The most gay-supportive mainstream print media outlet of the last thirty years is not the one you might think.

It’s not the New York Times, which is guilty of an appalling lack of AIDS coverage back in the early days of the epidemic, and didn’t agree to use the word “gay” (and not “homosexual”) as an adjective until 1987.

It’s not Men's Health, despite their always featuring a serious hottie on their cover.

It’s People Magazine.

Yes, that People Magazine--the one that features Jennifer Aniston on every other cover, and that includes all those articles about aging actresses who’ve clearly had cosmetic surgery, but who still claim their only beauty regimen is “eight glasses of water a day and sliced cucumbers on my eyelids at night.”

But that doesn't change the fact that over the past thirty years, People Magazine has been more likely to portray gay people equally than any other mainstream print media outlet.

It's true that the New York Times also now gives equal treatment to gay and lesbian Americans. In the years after 1987, when Max Frankel was appointed the paper’s new executive editor, a lot more changed than just their use of the word “gay.”

But guess what year People Magazine included Olympic athlete Tom Waddell and his partner in their “Couples” section?

It was 1976, long before the Times’s same-sex wedding announcements were even a twinkle in Max Frankel’s eye. 1976 was the year before Anita Bryant’s infamous “Save Our Children” anti-gay campaign in Dade County, Florida, and TWO years before and California’s notorious Brigg’s Amendment, which would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching.

And before the New York Times began featuring essays on gay romance in their “Style” section, People was already including openly gay men in their “50 Hottest Bachelors” feature, and noting them as such.

Why should gay men and lesbians care about how a celebrity-based fluff magazine like People portrays us? Because People is read by Middle Americans – 3.7 million of them to be exact. Many of these folks would otherwise get all their information about gay people from reading the National Enquirer and watching Jerry Springer.

What exactly do these folks learn from People?

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