Out Of The Picture

Nobody subscribes to Out for life.
(For the benefit of straight people, Out is a monthly magazine aimed at the Gay community.)

Unlike Time, Newsweek and even Gourmet, Out is not so much a chronicle of the ongoing history of our life as it is a chronicle of our underwear and cocktails of the moment.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because God knows every culture, class, demographic, orientation and time zone needs its own guide to hot and not. The trouble is that Out and its identity-challenged sister publication The Advocate are the only national news-like magazines we have. Except for a few struggling regional gay newspapers, there are no loud and proud gay news magazines standing up for us and staring down the nation’s bullies. There is nothing that we can own from the day we come out of the closet until the day they put us into the ground.

The Advocate once tried to fill that bill, and in their own minds, editors there might think they’re still doing that. But in reality, its little more than another version of the Big Gay Book of Bling.

The first time I subscribed to Out was when it and I were both quite young. I had just come out and was reveling in all things gay. It was my awakening, and I was going to conquer the world as a proud gay man.

Eventually I reached a point where I realized Out was becoming repetitive and my tastes were changing, so I let my subscription lapse. As a corporate gay man, I had other corporate gay people with whom to share interests, so Out was less necessary.

Then I was transferred from the very large southern city where my career had taken off to a much smaller Midwestern city and then a still smaller Mid-Atlantic community. I realized I needed to stay in touch with the outside gay world. That was also when AIDS was terrorizing our community, but our government was doing nothing. I subscribed again to Out, because I needed it to keep me tuned in to all of those things.

At some point sanity returned, I gave small town life the finger, and took a new, much better job with a much larger company in a mega-metropolis. Unlike my previous firm, my new big employer liked gay people a lot, promising non-discrimination and offering domestic partner benefits.

By that time I had also realized that Out really didn’t speak to my age group anymore, and really didn’t care who I was. If I wasn’t just barely drinking age, I was too old to matter. When it became clear that it took me only about two minutes to flip through the new issues of Out when they arrived, I decided to let my subscription lapse once again.

And time passed, until I entered my third season of Out. That would be the mid-life crisis. This is the time we want so badly to reclaim our lost youth and to do all the things we were too chicken-shit to do when we had the chance. This is an especially volatile time for gay men, since this is the time we achieve virtual irrelevance in the gay community. We might as well skip the Christopher Street stop in New York or the Dupont Circle stop in Washington. Not caring about us is one thing; not wanting us around is another, and that hurts.

So, in that effort to pretend I wasn’t as old as everyone else knew I was, I subscribed to Out for the third time. I tried to be interested in the music and the travel and the trends. I looked at the boys and sized up the clothes that would never come in sizes for me. It was a shabby fantasy at best, and one I never really believed.

So, here I am, back at the point where I can get through a complete issue of Out during a Project Runway or Big Gay Sketch Show commercial break.

My subscription will end before much longer, and I’ll let it lapse for the last time. The same for The Advocate. Everything here is interchangeable there.

It’s too bad. I won’t miss the magazines, although I’ll miss what they represented. I’ll miss the arrival of those plastic sleeves every month with the magazines that held the promise that there might be something relevant to my life. I’ll miss the hope that somebody at either magazine might realize that I still matter, and that the people who can actually afford the trinkets and toys that are advertised in the magazines are not the same ones the editorial department is targeting.

I will miss what the magazine represented in the reminders of the stages of my life that I shared with Out. I will miss the boldness of having Out on the coffee table when my (straight) brother comes to visit, and watching his face as he leafs through it and tries to comprehend what’s in it.

I know nothing about magazine marketing or Out’s market share, reach or circulation statistics. But I would take a wild guess that Out’s research shows people subscribe to Out for a couple of multi-year cycles, then go away as adulthood takes shape and they mature. They are replaced by a newer crop of readers, and the cycle continues. The well never really goes dry, but the numbers never really grow significantly. It’s a status-quo existence. And, in too many ways, that reflects how the gay community has allowed it’s political and socio-economic influence to languish as well.

But that’s a whole other subject.

Nobody subscribes to Out for life. And that’s a shame.