Monthly Archives: April 2017

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Everything was quiet in New York City the day after the 2016 election. The city was stunned into silence. Matthew Breen remembers people crying randomly on the street, comforted by friends and strangers. We were totally blindsided, Breen says. People were trying to look kindly on one another. It was such a raw and fragile moment.

Breen, now the editorial director of LOGO, was in his final weeks at The Advocate, where he worked for nearly six years as the editor in chief. Having publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, Breen says that the LGBTQ publication was totally blindsided, and his last issue as EIC wasnt the one he expected. The December cover of The Advocate depicted an American flag in which two of the stripes have fallen off. Meanwhile, a man and a woman stare out helplessly into the distance, struggling to figure out whats next.

The blunt title sums up the sudden and unexpected fear that gripped the LGBTQ community in those early days: Time to panic, it read.

The election of Donald Trump to the White House has radically transformed the relationship between the press and the Oval Office, a shift felt acutely among LGBTQ media as the industry has taken on a more adversarial role. Prior to the Trump presidency, many in the community wondered whether there would be a need for LGBTQ-specific news outlets in the futurethat queer and transgender people would be so fully integrated into society that outlets like Out, NewNowNext, Washington Blade, The New Civil Rights Movement, and LGBTQ Nation would no longer be necessary.

But as publishers and editors tell CJR, that has never been the case. The past five months have illustrated the vital importance of LGBTQ media in US society, as these publications provided support, information, and comfort to a community forced to adapt to a drastically different political landscape. Theres an even greater responsibility to tell the stories of the marginalized, ones that might otherwise get left behind, in a news cycle dominated by Trump. And readers have responded by visiting LGBTQ media outlets more often and sticking around longer, editors tell CJR.

The past three months have been a call to arms for LGBTQ media, but five decades ago, The Advocatethe nations first monthly LGBTQ magazinewas founded in the wake of bar raids in Los Angeles. The first issue acted as a protest newsletter to help the community fight back. As much as the 2016 election was a wake-up call, it also represented a return to the movements roots.

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The fear of erasure in Trumps America

Merryn Johns knew the election would go badly. Born in Australia, the editor in chief of Curve magazine, a monthly magazine for lesbian and bisexual women in the US, came to the 2016 election as an outsider. While all of her friends went out on the evening of the election expecting to celebrate Americas first female president, she stayed in and began working on an editorial explaining why Trumpwidely expected to lose in a landslidehad won.

Any time I heard Trump speak, I could hear him saying what a certain number of people wanted to have been said, Johns explains. I felt it was going to swing in his favor. He was tapping into a zeitgeist Clinton wasnt.

Johns says that for LGBTQ-focused publications, having Trump in the White House has been a huge reversal from the previous administration.

LGBTQ advocates had been gaining attention and notching wins for the past eight yearsfrom Obama enacting nondiscrimination rights for federal contractors in 2014, to the Supreme Court legalizing marriage equality a year later. Many felt that progress would continue under a Clinton presidency, but feel President Trump has already begun to reverse those gains. On March 27, the POTUS overturned an Obama executive order preventing federal workers from being fired on account of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Many of Trump Cabinet picks, including Secretary of State Jeff Sessions, have noted anti-LGBTQ track records.

What we had under the Obama presidency was that he acknowledged us, Johns says. He mentioned us in his addresses. We were on the website. We were getting legislation pushed through. We were invited to the White House. That is all being rolled back, and its made us feel quite insecure. Its not only a fear of not being seen. Its a fear of being erased.

A changing media landscape

If Johns claims that the very concept of media has changed under the current administration, it has also shifted the role LGBTQ media sees itself playing during a contentious political moment.

Lucas Grindley, editor in chief of The Advocate, says it has been important for LGBTQ publications to reflect what the community is feeling during an emotional time. During the week following the election, Grindley wrote an editorial taking his Republican family members to task for casting their ballot for a politician who campaigned on rolling back same-sex marriage. Ive been betrayed by my own family, Grindley wrote. Odds are, so have you.

People felt like theyd been betrayed and it took awhile for people to be willing to say that.

His op-ed, which was shared more than 20,000 times on Facebook, clearly touched a nerve.

People felt like theyd been betrayed and it took awhile for people to be willing to say that, Grindley tells CJR in an interview. The goal of The Advocate is to make you forward on a story and say, Finally, someones said what Im thinking. I dont feel alone.

Although hard data can be difficult to quantify, LGBTQ publications report that traffic has been up as readers seek out spaces that reflect what theyre feeling about the Trump administration. The Advocate reports a nearly 25-percent increase in unique pageviews for the first quarter of 2017 over the first quarter of 2016, while subscriptions have held steady. (CJR requested subscriber information from other LGBTQ publications, but they declined to provide hard data.)

