The New Gay » Gay Media Is Dead. Long Live Gay Media.

Zack' Ramblings: Gay Media Is Dead. Long Live Gay Media.

16 November 2009, 2:00 pm 12 Comments

This post was submitted by zack

tombstone

Besotted gay newspaper giant Window Media has closed its doors and the doors of its publications, which include Southern Voice, Houston Voice and DC’s own Washington Blade.

The Blade is America’s oldest and most respectable “gay newspaper of record.” Its loss is a terrible one for the local and national community. While some progress has been made, the mainstream straight media rarely has room for the daily trials and tribulations of the queer community. ENDA and Prop 8 make national headlines, but there is a significant amount of overlooked “minutia” that will largely go unreported without The Blade and its sister publications. Legislative action, hate crimes, the opening and closing of gay businesses — without The Blade, there aren’t a whole lot of other print news outlets that will cover these things.

But that’s a moot point, isn’t it? The loss of the Washington Blade is not endemic to our little pink corner of the newsstand. For reasons numerous (and already well-documented) it is unlikely that we will end this decade without seeing paperboys biking around with satchels full of laptops. The written word is staking a new home online and many more newspapers will go the way of the rotary phone before all the gray dust settles.

So the world at large is losing something. The pleasures of passing a long metro ride with a folded paper, the guarantees of accurate and fact-checked information in any given article, the false Rockwell-ian notion of an entire community uniting around a printed document that reflects all their needs.

While the gay community will feel this loss along with everyone else, I believe that the death of our print media also puts us in a unique position of potential advancement. For as much as The Washington Blade’s news coverage has been a boon for its readers — thanks to the thankless, undying dedication of writers like Lou Chibarro and Amy Cavanaugh — it’s culture coverage amounts to nothing less than a shackle.

The struggle that queer people face today is as much cultural as political. Though we have light years to go in terms of equal rights and protection under the law, we are going to have some serious problems down the line if we can’t reconcile our status as ghettoized minorities with our ability to define for ourselves how we choose to enact our queerness in the larger world.

In short? Gay media should reflect the world around it, not the other way around. The Blade’s insistence on only covering the most vapid, the most A-list, the most anti-intellectual, camp-at-all-costs, male dominated aspects of our life have done real and lasting damage to the 90% of us who don’t fit so narrow a rubric.

I’m just a white guy in skinny jeans who wanted to read about The Gossip instead of Kylie and I found myself alienated. I take only the most basic and superficial steps away from the mainstream in most of my component parts. Our community’s women, transfolk and people of color consistently saw themselves ignored or tokenized in The Blade’s cultural coverage. Anyone who didn’t fit an inch-thick definition of what it means to be GAY would seldom have found themselves represented in the Blades’ pages.

While this has lead to no amount of frustration on the parts of the queer disenfranchised, it also has lead to a groundswell in alternative queer media. People have long trusted rogue voices like Pam Spaulding and Andrew Sullivan to provide them with the news and opinions they could no longer rely on from their local gay newspaper.

I pray that this is not the last time we as a community get so thorough a document of our own lives — again, a paper like the Blade has the resources for fact-checking and thorough, long-term reporting that few blogs do at this juncture — but I can’t help see these developments as the felling of one of the last monoliths of gay culture, one of the final propagators of the idea that we all occupy some feather-boa’d hive mind.

If a city lies in ruins around you, do its citizens mourn its passing or work on rebuilding it in their own image? Though my heart goes out to all the now-unemployed veterans of Window Media, I feel a giddy sense of excitement about what can happen when gay people define their own lives instead of counting on a blind and withered puppet king to do it for them.

12 Comments »

chrisafer said:

The Blade may not have been perfect, but its history is something to be admired. Be careful dancing on its ashes so soon, Zack. You might burn your feet.

16 November 2009 at 5:02 pm

Scott said:

Tacky. You don’t dance on the grave so soon.

