thisisluisfernando asked: Do you think there's any hope for gay media? Also, what was it like interning for Out?
out was great - i met a bunch of people that i’m still good friends with and actually just sent my former boss a thank you card today for letting me hang around for so long. i thought for a while that i wanted to work for a magazine (a gay publication, specifically, as that’s what i was primarily interested in at the time), but eventually figured out through being there that i didn’t want to report on someone else’s successes in the art / fashion / film worlds regardless of the orientation of the company - i wanted to create my own successes. it was also during this time that i really started to resent celebrity and pop culture (out’s main focus, with the advocate being their political counterpart), so it never would have worked out.
i think the problems in gay media really depend on what the medium is. first off, you have to remember that all media is controlled most heavily by their advertising sponsors, and (large) gay media companies draw most of those funds from a few common-sense areas - alcohol, medication, vacation spots, some car companies, etc. there really is no “hope” for gay media in that sense because unfortunately they, like all media outlets, are subject to what their advertisers want and their own quests to make a profit through those advertisers. the same goes for television shows and (on a smaller scale) films that feature gay characters, who are even more subject to the problem of being “too controversial” for the mainstream and making sponsors afraid of alienating their consumer base. this process revolves around money, not changing the ideology of a nation. i don’t know what the solution this problem would be. i don’t think there is one. although i am curious if the producers of “the a-list” ever regret choosing money over giving horrible assholes airtime on their channel.
however, and i’m going to try to put this into words correctly, i do believe that the “hope” in a sense lies in the gay media outlets that perhaps aren’t so reliant on large corporate sponsors - LGBT blogs, independent films, etc that can present news and stories about LGBT people as actual human beings with a lot of humor and a little bit of class. i’m not saying to take the sexuality out of gay media, because that’s what the community is created on obviously, and it would be impossible to do so anyway. i’m just saying that it’s embarrassing and unprofessional that queerty and andy cohen have douches and jackholes of the week and that much of the talk on gay pop culture websites is stereotypical speculation on who is or who isn’t coming out of the closet - i think we owe it to ourselves to not be such childish cunts to the people that we don’t agree with. it would increase the validity of our arguments if we were to do so. keep making award-winning films and documentaries, present the news in a journalistic fashion, and use the platforms we’ve created to connect to each other and to people outside of the community. no one else is going to do that for us.
