Boyz: 25 Years

Boyz is celebrating its 25th birthday this week.

It started out as a drivel machine, but later had two great editors, Simon Gage and David Hudson.

Sadly it's back to being a half-arsed drivel machine, just doing puff pieces about the scene.

Here Hudson remembers the good old days.

Black Cap: Advert

Facebook. *

And don't forget other kinds of free advertising in the gay media are available...

There's advertorial pushing anti-listing petition this w/e (yeah, cheers gay listings mags 💅), so pls remind ppl of both sides 😘 #LoveTheRVT

— RVT Future (@RVTfuture) June 12, 2015

* Here's an interview with the Black Cap squatters from a well-known anarcho-queer zine.

PS Now going to step back in time and fill in some of this week's thrilling gay news, which will be filed below on the day the story appeared. Roughly.

The Libertines: Boyz On The Band

Was the recent story about you working as rent boys true?
Pete: "Yeah. It's in this magazine (gestures to a copy of a glossy gay magazine with their faces on the cover). It was always my ambition to be on the cover of a free gay magazine."

Pete Doherty in a newly published old interview in The Guardian online to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Up The Bracket. 
His claim to have been a rent boy - though admirable (and he's clearly being ironic, here) is not true, but hooray for journalistic credulity. 
Here's the original interview.

PS This was done under the great editorship of David Hudson. Boyz is a magazine now sadly shriveled to nothing.

Boyz Magazine: Royal Wedding Souvenir Edition

Oh FFS.
You may have hoped this celebration of tomorrow's cavalcade of crapola was ironic, but I can't see a single shred of it.
"Highlights" of this week's Boyz magazine include a letter from 'The Office of Prince William Of Wales' ("Warmest thanks and best wishes..."), 'A Right Royal Wedding Round-up ("This Friday is going to be all about bunting, beer and bridal gowns..."), and - best of all - a column where "Scene Queen" Dusty O "tells us why she's been a lifelong royalist."
"I have great respect and admiration for real royalty. I feel it's an essential proclamation of British identity in a time where national characteristics are dosed down to fit in with a more PC policy peddled by the left."
Wait, there's more...
"Her majesty has dedicated her whole life to serving her nation. In a time where we seem to have fostered, on certain levels, a work-shy subculture of people dependent on benefits, with the kind of attitude that expects the state to provide for them [!!!!! - Fagburn], I personally see her as a shining light of a work ethic and dedication to duty we seem to have partially lost from modern culture..."
Oh do fuck off.

• Don't forget tomorrow's Royal Zombie Flash Mob organised by Queer Resistance, and the protest against the invitation to seven royal tyrants outside Buckingham Palace at 2pm today organised by Justice For Bahrain.

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.