Print Out (Part 2)

There has been some hype about Genre magazine relaunching with some significant changes, and since I had previously identified it as providing the least value in major gay lifestyle magazines, I was curious to see if there would actually be any improvements or not. I was a little surprised to find that it is pretty much the same, and certainly provides no new reason to select it off the newsstand instead of any of its competitors.

The changes to the magazine were promised by its new editor-in-chief, Neal Boulton. To create buzz around any such changes, he characterized them as being part of trend towards a "post gay America". The concept is so ludicrous I won't waste space discussing it here, but will summarize that Boulton wanted to use it as an excuse to make Genre a more generic (i.e. less distinctively gay) mens magazine. To clarify, he is looking for some way to sell more subscriptions and increase newsstand sales and his thought is that he can do it by broadening his target market segment to be all men.

Boulton said in his inaugural editor's letter that he wanted Genre to be a "magazine for every man". That's strange, because looking through the first issue it is not clear how a story about a gay porn star or a gay rugby team would necessarily appeal to "every man".

The new editor also explained that gay interests like wanting a hot car, a hot body, and hot clothes are things that everyone else in America shares. How out of a touch can a person be? Straight men are still buying pickup trucks, chowing to excess at the Golden Corral buffet, and buying their "good" clothes at Wal-Mart.

The truth is, that like detergent companies that add an extra drop of fragrance to their product and call it "new and improved", Boulton so far has made minor changes for show instead of working on the actual quality of what he is trying to sell. To me it looks like the same magazine except for two things. One is that the front cover is trying to mimic tabloids by emphasizing the proven trick of using numbers to convince people that there is a lot of material inside (e.g "101 Ways to ..."). The second thing, in the October issue, is a two page spread on motorcycles. Actually, it was only a one page article with a facing title page consisting primarily of a picture of one motorcycle. In usual Genre tradition, the magazine makes sure it doesn't overwork its writers. Ditto for the page on Manuka Mule - a whole page for instructions on making a drink consisting of four ingredients. I'd like to be the person who got paid for those two minutes worth of work.

I will give credit for reducing the number of pages devoted to average Joe's. While some in the past have been good to look at, their inane answers to even dumber questions only showed what useless slugs they are.

Unfortunately for the magazine, it may intentionally be moving further away from having any raison d'etre at all. If looking for a real gay lifestyle magazine, for four cents less on the cover price, Instinct would a better deal. The October issue of Genre and the November issue of Instinct both had 96 pages (including Genre's useless 15 page "special advertising section") but Instinct just has more worthwhile copy in it. Genre took me less than 10 minutes to go through it cover to cover, while I am still not done with Instinct as it always takes several sittings to get through.

Bachelor Of The Year

Last week I watched the annual cheesy photo-op of Cosmo magazine's 50 hottest bachelors on the Today show. Seeing a sample of men from each of the states provides a nice variety of eye candy. Of course they are really only the hottest of the limited number of people who actually applied, but it still made for a pleasant view. I was never interested in collecting the 50 state quarters, but this is the kind of cross country collection that I could get into. Hurrah for federalism!

Cosmo magazine annually has its readers submit and vote for their favorite bachelors. One bachelor is selected from each state to be eligible to be selected the magazine's bachelor of the year. The 50 men are paraded through New York City with a shirt advertising the magazine and their home state. In exchange for their dignity, the winner is awarded an oversized cardboard check for $10,000.

The Today segment was short, beginning with a pan of the man mob, followed by Ann Curry trying futilely to hold onto her journalistic integrity, and ending with an inexplicable push-up "contest" between Maryland and Illinois. I had to go to the magazine's website to find out more. There I found pictures of all 50 men along with some facts and some personal comments, which were of the low quality variety that you typically find attached to fold-out, pin-up models.

Perusing through the pictures, I quickly realized that the best men came from the midwest Great Lakes and Great Plains states. Comparing region to region, it wasn't even close. Corn-fed beef reigns supreme. It makes me want to eat some corn on the cob instead of using it for its other purpose.

The comments the guys made taught me something about straight men - they are surprisingly needy. Examples:

• Relationship must-have: “I’ll do anything for a girl I love. But I want her to be ­devoted to me too.”
• Dating deal breaker: “When girls talk only about themselves. Make space for me too!”
• Sweet chick move he digs: “When I get ­separated at a party from a woman I’m dating, I love when she comes back to me for a bit to let me know she’s thinking about me.”
• Chick trait he craves: “I hope to meet someone who is a good listener. I can talk a lot, and I want to sense that she’s really listening to what I’m saying.”
• Hint from a hottie: “The typical guy needs to be reassured every once in a while that his girlfriend still has strong feelings for him.”

