A friend got me a subscription to The Advocate for Christmas last year. It’s an okay magazine, I guess. I’ve seen very few lesbian magazines and I’m not even sure the few I’ve seen would qualify as ‘news’ magazines. My girlfriend jokingly makes fun of the fact that I get a men’s magazine. She’ll say “Oh Honey, your fag mag came today” in a taunting tone of voice. Then the game begins…
I’ll say “Okay, smarty, who’s on the cover?” and she’ll take a guess before I take it out of its plain wrapper. She usually gets it right… and it just kills me. She must have some sixth sense or something because she never even reads the magazine and only minimally keeps up with regular TV news. Finally, the other day she admitted she didn’t have a guess for the yet unwrapped new issue. I thought for a minute and the only thing I could come up with was “The woman that plays Kerry Weaver on ER. She’s got a big lesbian storyline about to take off.” I opened the wrapper and feigned disappointment in seeing Sir Ian McKellen, who stars in the soon to be released Lord of the Rings, on the cover. It is, after all, a men’s magazine. And then I looked at it again, and sure enough there she was. A tiny Laura Innes headshot in the upper right corner of the magazine. Hah!
Yeah, allegedly The Advocate is not a men’s magazine … and allegedly neither is Out. … Hmm.
I read Curve as the best compromise among the women’s magazines. I liked Diva out of the UK, although it was expensive, but then my friend Nine told me they refused to let her say in a contribution she wrote that she is bisexual. Sigh.
Lesbian News is not bad, if you can find it. It’s with the out of town newspapers in big bookstores. 🙂
The webmaster of Curve joined my 60-member lesbian comedy list just long enough to hawk a half price subscription deal Curve was having.
I found it pandering at the scummiest level.