Boyz: 1993-2006

Boyz magazine is marking its 1000th issue this week, with a look back over the last 19 years in Boyzworld.
It's fun, but a little bit frightening if like Fagburn you actually remember gay life in 1991.
I remember being given a copy of the first issue at London Pride that year and my heart sinking - it seemed like the triumph of the banalification of the British gay press.
It seemed a betrayal too - the people behind it were the people behind the then serious, political Pink Paper, and Boyz seemed like anything but.
There are two ways of judging any publication; what's it trying to do and how good is it at doing that?
David Bridle, Boyz co-founder, its first editor and now managing director, remembers the original formula he sketched out on a beermat; "We had already decided the new Boyz - originally to be called Boyz Own - would be based on the formula of succesful girl's teen magazines Just 17 and Smash Hits but aimed at gay men..."
"A male nude centrefold, an agony uncle, a Boyz doc, weekly listings for strippers and drag artistes, a gay astrologer, a weekly cartoon strip, and postal 'contact' adverts divided into fetish interests..."
When Bridle was editor Boyz did what it did badly; it wasn't sexy and fun, it was nerdy and boring.
It got good under Simon Gage, editor between 1993 and 1998.
"We just realised that if you wanted to get very serious messages across, you had to make them fun. You could say it was a pretty dark moment in our history, with Aids and a government intent on stamping us out with legislation like Clause 28, but rather than give into it, we made it fun to do the right thing. In at atmosphere of 'Gays, stop having sex!', we were very sex positive and just hammered home the 'Use a condom' message. Generally we were all about underlining what a great thing it was to be gay and never mind what the old cunts in the House of Lords were saying..."
It was in its own way quite subversive, a tradition carried on by his successor as editor, (David) Hudson, now with added Indie.
Hudson was dumped in 2006 and Bridle took over running it himself.
Bridle told Press Gazette; "Boyz has always been a young men's gay title, but we're at the stage where we need to remind ourselves what we're about. We're looking again at what an 18-year-old would want from the title."
ie Bridle wanted to make it more like a "girls' teen magazine" once more.
Ah well, it was good while it lasted.
So much of the gay press seems like cut-and-pasted press releases. Boyz at its best felt like you were reading queens writing about the things that actually excited them, or that riled them.
Both Simon Gage and Hudson could teach classes at working within and pushing against the constraints of the commercial gay press.