In my career as a writer, I've worked for a lot of publications (yes, printed matter) that eventually fell by the wayside, either because I've been around for a long, long time or because I'm some kind of horrible bad luck omen who curses the pages I grace. In any case, read this quickly before I drive this publication to extinction.
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AFTER DARK MAGAZINELaunched in 1968, this beautiful, glossy magazine full of luscious color spreads managed to appeal to an affluent, 30-something gay market without being expressly gay. But the sensibility certainly was. Covers through the years included Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, and Ann-Margret. I did a cover story on teen idols, as well as interviews and ultimately a gossip column about theater and nightlife. The magazine folded in 1983 as AIDS was hitting and the closet was no longer useful.
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CUE MAGAZINEThis was a glossy weekly listings magazine, which also included some great features about Broadway, movies, and other areas of entertainment. I did a cover story for them on the Tommy Tune show
A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine and loved reaching a literate, plugged-in market with it. In 1980,
Cue was folded into
New York magazine, which found its listings invaluable.
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HX MAGAZINEMarc Berkley and Matthew Bank founded this weekly bar mag (full name
Homo Xtra), and I was regularly featured in it, and once even wrote some kind of wacky, autobiographical poem for them. Berkley wanted to bring sex and fun back to the community, so the mag included celeb interviews, gogo boy pictorials, theater and restaurant reviews, bar gossip, and lots of listings. In 2009,
HX was sold to its rival,
Next, which then folded it.
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PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINEFounded in 1911 and most popular in the 1920s and '30s, this monthly glossy wasn't sleazy in the late '70s, when I started interviewing TV and movie stars and doing music reviews for them. It was all straightforward and kind of appreciative, for real fans. In 1980, the mag folded and we were moved over to
Us magazine (later to become
Us Weekly), where I wrote the music column for years.
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TV DAWN TO DUSK and
TV STAR PARADEIn the late 1970s, I got a job as managing editor of these two monthlies, both put out by Ideal Publishing. The first one was a gushy fan mag for lovers of daytime soap operas, and the latter was a sleazy TV/movie mag, with purposely misleading titles that made you have to buy the magazine to find out the answers. ("Cher Leaves Sonny!" turned out, many pages later, to signify that she left him to go shopping for a few hours!) As people got savvier, the whole thing was doomed and went el foldo while I worked there, but I learned a lot -- about what not to do in journalism.
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SOHO WEEKLY NEWSThis frisky alternative weekly thrived in the 1970s, when it bristled with downtown cultural coverage and sociopolitical commentary. I interviewed everyone from Bruce Dern to Peter Ustinov for them, but I also did fashion pieces (with PAPER's own Kim Hastreiter as one of my editors) and breathless nightlife reports. I even wrote an exposé of the aforementioned fan mags, sardonically titled "I Made Farrah 'Pregnant'!"
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DETAILS MAGAZINEI know it still exists, but before it was a Condé Nast men's glossy,
Details was an essential guide in the 1980s to NYC fashion, nightlife, and music, edited by Annie Flanders and anchored by a witty Stephen Saban first-person column around town. I wrote quippy, two-sentence movie blurbs, as well as cover stories about Hollywood hair and Susan Tyrrell. It was magical.
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BLUEBOY MAGAZINEFrom 1983 to 2007, this was a sexy magazine (mentioned in Cyndi Lauper's song "She Bop"), but with coverage of arts and politics to balance out the lustings. It was sort of After Dark Jr., and in the 1990s, it became more porny and less cultural, to make it stand out from the pack. I did a perfectly innocent feature story for them once -- no, I swear. Also:
Christopher Street magazine, which I wrote a cover story about obsessive nightcrawling for, among other features. The mag gradually became obsolete and died in 1995.
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CIRCUS MAGAZINEThis monthly rock magazine (1966-2006) also highlighted topics like TV and comedy -- basically anything that would appeal to the young, male audience. I wrote for them in the late '70s, interviewing married comedy team Stiller and Meara, among many other celebs.
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MICHAEL'S THINGLet me include one publication I didn't write for, but picked up, whenever it was convenient. A small '70s-era weekly, with guides to cabarets, theater, baths, porn theaters, and other recreations around town,
Michael's Thing covered campy entertainment, but there was a heavy emphasis on sex that gave it a certain underground insouciance. It was a real kitsch rag, but very of its time.
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Good work, nerds -- toy company Bif Bang Pow! has announced a limited run of Weekend Update action figures depicting everyone's favorite comedians ready to mock the news. They are available for pre-order for $29.99, including a Weekend Update desk for your play-acting of the heady days of the Bush administration -- though they will also reportedly be sold first at Comic-Con, where they will almost certainly run out. The bigger question is -- why SNL? Why isn't this a complete set? Why aren't there Baby Mama action figures? Where are the Golden Globes action figures, complete with awards for only Amy Poehler and Tina Fey? Sometimes, the universe is a cruel place.
AFTER DARK MAGAZINE
CUE MAGAZINE
HX MAGAZINE
PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE
TV DAWN TO DUSK and TV STAR PARADE
SOHO WEEKLY NEWS
DETAILS MAGAZINE
BLUEBOY MAGAZINE
CIRCUS MAGAZINE
MICHAEL'S THING
Image by Maria Corte Maidagan 
Image by Mark Summers 
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Back in the mid-'90s, when the internet was in its infancy, there was an online community of message boards and chat rooms called the WELL (the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"). Mostly run by futurists and radical techies out of Silicon Valley, the site was one of the web's earliest examples of a social network, a gathering place for people to share ideas and connect with like-minded individuals. In WELL-user and Stanford Futurist Tom Mandel's case, who, like other WELL-dwellers, envisioned the internet as a place for genuine human connection and not for commodification, the site wound up becoming a place to live out his final days surrounded by his online friends. Today, we don't think twice about telling our followers and friends what's going on in our personal lives on Social Media. People use Facebook to announce births, deaths, illnesses and other personal news. But when Mandel started the Well conference topic "Local Bug Report" one day in 1994 when he was feeling under the weather, what would unfold was unprecedented. 
Shock-rap collective Odd Future doesn't really exist anymore in any form but name -- its most successful member, Frank Ocean, hasn't collaborated with anyone in the group for a while, nor have Earl Sweatshirt or leader Tyler, the Creator. But, confirming the inevitable for fans hoping for another group mixtape, Tyler seemed to indicate on Twitter last night that OF was 
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Remember when you couldn't leave the house without a well-meaning friend telling you to listen to Serial? "It's soooo good," they'd say. "You just have to listen to it. I mean, what a crazy investigation!" There was a time when everyone you knew was asking your opinion on whether a man neither of you knew had a committed you crime you only knew about because of NPR. Heady days, especially if you've already seen The Jinx.
Queen Sateen. (Photo via
Queen Sateen and Exquisite. (Photo via 
The big event this week is the third edition of New Museum's 
"Plush"
Mmuseumm
Aida Mahmudova
Lisa Hoke
Yoan Capote
Heide Fasnacht
Teresita Fernandez'sFata Morgana
