Celebrities hit the red carpet at the Advocate‘s 45th anniversary bash at the plush Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles. Launched in 1967 as a mimeographed broadsheet warning gay bar patrons of police raids, the magazine has come a long way, virtually paralleling the breakthroughs of the modern gay-rights movement. As boldface names like Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Macy Gray (above) and Dustin Lance Black mixed and mingled, other luminaries—including Larry Kramer, Judith Light and Ricky Martin—gave taped testimonials to the power of the magazine’s reach.
Queerty congratulates all the Advocate editors and writers who weathered postal censors, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, economic downturns and more to produce the magazine nearly without interruption for more than four decades. Yet like many dead-tree publications, the print edition that once changed the world for the better is now a shadow of its former self. (A few thin, forlorn issues lay scattered, untouched, on cocktail tables.) But in recent years, the Advocate has reinvented itself as a successful online entity that covers a wide range of topics and draws a huge audience–a readership, in fact, that closely rivals the one reached by your very own Queerty!
Click through for more pictures from the Advocate‘s 45th anniversary party
Photos by John Shearer/Getty Images for Advocate
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Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Jesse Tyler Ferguson, David Burtka and Dustin Lance Black
Traci Lords
Serinda Swan
The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles
Emcee Ross Mathews and friends
David1950
The advocate is and always has been a very shitty magazine! It was this way back in the 70s and 80s and it still continues to be this way today and it’s not relevant to the LGBT community at all.
JBS
Perez Hilton? I agree with the poster above. The Advocate is proving its irrelevance with shining colors. I find it disgraceful that he is considered by anybody gay to have any single degree of legitimacy.
Christopher
@JBS: @David1950: Being a guest at a party isn’t conferring legitimacy on anyone, its a publicity event.
Thank you David, for deciding for all of us that the Advocate is irrelevant, and to use your word “shitty”. However, it wouldn’t have existed this long if it didn’t have a readership.
In my opinion, the Advocate has done a lot for the community it serves, and has done immense things for visibility of the community. I remember when appearing on the cover of the Advocate was a scandal, now it’s just part of a regular publicity campaign. Notice how I said “in my opinion”, that tells you that I am mentioning this as personal feeling, not a statement of fact… it is a useful phrase, you may wish to use it occasionally, David.
I will never understand the compulsion to spout off on the internet about things you don’t like, in such derogatory terms. The Advocate is simply a magazine that you don’t enjoy, so be it. I don’t like broccoli, but that doesn’t make it a bad vegetable! It’s actually very good for you, just something I don’t like. The same goes for this magazine, for some people (not you apparently), it was a useful magazine. For me personally, growing up in a small town in the 70s, it was the only connection I saw to a larger gay community (that wasn’t a porn magazine), and I was grateful that my local newsstand carried it.
Sorry for the rant, just reached my limit of idiotic blanket statements for the day.