boy culture

The Original Fierce Advocate Is Now A Fierce Insert?

UPDATE: Regent is claiming that the Queerty story is false, though the long-winded letter about the future of the magazine does not flatly say "there is no truth to this" so much as it says they're "making strategic and sometimes difficult staff changes," all to strengthen The Advocate's brand. Is Queery just not a fan of Regent in the way it's not a fan of Barack Obama—to the point where any negative story is better than the truth? Or is Regent b.s.ing  and a year from now The Advocate doesn't exist? Read Regent's full reply here.

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I can't think of one snarky thing to say about the death of the leading gay-issues newsmagazine, The Advocate—it has been announced it will now be a 32-page insert inside Out. Which itself will die at some point, probably not years and years from now. It's hard to overstate the loss to the gay community. 

The Advocate has been around for 40 years chronicling gay news, following politics, tracing fads, providing a means by which stars (gay and straight) could directly reach a captive LGBT (not just G and not just L) audience. The death of The Advocate feels like a symptom of the admittedly slow death of "gay" as an identity. More and more, LGBT people are of the mindset that gay shouldn't matter. It shouldn't, but it does—abandoning it prematurely is only going to lead to things that will make us wish for it back again.

  

 When Boy Culture premiered, the party was sponsored by The Advocate. Having its imprimatur on that party made me so proud. I also once did a phoner with Harvey Fierstein for The Advocate. How gay was that sentence? And in a move that thoroughly enraged my slightly older, infinitely less everything else boss, I was chosen as one of "30 under 30" by the magazine—an honor I still can't believe I was lucky enough to receive.

The death of the gay print media (the rest are not long for this world and will also be missed) is a microcosm of the death of all print media (ditto). It's going to be up to bloggers and other on-line reporting/opinion-making to pick up the slack—and frankly, I don't think we're up to the job. For one thing, for many of us, blogging isn't a "job," even if it's hard, time-consuming work. (Queerty is where I found out about The Advocate, and Queerty is no Advocate.) I'm not trying to get a swelled head about it—just the opposite!—but face facts: The surviving print media doesn't give two shits about gay rights and gay issues unless it's that one, nationally appealing case (Matthew Shepard) that comes along every decade.

I will genuinely miss The Advocate—and I think once its absence settles in, many of us will miss what it takes with it.

Palin's Drone

Looks to me from the on-line ad above that Mike Bloomberg's campaign is trying to make it seem like his rival, Bill Thompson, is endorsing his in this Tuesday's election! Not that he needs it, but he's wicked enough to have done this purposefully just for shits 'n' giggles. Some random guy becomes the face of Bloomberg's ad and he resembles Thompson rather a lot:

In more pungent NY (state) election news, moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava has surprised everyone and suspended her campaign three days before the election in the face of a mountain of backlash from truly nutty, far-right Republicans who have come out of the woodwork to support someone who might be even crazier than they are, Conservative Party candidate Douglas Hoffman. Hoffman knows NOTHING about the district he's running to represent and backed out of a debate after an embarrassing interview with the editorial board of the local paper, and yet stupidity and incompetence do not matter to the new breed of wingnuts (spear-headed by Sarah Palin, whose endorsement helped swing the race to Hoffman's favor) as long as a candidate is a complete caveman when it comes to social issues and willingness to spout Obama conspiracy theories.

Douglas Hoffman (left...but very right!) and Democrat Bill Owens (right...and fairly right for a lefty). 

It's a shame if Hoffman wins for those reasons, but also because the mainstream media will no doubt gobble this up as proof that the teabaggers are somehow gaining traction. In reality, this is a district that has only elected Republicans for the past 150 YEARS. So the fact that a Democrat was poised to eke out a win until three days out (and might still win), causing a Republican to drop out so that a third-party candidate might take the lead...that is the real story. 

This was a special election anyway. Let the lunatic win and be in office for just over a year and guess what happens to him in 2010? Destroyed by a conservative Democrat or a conservative Republican.

P.S. Speaking of the mainstream media, the AP reports that Scozzafava is encouraging her supporters to vote Hoffman. Not so. Her statement said NO SUCH THING.

Striking Gold

Snippets from Bea Arthur's final interview. I hope they'll release the entire thing sometime soon since that Lunching With a Legend show doesn't sound like a sure thing to hit the airwaves. Thanks to Stephen for the tip.

Propaganda Tools

www.thedailyshow.com

FOX needs to be called out again and again. I'm all for dissent, but it really does go so far beyond that—the opinion element is completely indistinguishable from the news element. It's a joke; so is The Daily Show, but at least it's supposed to be!

A World Of Heart

I like Adam's song; it reminds me of George Michael and Lady GaGa both and he occasionally sounds like Phil Collins in a strange way—he's definitely singing in a different style than we're used to hearing that huge voice. And, surprisingly, the music reminds me faintly of this. So far, so good.

Teach Your Children Well

One teacher told his class their tax dollars were going "to pay some black fag in New York to take pictures of other black fags." Another teacher allowed his tenth-grade students the option of visiting a site to read about the occurrence of homosexuality in animals. Guess which one got a warning and which one got suspended and could lose his job? 

Adam Gives The Fingers

This is more like it. I like this cover for Adam Lambert's "For Your Entertainment" single. (Note that the stars are from Pink Is the New Blog.) It's really great. My only criticism is the back of his hand is so PhotoShopped it loses all depth and doesn't look right. Otherwise, very Theda Bara...in a good way:

We Will Carey You

Forgive me—I know I'm utterly juvenile to put this up (with an assist from Chris), but it's so well done and it coincides with an interesting factoid: After four weeks on the charts, Mariah's Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel has failed to sell what Madonna's Hard Candy sold in just its first week! 

Before you think I'm gloating, here's what this really means: Madonna's next proper album will probably sell even less than what Memoirs is selling, and Mariah's next will sell less than that and so on and so forth. The plunge in album sales is to the point now where you can't really even judge relative success or failure in that area—even records from just a year or so ago (Hard Candy) were selling far better than many are today.

Are CDs going to exist in 10 years?

Taking Beautiful Music Together

Former 98° (hey, I still remember the Mac shortcut to make the degrees symbol!) heartthrob Jeff Timmons is a sweet guy in real life...and apparently a generous one, too. You can get his entire new album free for the taking when you register at his official Web site. Boy can sing. 

Dead Man's Bluff

I don't know what they're putting in the water in South Carolina, but they should switch it to saltpeter when 66-year-old civil servants need to take 18-year-old hookers, Viagra and a "bag" of sex toys to cemeteries on their lunch breaks.