The Attitude of the gay community ... (Attitude)

Member Name: edindave

Product:	Attitude
Date:	10/06/09 (22 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good celebrity interviews, good journalism around difficult subjects sometimes.

Disadvantages: Not enough tackling of the difficult subjects.

Attitude is a gay lifestyle magazine. It is published monthly by Trojan Publishing and is currently the best selling gay lifestyle magazine on the market.

Every month, the production team strive to put something a little intriguing on the cover - of course they do, it is a commercial magazine. Something has to attract the customers! The covers tend to lean toward the cliché side of gay culture and play very much into the hands of stereotypes. The primary focus of the magazine is (and always has been) the London gay scene so for those of us who choose not to live in London, the magazine can seem a little alien and irrelevant.

The regular features include a letters column, "uppers and downers" and "how gay are you". The letters section of Attitude has undergone some kind of renaissance over the last few months; gay men are writing into the magazine and actually becoming passionate about current affairs and their have been several examples of proto-debating among the readers. Hopefully, this will result in a move away from the narcissistic letters about celebrity abs and who did what to whom and where ... but I won't hold my breath just yet.

"Uppers and Downers" is the section of the magazine where the team put together a list of things currently in the public eye and decide whether it has made them seem more positive or more negative to the public. It is almost a barometer of public relations success and failure although, once again, this tends to be accompanied by the tiresome cliché of the gay man who loves a diva and hates ugly-ness.

The irrelevance of it all is typified in the "How Gay Are You" section where a "celebrity" is asked a series of bizarre (and borderline offensive) questions and then eventually given a score out of 100 which purports to be their "gay score". Once again, unfortunately, this section of the magazine tends to be more about the celebrity trying to convince us that they are "cool" and "down with the gays". It usually makes me think of the celebrity worse than I did before reading the article!

It is disheartening to see the magazine sticking to the stereotypes and enforcing the self-loathing that is rife in the gay community. The London-centric journalism also makes those of us outside the capital feel second-rate. However, some of the journalism in the magazine is to be commended. They were the first gay magazine to get an interview with a sitting Prime Minister (Tony Blair) and they regularly get the big interviews with whichever celebrities are visiting the UK around the deadline date.

The major draw of this magazine is the fact that it manages to get such big names to appear in it. There is also the regular debate between two journalists who write articles from either side of a common theme. All of these things make the magazine worth reading and there is a lot of content that could easily be skipped-over as being frivolous and a waste of time. The "other" gay lifestyle magazine out there at the moment is worse than Attitude in all of the above categories and the stereotypical view of the narcissistic and promiscuous homosexual man is forced into everyone's face.

I long for the day that a magazine comes along that savours the members of the gay community who focus more on the intellectual side of life rather than on which face-cream works best overnight. While I recognise that a magazine needs to have appeal across the market in order to gain enough readers to make it financially viable, I do wish Attitude included something a little more meaty sometimes in order to justify the almost £4 price tag. I will continue to read the magazine because I think, of all of the gay lifestyle magazines out there, Attitude is by far the best. If this is the kind of magazine you are looking for, you should head for Attitude over the others. Let's just all hope that the gay press has the courage sometimes soon to move away from the media's view of the gay community and that it focuses eventually on the reality of the gay scene.

Summary: The best of the gay lifestyle magazines ... but perhaps the best of a bad bunch?