Other comments involved promoting the stereotype that men are easy to understand and that women are not. From Mr. Ohio (at left): [If he had a superpower:] “I’d want to be able read girls’ minds. Then I’d write a book about it to help out other guys, since we’re all in the dark!”

That straight women buy into this load of crap makes me think a little less of them. The honest response is, "If I can pretend that I don't know what you're talking about because I'm a man, I've got a great excuse for ignoring you and doing whatever the hell I want to."

A third theme running through the comments was the need for the men to get away from their girls. South Carolina: "I like to go to a secluded place in the mountains and spend time relaxing and reflecting.” I know these guys are straight (or at least have to pretend to be in order to win), but isn't this what Ennis Del Mar wanted also?

The winner was Ohio. Best dark horses: Alabama and Utah.

Print Out

Why subscribe to magazines anymore? When I want to read about what is going on in the world I read it on the web. Unfortunately for me, I still have subscriptions to eight print magazines, including Out, The Advocate, Instinct, and Genre. I try to make sure I read them since I paid for them, but I still have a large stack of unread magazines from this year (or maybe from last year too, I don't know).

I see most print magazines becoming obsolete. The information they provide is available on the internet quicker and more usable and generally for free. You can get all the news, columns, photos, and yes, ads, that you could ever want. It's also more convenient on the net. When I see things in magazines I want to save, I rip out pages, but I just add them to the magazine stack so I will probably never see them again. I also rip out scraps that have something on them that I want to look up online. In a world of bookmarks and cut-and-paste, this action seems very inefficient and anachronistic.

They say that a computer screen can't replace a book, because it can't replace the enjoyment of curling up with a good one. That's true, but a magazine is not a book. I don't curl up with AAA Hoosier Motor Club's Home & Away magazine and I don't think I'd enjoy it anyway. I'm not a green person, but I think I would enjoy more not to pollute the landfills with more reams of bleached, glossy paper.

The evolution is going to need to be a migration to online versions only. Planet Out's magazines aren't doing so well but maybe they would do better if they jettisoned the hard copy. Genre should be hurting a little too as they indicate that the magazine is printed in Canada and the current exchange rate doesn't make that such a deal anymore. (It also kills my Fall travel plans, but that's another story). There must be money to be made with online periodicals or the New York Times wouldn't have decided to end their paid online subscription service in favor of a free, advertisement supported site.

To slow down the growth of my magazine stack I need not to renew at least one of my subscriptions. Unfortunately for you, Genre Media LLC, I think yours is the one to go. From an economical point of view, Genre has seemed to offer the least value. This is not a critique of quality, just the value for the money. The kind of material that the magazine includes is similar to what you get from a well chosen set of 3 or 4 RSS feeds.

The least value has been for whatever part of my subscription cost has paid for the "Genre Man" section in the back. The inane comments from the chosen few are far less interesting that a sampling from Craigslist's "casual encounters" (e.g. "m4m - 26, Want me to suck you off tonight? I'm 26, 6'1" 170lbs. I suck and I swallow. I might even let you f*** me. I prefer big c***s that shoot thick loads." Isn't that more informative than "What brands of clothing do you like to wear?")

There will still need to be some magazines in print. One is the required reading Vanity Fair. It's the perfect companion for air travel. It will get you through two legs and a long layover easy (and then some). The other is the ubiquitous two month old People magazines that clutter doctors' offices. There is nothing like reliving the catastrophes of celebrities as if they just happened again. Actually, with Britney, etc., there is a good chance they did just happen again.

Tripping Your Trouser Trigger

It's great that Levi's has a gay ad for their 501s, but this ad has problems. If it's possible you don't know yet, Levi's has a commercial with a straight version and a gay one using the same footage except replacing the female object of flirtation with a guy in the gay one. If you haven't seen the ad yet, see below.

One of the ad's problems is that it doesn't make sense. Who puts their pants on both legs at the same time? Why would he pull them up when he saw it would unleash dungaree destruction? Why didn't he use the phone booth to call his insurance agent?

I've tried to make some sense of it, looking for a deeper layer of substantial meaning. Here is all I could come up with:

Like the narrator of Fight Club realizing he didn't really have his sofa problem handled, the protagonist of this ad becomes distressed inspecting his purchase of 501s, understanding that his carefully ordered, button down and buttoned up world does not satisfy him. The ad takes a dark turn with the pants becoming his denim Durden, giving him a vision of an extended and violent reality that supports his self destructive behavior. He meets his Helluva Bottom Carter, but the commercial ends before his sex interest can tell him his name is actually Levi.