Given that demand, many LGBTQ publications have shifted greater resources to covering the daily happenings of the Trump administration and telling community members how to take action. In the days after the election, The Advocate started The Resistance, a Friday newsletter listing protests taking place in your area; that newsletter morphed into a video series. NewNowNext created Five Dollars/Five Minutes, a recurring feature that offers quick and easy action steps for readers who want to get involved. Go Magazine, which covers queer and lesbian nightlife, includes demonstrations and political activities in its monthly calendar.

One challenge is striking a balance between taking a hard look at the current reality and offering healthy escapism for readers, says Trish Bendix, editor in chief of GO Magazine.

Its an everyday battle, Bendix says. Theres definitely people out there who arent just interested in going out and dancing, but you dont want to be too depressing and to pump out stories that make us feel things are hopeless. Our community has enough problems with suicide, depression, and self-harm as it is, so there has to be a way to keep it positive while being very clear about what our missions are and what we have to do now.

Our community has enough problems with suicide, depression, and self-harm as it is, so there has to be a way to keep it positive while being very clear about what our missions are and what we have to do now.

Bringing everyones stories to the table

The Advocate has aimed to balance not only levity and advocacy but coverage of topics that arent traditionally viewed as specific to the LGBTQ community. During the 2016 primaries, Grindley sent out a memo to staff to treat Donald Trump as an LGBTQ issue, meaning anything he does is news for Advocate readers. Since that time, the publication has covered the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority nations, and Trumps stated intent to increase the deportation of undocumented workers.

Because the Trump administration is attacking different marginalized communities, its brought all those communities together, Grindley says. Were all combating mutual opposition.

LGBTQ media has been criticized in recent years for marginalizing issues that affect people of color. #GayMediaSoWhite, a hashtag that went viral in 2016, drew attention to the fact that the covers of Out, The Advocate, and Attitude, a British gay publication, regularly feature straight white celebrities to sell magazines. Critics claimed that bottom line is calculated at the expense of non-white people, women, and transgender people yearning for the same platform. A Fusion survey found that between June 2011 and May 2016, 85 percent of the faces on the covers of these three magazines were white.

Les Fabian Brathwaite, a senior editor at Out who is black, admits that LGBTQ publications have done a terrible job of racial inclusion in the pastand stressed that fixing these issues is crucial to addressing the intersectional problems posed by a Trump presidency.

People are well-intentioned, but if you only have a bunch of gay white men talking about diversity, you have to have other people to in the room to address that as well, Braithwaite says. Our responsibility is to bring everyone to the table, tell everyones story, and make sure, as much as possible, that everyone has a chance to tell their own. To speak truth to power, you have to make sure everyones voices are represented in the conversation.

We need LGBTQ media because no one else is going to speak for us.

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Its particularly important for LGBTQ publications to be more inclusive watchdogs because, as Breen argues, many stories impacting vulnerable subsections of the community may get lost in a media cycle dominated by Donald Trump. Trump has swamped the news, and it has crowded out stories about all kinds of populations, marginalized or not, he says.

Three months into the new year, eight transgender women have been murdered as hate crimes against the LGBTQ community increase across the country. Nearly a dozen LGBTQ centers have been vandalized in 2017, and an employee of Casa Ruby, which offers support and services to Washington, DCs trans community, was attacked by two men who targeted the building. These stories have received attention in mainstream press, but they have yet to receive the traction such important subjects deserve. It is not only the responsibility of LGBTQ publications to fill that gap, as Johns argues. Its why these outlets will continue to be irreplaceable.

We need LGBTQ media because no one else is going to speak for us, she says. We are planting a flag in the sand to say: Were here, we exist, and you cant get rid of us.

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Read more from the original source:

'No one else is going to speak for us': LGBTQ media rise in age of Trump - Columbia Journalism Review

50 years after hippies, free love, getting high and flower children entered our cultural lexicon, Indrajit Hazra looks back at the legacy of that short summer in 1967

Well, lets face it. Most of us rewatch Woodstock, the 1970 documentary film, not just to refill our dipping musical quotient, but also to see those acid-tripped out women dancing naked and displaying their ample bottoms. (Please do note how effectively Ive made the collective of us come in handy to cover my own derriere.)

There was a time when all this counterculture free love, peace and joss sticks part-outraged, part-titillated a generation that was as dogmatic about family values and tradition as their instigators were about turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Today, 50 years after American mainstream media first caught the zeitgeist to effectively introduce the world to a (21st century jargon alert) lifestyle choice, the Summer of Love of 1967 in San Francisco and its many descendants come across as cute, silly, and fun(ny), like one of those PG rated films you saw with a thrill as a kid, but which now looks not just tame, but Nat Geo-worthy.

