Judy, Judy, Judy

Canada has so little in terms of gay press. By comparison, the U.S. is crawling with queer media. And Judy Wieder was one of the few women who scuttled about within. The bug thing is not about insult, but about the place of homos. She helped bring gay American glossies out into the sunshine.

Wieder may be best remembered for getting lesbian breast cancer on the cover of The Advocate -- a first. It was a shocking thing at the time for men, certainly. But also for women: "Wieder said she regretted placing a women's diseased breast on the cover of The Advocate back in the mid-1990s. It didn't sell, leaving Wieder to conclude that a hunky guy would have upped sales and brought in readers to the solid journalism inside on breast cancer." That's from an interview I conducted with Wieder in 2004.

(The breast -- either whole, or as echoed by the scar left behind after being sliced out -- has become a cliché for the gay media's coverage of women's cancer ever since. For some editors, that may be a sign of courage; for others, it's sheer laziness.)

If you wanted your politics presented pragmatically -- that is, mixed in with the readability of pop culture and pages of hot boys larded throughout to ensure financial success, then Wieder was the one. She was also a friend of the rich and famous lesbo, encouraging her to come out in the pages of her publications, but never outing. Wieder's the ultimate insider with an agenda -- and forced to deal with all the good and bad that that entails.

When PlanetOut Inc. bought LPI Media's big-name glossies like Out and Advocate in November, various talking heads said there'd be no big putsches. A sort-of decent amount of time later, Judy Wieder got tossed. Or perhaps left on her own, though relatively quietly and with no future plans announced. Certainly she had no formal business training that I know of, and was thus unlikely to get promoted any further up.

My old interview with Judy Wieder is here: "Conveniently anonymous leaks to gossip columns portray Judy Wieder, perhaps the most prominent lesbian in American journalism today, as hiding her devil's horns under strategically placed wisps of hair."