Gay Marketeers

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When first started working as an openly lesbian journalist, there were hardly any out women in non-gay publications. Most everyone who was out was restricted to volunteer papers like Womanews and Gay Community News. At that time, being an out lesbian journalist meant paying a high professional price. As my grandmother would say, there was no money in it. As a result, the gay press, with a few exceptions like The Advocate, was run by disorganized but community-based collectives. If you could survive the collective, you could probably get your article published. Traditionally, people on professional journalism tracks stayed in the closet while the gay enterprises that had no professional future were left to the communities.

Today, gay journalism is a highly controlled and rigid phenomenon. Most of the glossy gay magazines or mainstream magazines with significant gay content subscribe to uniform styles, narrow scopes of coverage, and a sparse collection of opinions. Even though the idea of homosexuality has more social visibility, the spectrum of gay and lesbian opinion and experience represented in the media is far more narrow now than it was fifteen years ago.

In an effort to win advertising from producers of prominent luxury items, like Absolut Vodka and Kenneth Cole shoes, the glossy gay press represents its readers to advertisers as people with large discretionary incomes. Some gay magazines, in their prospectuses, claim readers with an average income of $55,000 a year. They claim gay men are the "most brand-loyal consumers" in the country. …