From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Outside In
Gay themes in the mainstream press.
Adam Moss is a nice man, and attractive too, in a spare, boyish sort of way. His speech is often just as spare, and I guess you'd call him circumspect.
So imagine the frisson that coursed through his audience when Mr. Moss--the editor of the New York Times Magazine--said, as part of a panel of gay editors at mainstream magazines, that "I actually edit a magazine that's pretty gay."
The public forum at which Mr. Moss was featured on Tuesday--along with a clutch of gay editors from Newsweek, Fortune, Vibe and the late Talk magazine--took place in a cavernous Tribeca bar, the sort of place that charges $15 for a Dewar's on the rocks.
Not everyone present was gay (there were about 200 listeners), and not everything that was said by the panelists was as piquantly mischievous as Mr. Moss's assertion. Inevitably, there was a certain amount of the tedious posturing that one might expect to find at any gathering of an assertive subculture--an example being the panel moderator's insistence on referring to his constituency as "the LGBT community."
That's short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered, admittedly a mouthful, but a mouthful of needless manufacture. Yet there was, among panelists and audience alike, a refreshing absence of self-pity and paranoia. There was a sense, even, that nobody can isolate what is, or isn't, exclusively "gay" in the media today, because however separate the gay aesthetic may have been 20 years ago, it is now a seamless part of the mainstream.
For that reason, it was not so much the truth of Mr. Moss's remark ("I actually edit a magazine that's pretty gay") that was so striking, as its utterance. This was borne out by the reaction of a writer for Mr. Moss's magazine, a gay man, to whom I spoke after the meeting: "Oh, no! Did he say that? Really? "
Of course, I'm not suggesting--nor was Mr. Moss or any of his co-panelists--that gays dominate the media. But their approach, and their once-distinctive aesthetic (not to mention numerous gay editors and writers), have been folded into virtually every mainstream American magazine. Even Vibe, a magazine that tracks black urban culture--a way of life not celebrated for its tolerance of homosexuality--has a gay editor in chief.
No doubt with these facts in mind, Mr. Moss went so far as to say that it was now much less necessary for gays to have a "singular gay press." In these "assimilationist times, [gay] people get their stuff from the mainstream media."
All very enlightening. So what is there in the content of the Times Magazine that makes it so gay?
"Well, it's mostly 'lower-case gay,' to be honest, not 'upper-case gay,' " said the gay Times Magazine writer I spoke to, introducing an instructive nuance into the subject. "Upper-case stuff deals squarely with Gay themes, such as a Q&A with James Dale, the gay litigant who sued the Boy Scouts. There's not too much of that."
And lower-case gayness? "By that I mean a lot of edgy fashion, with a higher priority on attitude than on reporting. Nothing's straightforward; they're always crawling around fashions from a particular corner. And there's a frequent focus on musical theater, subjects that are perceived as being of interest to gay people." (The Times, he said, sends regular e-mails to a list of gay readers, alerting them to fashion and theater pieces in the magazine or newspaper. "Where did they get the list from? I don't know!")
This sort of "gayness" isn't confined to the Times Magazine. One might say that gay editors, having been for so long in the mainstream but not of it, have added a sense of irony to media culture. After all, they've always had a natural, and quite unaffected, distance from the cultural middle ground. And as opponents of all things staid, they've certainly helped to integrate a sense of kitsch--or campiness--into magazine visuals. I'm thinking not merely of audacious colors but of facetiously schlocky headlines and a basic irreverence--sometimes even an insouciance.
Some conservatives might say that gay editors have made family life uncool, by focusing so relentlessly on the young and the single (or the nonprocreational). And in this vein, it is certainly true that the content of the Times Magazine has given normal women--the sort of women who are its readers--short shrift. The editors would much rather do a cover story on "Mean Girls" than on pleasant moms.
But gay editors in mainstream magazines are acutely conscious of boundaries, and of cultural frontiers. So are their gay readers. Hence the thrill--a mix of surprise and disconcertedness--over Adam Moss's remarks. Since he's a nice man, a circumspect man, I'll leave the last word to him: "If anything inhibits the amount of gay material we publish, it's me."
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His OpinionJournal column appears Tuesdays.
