AfterElton Briefs: Happy Birthday Diva, the Collapse of "The Advocate", Breaking Down the Maine Defeat, and more!

...a key reason a number of readers dropped their subscriptions to the mag after being faithful devotees for years:  the Advocate's increasingly conservative bent.

For a good part of the last decade, the Advocate has been slipping more and more into Log Cabin Republicanism, culminating in repulsive actions like the cover asking if we should blame the gay community for the death of murdered gay teenager Lawrence King.  If memory serves me, that same issue had a puff piece praising John McCain.

I once loved the Advocate, but it was even before the Regent takeover that the magazine had lost leave of its senses and we were getting all these pseudo-Righty articles by the likes of James Kirchick.

If the Advocate is dying, it's kind of a suicide.  I'm sure I'm not the only reader who stopped subscribing because several of their regular contributors were starting to make Andrew Sullivan look like a bleeding-heart liberal by comparison.

He's a flesh-eating zombie!

(Hey, read the Gospel. I don't make this stuff up.)

My take is that it may be entertaining, but it won't be memorable.  And the original definitely was.

Considering that it lost its showrunner less than 24 hours after debuting, I wouldn't be surprised to see it pull a "Commander in Chief" in the ratings.

I am so torn on the issues raised in the article about the downfall of The Advocate.

On the one hand, it breaks my heart to read about the behind the scenes "dumbing down" of the publication from hard-hitting news magazine to fluff piece.

On the other hand, I think the reality of the situation is, even if the magazine had NOT changed tone, its days would still be numbered.  The comparison to Time and Newsweek notwithstanding, the target audience for a magazine like The Advocate is the internet generation.  

I think the author misses the point; yes, there are absolutely sites out there that offer gay news in the format of soundbytes and flashy videos with little substance.  But that's not ALL that's out there.  AfterElton and AfterEllen are clear examples of where that's simply not true.

While it's a given that we need more substantive journalists in the digital world, to dismiss them all as being inequal to what the Advocate provided is inaccurate.  They are out there, the difference is that it's not all under one umbrella anymore.

So, yeah, I'll miss The Advocate, but there's really not a void there like she's alleging.  The information, the perspective and the voice is still out there, it's just a little harder to find these days.

The Advocate has been presumed dead on more than one occasion--when the AIDS epidemic hit (would there be enough "community" left to support it?), when they took out the adult ads in the middle (who would buy a gay magazine that was "just" news?), when they merged under the LPI umbrella, etc.

I've vented before about the potential death of magazines.  This is great environmentally (less use of paper), but potentially catastrophic for society.  Why?  Because it's now much easier for our history to disappear--as we should know from any good history/anthropology class, it's the cultures that don't create tangible artifacts that last that vanish into the mists of time.  Especially with the gay community (can you imagine someday if genetic engineering makes it possible to limit or eliminate same-sex attraction?), I feel real strongly about us valuing our cultural heritage.  (I can't figure out if it's more elitist to say that "Well, EVERYONE is online, or should be" or to say "Well, if you're gay, you should allocate X amount of your time and income to supporting our media.") 

Like it or not, if The Advocate goes under, part of the gay community's story dies.  OUT, Instinct, Bitch, A Bear's Life, etc.--even AfterElton--all owe some of their success to the trailblazers at The Advocate.

It's always a good day when it has a little Ian in it. 

Regarding The Advocate, isn't it also about the traditional  media not doing so well in this internet-era? It's too bad because I don't think people really understand what they are going to miss when magazines and newspapers will dissapear until it's too late.