jps246's Full Review: The Advocate Magazine Subscription
The Advocate is the Newsweek or Time magazine of the gay community. It is published every two weeks (except for a special issue in the summertime where it is only published once in the month).
The news stories cover all of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community (coverage on transgendered issues has been increasing over the years). Most of the stories are well written and informative. There are occasional fluff articles and interviews. Most of the interviews reduce themselves down to questions like "who doe you find attractive" and "when did you know you were gay" but almost any interview of a famous gay person will come to that in any article, so I am not going to mark the Advocate off there.
A continuing gripe I do have is the lack of LGBT people on their covers. OUT magazine does this too - why put straight person after straight person on the cover of your magazine when you are a LGBT magazine and I am sure there are more than enough LGBT people out there who want to be/should be on the cover? Okay, if you interview Cher or someone else as equally earth shattering, stick her on the cover, but do we really care that so and so (put mediocre hollywood star in) is a big ally of gay people?
Another problem that I see cropping up in the magazine is that while it does better than OUT or Genre, it tends to assume that everyone in the LGBT community is in their 30's, have great jobs and have tons of disposable income. I'm not 30 yet, I don't have tons of disposal income and it's not likely that I will be vacationing in Tahiti anytime soon, so I don't really care about how gay friendly of a vacation destination it is.
And one other thing, why does every gay publication, no matter how mainstream it is have all those 'adult' classifieds in the back? Is every gay man really interested in making his equipment bigger? I would think that as a community, we could rise above merely sex. It has always annoyed me and the Advocate is not the only culprit here - just about every LGB publication that claims to be "mainstream" has these ads. I hope sometime to pick one up and not see this stuff in the back.
If you want to stay updated with what is going on in the gay and lesbian community, you aren't going to get any better than the Advocate. Between their bi-weekly publication and their respectable news coverage, if something important is happening in the gay community, you will hear about it in the Advocate.
In general, I recommend this magazine wholeheartedly. There's a few hang ups, but just about any magazine has a few flaws, but thankfully, none of the Advocates flaws are more then blemishes and this magazine keeps its luster. It is more than worth the purchase at the news stand and is more than worth a subscription.
26 issues - The Advocate Magazine has been America's indispensable gay and lesbian news source since 1967. Published biweekly, the magazine informs an...More at SuperMagDeals.com
26 issues - The Advocate Magazine has been America's indispensable gay and lesbian news source since 1967. Published biweekly, the magazine informs an...More at Subscription Addiction
24 issues - The Advocate has been America's indispensable gay and lesbian news source since 1967. Published biweekly, the magazine informs and enterta...More at SpeedyMags.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.