Other than this problematical story line, the biggest problem I have with this ad is the casting of the guy in the phone booth. The way I see it is that casting for gay roles on television ends up with what some straight guy thinks is the gay ideal. I don't know how they determine what that is, but in this case it looks like the casting process used the box cover of an early 90s gay porn video as their inspiration. Contrast this with print ads from your favorite gay magazines. The people who choose the models for those ads know what they're doing. The guys have the hot looks that sell.

The Levi's ad team used the same actor for the lead in the straight and gay version, so they cast someone who is just hot in general and for want of a better term, looks "normal". I wish they would have used the same criteria to cast the gay call boy. I want to see guys in gay roles who really look like they would be the center of attention at a gay party and not look like an extra from Boat Trip.

Nevertheless, the gay version is more believable that the straight one. The carefully coiffed star with his boxer briefs and (at first) well designed apartment looks absurd walking with the girl, unless you can imagine they happen to be going together to a male strip club.

Boys Do Fall In Love

This is one of my favorite old-time print ads. It is a 1950 advertisement for Coca-Cola. I like the setting and the colors of the illustration, but what I really love is the backstory I've created for it.

The kids in the picture are students at a small college in Indiana. Maxine, the girl in the green top, is best friends were her gay buddy Bobby, the boy in the khaki colored shirt. Maxine had decided to try to match up Bobby with Paul (checkered sport coat), the brother of her sorority sister Cynthia (in the blue). Maxine has invited Bobby, Paul, Cynthia, and her other friends Mary Ann (in the pink) and Bess (not visible) to go for a picnic so that she could have Bobby and Paul become better acquainted.

So far this afternoon, the plan is going swimmingly. Bobby and Paul are getting along great, talking about their common interest in art history. As all of the kids finish eating, Bobby tells Paul about how he loves to draw. Paul gets into the cooler to get Bobby a Coke and asks Bobby if Bobby would do a drawing of him. Bobby, perhaps in a Freudian way, exclaims, "I'd love to do you!"

At this moment, Bess is standing in front of the group with her camera to take a picture. She captures the scene seconds after Bobby's exclamation. Bobby realizes his double entendre and smiles sheepishly at Paul. Paul, thinking he'd be happy to be done by Bobby, blushes and averts his eyes downward. He gives the coke bottle an almost imperceptible stroke to let Bobby know that he's okay with the idea. Maxine smiles knowingly, realizing her plan has been a success. Cynthia howls with laughter thinking to herself, "he said draw. Ha-ha-ha." Mary Ann stands back and grins, hoping no one realizes that she has no idea what's going or why she's there.

What happens later on the night of the Homecoming dance, or when Bobby contemplates quitting the glee club to spend more time with Paul? I don't know. You tell me in your belated reply.

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Robin Gibb "Boys Do Fall in Love"

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The best Coke campaign ever, featuring Joey Diggs' "Always Coca-Cola"

I Now Pronounce You, Adam Sandler, Out

I do not mean out, as in out of the closet; I mean out as in out of favor with movie audiences. It is a moment I have long been waiting for. I have never found Adam Sandler's comedy funny. His style of "humor" is classically sophomoric and represents the least desirable qualities of straight males. I could overlook this if he was at least attractive, but that face and that voice do nothing but repulse me even further.

Did I mention how proud I am that I have never seen an Adam Sandler movie in its entirety? There have been surprisingly many of them and for this I think Sandler does deserves a lifetime achievement award for stretching a one-note, one-dimensional routine into what feels like a lifetime of cinematic refuse. I see that a number of reviews agree with me.

Thank goodness, I finally see the sign of the end with the preview of his latest movie I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry. The synopsis is that two straight firefighters, Chuck (Sandler) and Larry (Kevin James), pretend to be a gay couple in order to receive domestic partner benefits, which leads to comedic results. Playing gay for laughs is fairly common in movies as a quick gag, but going full on gay as the central element of the story may be the indication that Sandler's career is heading in its long delayed downward direction.

My reasoning is based on the article "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" by Mike Albo (Out magazine, September, 2006). In the article about straight comics playing gay for laughs, Albo states

"Straight comics will usually fall back on gay when their jokes are falling flat and they are flailing, feeling the audience slipping out of their grasp. Then, out comes the word gay and, voilà, someone in the audience will laugh nervously, encouraging others to laugh, and the audience is back on track. It's like the comedian is jump-starting an old crappy car."

Though the situation is not exactly as described in the article, it is still close enough for me to believe that the club of extinguished SNL stars can now prepare to welcome its long lost initiate.