GLR January-February 2023

HISTORY MEMO

Taking Stock as the The G&LR Turns 30

J OHN R. K ILLACKY E DITORS N OTE : This issue marks the start of The G&LR ’s thirtieth year of publication. Our thirtieth birthday is still a year off, but this seems a good time to take stock of where we’ve been and where we are now. As luck would have it, a frequent contribu tor to the magazine, John Killacky, recently wrote a piece for an on-line magazine, The Arts Fuse (artsfuse.org), which provides a general history and overview of The G&LR. While written for a “lay” audience, I think it contains some facts and figures that even veteran readers of this magazine may find interesting. (What follows has been adapted from the Arts Fuse piece.) D ESPITE THE DECLINE of print publications, The Gay & Lesbian Review / Worldwide ( G&LR ) has published 160 issues to date, all in “hard copy.” The magazine began in 1994 as The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review , a no-frills, black-and-white quarterly that gradually evolved into a glossy bimonthly magazine. Then and now, The G&LR has featured eru

dite essays from queer historians, scholars, writers, and political figures investigating relevant history, politics, and culture as well as artist interviews and reviews of books, exhibitions, movies, and plays. Driving the vision is editor-in-chief and founder Richard Schneider. He received a doctorate in sociology from Harvard in the early ’80s. After two careers (as a college prof and a research director), he launched the magazine in Winter 1994. But its origins go back to 1987, when Schneider was re cruited by the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Cau cus, an alumnœ organization, to produce its quarterly newsletter. This is where he learned how to be an editor and a desktop publisher. While the Review was at first an in-house publication, he soon realized that it could be a national magazine. It was incor porated as a nonprofit in the late 1990s and dropped the “Harvard” from its name start ing in 2000. In a 1998 feature in The New York Times , Schneider spoke about his initial aspira tions: “In 1993, there was nothing in the gay world corresponding to The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker that

featured intelligent essays. There was a huge niche or vacuum in gay and lesbian letters which I hope we somewhat filled.” From its inception, trenchant writing by such literati as Edmund White, Barney Frank, Jill Johnston, and Jewelle Gomez distinguished the magazine, with its focus on high culture. Remarked Larry Kramer in the 1998 Times piece: “It is our intellectual journal. ... If you want to deal with schol arly intelligent arguments, there’s really no place else we can publish.” As a nonprofit organization, The G&LR has around 750 annual donors, of which around 500 are “Friends of The Review .” The average print run is around 10,000 per issue, of which about 8,000 go to sub scribers, with most of the rest going to bookstores. Historically, subscriptions have been the most important source of revenue, though charitable donations have pulled even or even surpassed subscrip tions in recent years. Advertising makes up about fifteen percent of the total. The G&LR conducted a readers’ survey in 2022 and found that its readership is predomi nantly male and skews toward an older

The G & LR

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