"Power and privilege in the gay media"

Judy Wieder speaks out on lesbian readers, diversity, and ducking the muck

By ELEANOR BROWN

Conveniently anonymous leaks to gossip columns portray Judy Wieder, perhaps the most prominent lesbian in American journalism today, as hiding her devil's horns under strategically placed wisps of hair.

Take the feisty Page Six in the New York Daily News, where a blurb had her subjecting staffers to tirades, allegedly angry that she'd been briefly parodied in Michael Thomas Ford's novel "Last Summer" and was trying to stop its distribution.

In an interview with Press Pass Q, Wieder is charming and defers to the opinions of others when asked about her greatest contribution to gay and lesbian media and activism (but is able to quote a compliment). She's no pushover, ably defending her employer when necessary, thanks perhaps to years of coping with criticism as editor of The Advocate and now, as a senior vice president of its publisher, the private company LPI Media.

There's no denying her buck-stops-here primacy. "I'm the glue. They report to me, and I have to answer the problems. It's endless," Wieder said in a telephone interview from her desk in Los Angeles. The chat, conducted at the beginning of August, was set up after Press Pass Q's questions were vetted by LPI's cautious media-relations handler, Eric Chandler. (Wieder was eventually late for a lunch meeting when she doubled the 20 minutes allotted, but still only got through about two-thirds of the queries.)

As the corporate editorial director, Wieder has the final say on the editorial content of magazines like The Advocate, Out, Out Traveler, and HIV Plus. There are also websites, a book publishing arm, the creation of new magazines, and the need to push into television. Wieder might not always have the time to read every single word on the magazine proofs, but she tries.

She also expects back talk from the peanut gallery. "A lot of things blow up on you when you're the face. 'Uh oh, here it comes,' and I just duck under the desk."

Some say that Wieder, and LPI Media, have too much power, that the conglomerate has a stranglehold on the national gay voice.

Wieder doesn't understand why success and the promotion of gay visibility must be attacked. "This company has been putting out magazines that have worked, and not only in the rich days! Now that we have a foothold, we can put magazines in mainstream places. Why should this be looked at in such a negative way?"

LPI was also criticized indirectly at the recent National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention in New York, where some panelists said that national queer media is "losing out to the mainstream on coverage of LGBT issues" because of a lack of resources.

"The national gay press has really lost its way in terms of what it thinks gay stories are," Las Vegas freelancer Steve Friess was quoted as saying in an NLGJA newsletter. "You find much better stories on gay issues in mainstream national media."

Still, panelists agreed that mainstream reporters don't understand the guts of gay issues, and also acknowledged the supremacy of the gay media's coverage of AIDS issues. Certainly The Advocate, billed as a newsmagazine, has been panned for being too soft and too entertainment-oriented.

Wieder dismisses those calling for movie boycotts when they haven't watched the film. "People just need to look at what they are complaining about. We're the most discerning publication out there, and we print the bloody truth."

It's sometimes about presentation. Wieder said she regretted placing a women's diseased breast on the cover of The Advocate back in the mid-1990s. It didn't sell, leaving Wieder to conclude that a hunky guy would have upped sales and brought in readers to the solid journalism inside on breast cancer.

Wieder has also been accused of blacklisting writers who displease her. Four years ago, freelance writer Andrew Sullivan claimed Wieder banned him from The Advocate after he criticized the publication; Dan Savage then quit his column in Out magazine in solidarity. At the time, Wieder acknowledged that an assignment given to Sullivan had been withdrawn, but she said he wasn't banned forever. She told Inside.com that her staff was furious with Sullivan's insults (he went after writer Chris Bull by name). Sullivan now writes regularly for The Advocate.

Wieder said much work has gone into providing diversity. "People villainize.... There are so many different voices in The Advocate."

But she also acknowledges that LPI's clout makes its critics wary. "We went through this when people thought we were going to merge with PlanetOut and eat the world." LPI and PlanetOut called off a planned merger in March 2001 (around the time the dot-com boom went bust).

The complaints were a ramped-up repeat of LPI's April 2000 purchase of the lifestyle magazine Out. It was feared Out and The Advocate were to become carbon copies. "To what purpose?" asked Wieder. "Both magazines would die. People would buy one or the other, but not both."

In fact, in order to ensure even more diversity, a writer must pick either Out or The Advocate, because he or she won't be allowed to write for both.

Wieder also notes that rivals can, and do, fight back. A recent leak had LPI planning a parenting magazine helmed by actor and former talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell, which would compete with the national glossy And Baby. But Wieder said And Baby publishers used that leak to get into the New York Times, garnering free publicity.

Wieder won't confirm that a new O'Donnell publication is in the works, only "that we are talking about it." But such a magazine would go a long way to giving lesbians a place in the LPI readership. "We want lesbians," said Wieder.

"After all, I am one."

Focus groups are in the works for lesbian projects. "When we do something, we take a lot of time, we cannot go out there and fail; it reflects on the women."

Still, LPI has no product that specifically focuses on lesbians. Wieder said it's "hard enough for us to get any female readers into The Advocate." And Out magazine is perhaps the company's biggest failure in terms of lesbians.

Upon Out's purchase, Wieder told Folio magazine that she wanted to bring women into the fold. Four years later, she said: "It's very difficult to have a co-gender lifestyle magazine.... They don't have enough in common." Out's direction didn't include women. (Out is not a failure as a magazine, however; Wieder refused to give specifics on money, but said one recent issue had revenue of US$1 million.)

The purchase also marked a change in LPI's direction. The old name, Liberation Publications, reminiscent of in-your-face gay-lib politics, was dropped in favor of the current acronym, and the company got rid of its men's skin titles.

Wieder's own professional rise parallels the growth in power and respectability of queer media in North America. Born in New York, she came of age on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles, where she was bound for a career in music. First a concert pianist, then a cellist, she became a folkie with a guitar when she discovered a thriving youth subculture in Berkeley. After college she connected with artists at the famed Motown recording studio. Some who'd left the label began recording her songs.

"You don't make a living in music," Wieder lamented. She moved to music journalism, where she made her name in a new field. "One day I started doing some work for Genre, then became editor." She eventually jumped to The Advocate, becoming arts-and-entertainment editor in 1993, then editor three years later, and on up. Asked to profess her greatest contribution to the gay media (and the gay movement), she demurs. "You can never really evaluate yourself very well."

But she cast back to an Equality Award she received last February from the Human Rights Campaign. "What [they] said about me, which I hope to be true, is that I humanized the movement. The [gay] press had been very biting and angry - there were reasons for that: the whole AIDS epidemic, the pain of coming up from down under after so many years of hostility."

Wieder said activists, men and women, and those in the gay press, were all busy attacking each other, rather than taking on the bigots. "We were much more aimed at not liking each other. A stupid waste. I just ignored it."

Despite all she's done, Wieder does not believe that journalists should be activists. She said up-front activism cuts into a reader's trust when the reporter's tackling news. In an age when many queer journalists see themselves as activists, regularly penning editorials and opinion columns, hers is an unpopular position.

"Who cares?" she replied.

###