Pick-A-Day

October 2005
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The Advocate

I hate the Advocate, the “national gay & lesbian newsmagazine” of the United States.

Well, hate isn’t the right word; it is more a sense of profound disappointment and contempt.

It is, to be blunt, shallow, bland, and boring.

Strangely, I feel the same contempt toward the Advocate that I feel toward Time and Newsweek. Time and Newsweek (and US News and World Report, for that matter) are thin weekly magazines with shallow, bland, and boring coverage of US News, with the occasional realization that there’s news from outside its borders. The Economist was the newsmagazine that made me realized that Time, Newsweek, and US News are really horrible.

I suppose when I lived in a vacuum, I didn’t really find the Advocate that shallow, bland, and boring. Unfortunately I started reading the Gay Times more regularly. Gay Times is a British based monthly gay magazine. Not only does Gay Times provide interesting book reviews, video reviews, and porno reviews, it provides decent global gay news coverage—including, nicely enough, the United States.

Admittedly the GayTimes doesn’t bother to reveal that Peter Jennings’s managed to reduce the number of smokers in the United States through his death from lung cancer (27.Sept.05), but quite frankly, that’s not really gay news. That’s straight news with a gay twist. This is not to say that the Gay Times provides comprehensive coverage of US gay news, it doesn’t, but what it does choose to cover tends to be well done and complete. Reading the Advocate gives me a great superficial take on gay news.

The Advocate is to the Gay Times as Time and Newsweek are to The Economist, or USA Today is to The New York Times.

2 comments to The Advocate

  • Jerry Faust

    Out Magazine has even less news content than Advocate, but I suppose that news is not its mandate.

    I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Vancouver’s biweekly gay newspaper Xtra West. The writing and reporting are good, and I prefer it to Windy City Times or Chicago Free Press.

  • I always thought Out was a vapid magazine, sort of a… uh, I don’t know what to compare it to. All I know is that I haven’t had the urge to read it in at least 3 or 4 years. The last time I read Out was when it had a Matthew Shepard cover story.