Janis Joplin performs in Golden Gate Park

In the summer of 1969, over 40,000 people gathered over four days at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in upstate New York. With it, the counterculture movement had reached its apogee, that apogee decided by Life magazine and other mainstream media publications. But it was two years earlier that hippies, free love, getting high and flower children firmly entered the American cultural lexicon. It then quickly, via media, spread its grooviness in the country called London, and then to other parts of the world where the term gap year was yet to be invented.

Hippies the term having the same source as todays hipster, which, in turn, came to initially describe liberal-minded young folks moving into New Yorks arty beatnik haven of Greenwich Village or San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury district had existed before The Summer of Love. Inspired by the Beat movement of the 1950s and its protagonists like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the hippies method-acted life in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, with more than just a solitary child-like couple and plenty of great music thrown in.

The Summer of Love, with its numerous bed-ins and events and its emphasis on being part of a collective (that ironically rejected the herd), was the culmination of all that was gathering prior to The Beatles coming out with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Timothy Leary presenting his The Death of the Mind lecture in colleges across the US describing the joys of the LSD experience.

Communal living, rejecting authority, and turning ones back against consumerist society was the credo. The Summer of Love was seen as the natural result of a new generations Winter of Discontent.

In 1960, the Pill, the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill (COCP), did far more to usher the sexual revolution than the ones Jefferson Airplanes White Rabbit mentions makes you larger and makes you small. Poet Philip Larkin was as right as any Baby Boomer who came after him insisting that liberation came with free love and howling at the moon, when he wrote in Annus Mirabilis in June 1967: Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) -/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles first LP.

But it was far easier to capture in pictures the Beautiful People than the Pill, or the words of a poet from Hull.

The anti-consumerist tag was somewhat ironic, considering that the Summer of Love itself was a product to be consumed through fashion, music, the stage, advertising, and the shimmering billboard of sex and drugs and rocknroll or, at least gentle strumming and/or incredibly long jam sessions that could be appreciated only with a generous amount of marijuana intake. And, there had to be long hair, as a counter-uniform.

Hippies dawdle at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, in San Francisco in 1967

In London, the Summer of Love took upon itself to be more openly consumerist, a throwback to the era of the Dandy. And if Austin Powers version of Londons Swinging Sixties is a comic exaggeration of what was really going on in Paradise with its centre at Carnaby Street, it is only a slight exaggeration. Rebellion was no longer confined to the slightly dangerous Marlon Brando-ian Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against? Whadda you got? (That Teddy Boy switchblade cockiness would resurface with punk.) Now, it was Peace, man, Live and let live, and about sharing accommodation, food, recreational drugs, bodies. This was New Testament-style Christian brother/sisterhood with dollops of pagan intercourse.

As all collective movements go, the birth of the Summer of Love was as imaginative as its death, announced prematurely in typical exhibitionist fashion when a ceremony was held on October 6, 1967, with the funeral notice: In the Haight-Ashbury District of this city, Hippie, devoted son of mass media. It is with reason that own-man Bob Dylan refused to take part in the Woodstock festival, even though he actually lived there. Ostensibly, as he wrote later in Chronicles Volume One, he was upset with moochers showing up from as far away as California on pilgrimages. rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry.

But Dylan also mentions why The Counterculture could be as stifling as The Culture: all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul nauseating me the streets exploding, fire of angel boiling the contra communes the lying, noisy voices the free love, the anti-money system movement the whole shebang [I] didnt want to be in that group portrait.

But plenty of others will be in that (re)group portrait this summer. Throughout the year, San Francisco will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Retired Baby Boomers will reconnect and recollect when their bodies were beautiful and before they made a Silicon Valley out of All You Need Is Love. According to organisers of the celebrations, there will be a wealth of events, ranging from wine tastings to sailboat regattas, a 60s dance party, featuring a Beatles cover band and more groovy stuff, Folsom Street Fair this sub-culture festival attracts leather fetish enthusiasts from around the world. Sounds groovy.

But the Summer of Love did do something that for all its fun, flakiness and ephemeral quality (read: double-standards) has left its mark as the new normal: emphasising more than anything else the value of individual freedom.

It was also there in 17th century Paris, 18th century Awadh, 1920s Berlin and New York. But the Summer of Love democratised free spirit. It was no longer the monopoly of aristocrats, nawabs and flappers. Love, and much more, suddenly was there to flaunt for the middle-classes. One day, perhaps, our very own Romeos and the youth could also come to the same happy, far out conclusion, without being tied to their parents aprons.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

More:

One swallow that made the Summer of Love - Times of India (blog)