends for me i think are limitless in the sense that if i look back to where we were just seven or eight years ago the whole concept of gay and lesbian marriage was not even i don't i don't think it was on the you know it wasn't on the scale nobody was even looking at it and here we are it's you know it might possibly become reality in hawaii maybe alaska it's happening in other countries the issues have come along so quickly that i feel that sort of with maybe with the civil rights movement or other struggles once the cat's out of the bag it's kind of tough to stuff it back in and i feel that the more people are getting feeling the ability to come out at earlier ages or even at later ages when you think that they have nothing to gain by coming out other than their own self-awareness you can't stop it and i think that as we come out which is still the most political i think event that any single person can do with the most political action it brings 10 15 20 people with them that may not even have a prior connection to the community they now can put a face to this movement it's very difficult to unlike someone that you already like because of something that they've shared with you and many times i've found people are closer to you once you can find something so important and you say you know i have something to tell you you know i'm a gay man and like the response has been well thank you so much for feeling that you could trust me with that or you could tell me that or bringing me into your family of gay friends or you know extended family and uh that is um i don't think you can put a price tag on that it's uh it's just amazing that but but there is a price tag on some of this stuff and some of it goes to the cost of publishing these things as well i mean i guess one of my questions goes to any conflict that you might feel and i'm not certain how this would play out in your work ernest you depend a lot on advertisement a lot and you were talking about the kinds of ads that you have that are really community ads in the advocate it's a little bit different um and you know i've been pretty critical about the fact that our community relies so much on booze ads and booze sponsors which seems to me that they see an opportunity when they want one and and they'll grab it do you have any conflict i remember when ms magazine decided they weren't going to take any more ads because everything conflicted with what they wanted to say which is where that reputation comes from does the advocate have a problem in that kind of conflict well you know we get our letters and we get you know about letters about you know smoking or alcohol or something like that it's a trade-off again you know it's um you know the other thing that the reader would want that comes along with being able to get a national advertiser is uh you know nice glossy pages and and you know be able to for the magazine to afford some really interesting news photos or you know better writers or it's a trade-off you know without that i think there would be a tremendous loss in getting people to be interested in reading some pretty difficult news stories sometimes so i mean and that's definitely the way that i look at it i understand that you know we have when you have a national advertiser coming into a magazine like the advocate which is not again a lifestyle magazine so you're not getting fashion as you're not getting that kind of fun stuff that's pretty adventuresome for them for coors or whatever to come into the advocate because they're coming into a magazine that is saying this world really can hurt people it's prejudice it's homophobic you know that's the news that's coming out in this magazine and it's not being done necessarily in a very pretty fun you know gosh aren't we happy-go-lucky people way and yet these national advertisers that you know the representatives are not necessarily gay are saying let's go in there and see if we can make some money off of this population let's go in there and see if it doesn't hurt our company i feel like it's another forefront um i certainly understand that you know gays and lesbians have liquor problems gays and lesbians have smoking problems what are we you know catering to that are we making it worse again it's um there's a trade-off for it and i think national magazines go through this all the time i mean it's not different for this population and i think there's something to be gained it would be great if all the ads were about wonderful things that had no effect on our health but that's not the way the world works and it doesn't work any differently in this magazine i think one of the tensions in this whole argument as well is a lot of people view it as a triumph when they are seen as a demographic you know that is their mark that we've arrived we are a desirable demographic and then there's a whole other you know school of thought that says i don't really want my um terms of humanity or whatever determined by the marketplace or i don't want i don't want the revolution you know waged on wall street what have you and i think i mean that to me is really one of the most interesting aspects of watching the ways that different gay and lesbian magazines present themselves i mean there are some that i i personally just would not read because i mean it's it's offensive to me i mean there's too much gloss and it's just like so clearly this is a demographic that we will deliver to corporate america and that's offensive to me and i really appreciate and respect those publications that are at least you know struggling and juggling the issues and try and and being realistic about okay we are a business but at the same time you know let's have some let's have some real meat um in these pages as well it looks like in the local papers it looks like party party party well we'd be dead without the advertising we're a free publication but what we try to do is have standards you know and you'll see it i mean there's some la publications that uh have a lot lower standards than we've got um there are certain parts of the mail anatomy we will not show uh certain parts of the female anatomy we will not show in an advertisement and that includes the sex ads in the back of the publication we just have certain hard and fast rules that we will not uh that we won't bend but uh we've tried to go out beyond uh you know receiving ads from alcohol uh sponsors and uh camel cigarettes or whatever to try and get the the car dealers and we've been fairly successful but i mean there are some even some mainstream advertisers we won't accept we're we're on the other side of the course argument we won't accept you know money from coors basically because we don't feel that things have changed enough with the way the corporate and the family funds are you know still coming see if you took a politician's point of view you would take the money from coors and write a story about how the family is putting money into homophobic organizations that are you know killing legislation you should say that yeah why stand by [Laughter] well it but it sounds like it might be difficult i'm not it is difficult you know i haven't seen the advocate really pandering to its advertisements that's not what i'm saying at all right well sometimes they'll have um i'm thinking of an ad that we had gotten a while ago that we ran once and it was a cigarette ad and it was it was ins you know i just kept puzzling at it when it first came in and uh it was it was almost like a heterosexual joke about two women and i kept looking at it and thinking oh this is this isn't you know and i think all the readers did that so i did go to the associate publisher and said um i think i'm going to take a lot of heat for this and he went to the company the cigarette company and they put together a different ad for us the next time but it's still a cigarette you know it's a cigarette but well but those are that's different i didn't mean to raise it like you have to turn out all ads that might be in jeopardy jeopardy i think was hurt it's difficult enough to write about something where people are oppressed and people are hurt and people are you know the you're you're talking about negative kinds of things and not not fun fun fun things if if that's mrs mission statement and they're they have an important thing to be doing then to also have had to go down to paper that looks sad and no pictures that look you know against personal opinion of my own i sort of sort of thought you know that's a little too much for me but the great thing about that is you know with them having made that decision and taking action based on that decision down the road other people can can learn from that and so you know we i actually have deep respect for that decision and applaud you know you having the integrity to stand behind your beliefs but the real world is a little more complicated but now we see red book doing the kinds of stories that miz was doing in his first year i mean it's just become a whole other identity so for them to reach outside of themselves and do something that's right difficult it's just like uh oh aren't they getting more interesting well i i i say this but i think we've we've not only finished our hour but i think we're even running into the next you know 65 minutes so i i would want i want to thank you all very much for being here this has been fascinating thank you for your work thank you for being there with us i want to encourage you to support your national and local gay and lesbian publications pick them up if they're free buy them if they're not talk back and certainly in terms of the so-called mainstream press you tell them that you want more stories about yourself and they better get used to it there you