16 November 2009 at 8:46 pm

Why the LGBT Press Matters? « The NLGJA Blog said:

[...] idea was reinforced in an oddly axe-grinding post by former Blade writer Zack Rosen at The New Gay. Rosen complained about the Blade’s culture [...]

16 November 2009 at 11:17 pm

JMan said:

Harsh but true. And we’re talking about a newspaper here, those things that were supposed to be in the business of giving us the unvarnished truth. A business implosion that hurts the community is no time for mawkish poetry.

The Blade under it’s original owners was staid but substantive. It mattered. Then along came three guys, Waybourn, Crain, Unger, who were basically poster boys for the insular mindset Zack describes: one much older white gentleman who wanted a big salary and bragging rights and part-time dithering with an art gallery, his middle-aged white conservative circuit party cohort, and funded by a recently-out white man of means who dabbled in producing shows in NY.

Hello. Any surprise these guys actually believed that Jeff Gannon–a white conservative former escort who sneered at regular gays and wouldn’t say whether he was himself–had something to say to the rest of us as an editorial columnist? Any wonder we started seeing more Rosie and advice on how to go shopping at the expense of covering the changes (and threats) in our community?

And it was all run like an admiring wannabe mini version of the bigger corporate bubbles: debt, acquire, more debt, more acquire.

Like the bigger party, it too was bound to fall in on itself. And it took some hard working people, and the community’s need for info as ammo, along with it.

17 November 2009 at 9:15 am

Kyle said:

I remember when the Blade was good. While I’m sure a few of their most recent writers were still good, the paper as a whole had become irrelevant under the aegis of it’s corporate owners. While it was going downhill, Metro Weekly was improving its local coverage. As for national news, The Advocate while not stellar, still suffices. I’ve heard rumors they want to restart the Blade. I hope that if they do, they restore the integrity of local ownership and reporting, and include writing on a diversity of cultural and scene topics, and not only the narrow focus on circuit queens.

17 November 2009 at 9:27 am

Stas said:

The Blade hadn’t been a local paper in ages. I hate to say it but it came off as very lazy. They would just run the same stories that every other paper owned by Windows media ran. Sure they might do a story on DC if it took place no more than 3 blocks away from their offices, but not if it conflicted with some story pasted from Southern Voice. I really will miss the Blad for the paper it used to be, but I’ve been missing that for like 10 years now. Metro Weekly, Baltimore Out Loud and Baltimore Gay Life took up the Local reporting and replaced the Blade a long time ago.

17 November 2009 at 12:08 pm

Jose said:

I am just upset that I now have to find a new way to advertise my escort services, fuck.

17 November 2009 at 4:19 pm

MarkDC said:

Darn where will I find Bitch Session now? Oh, right. Just go to [insert name of bar here].

RIP Bitch Session.

17 November 2009 at 5:12 pm

Nick said:

Damn now I can’t get all that compelling news on circuit parties, interviews with drag queens and Q&A with underwear models.

17 November 2009 at 6:39 pm

adam said:

rip bitch session.

17 November 2009 at 8:07 pm

James said:

I would rather see a smaller paper than one with so much not GLBT coverage. There are numerous media out there covering culture including Metro Weekly and City Paper. The Blade was once a great newspaper and any new effort needs to move back in that direction. When it started it was more about the local community but somewhere along the way they lost their compass and seemed to let their ego’s take control become more interesting in having a national status. This caused many people, especially younger GLBT individuals not to see it as their paper as they unfortunately have less interest in the political side of events. Too many young people and minorities do not feel their issues are adequately covered at the local level. Reading the Blade one could get a lot of political news and opinions and learn about the clubs but less about the local community. Hopefully a new paper will stop being lazy and wasting space on a Birth Section just because it takes little work and cost little.

18 November 2009 at 1:29 am

Chase said:

Now if only International Male would go out of business!

19 November 2009 at 1:00 pm