Legendary Editor of ‘The Advocate’ Judy Wieder Pens Powerful Call-To-Action on Pride

The juxtaposition of Wieder, one of the lone female rock reporters (who was not quite publically out at the time) schooling the uber-heteronormative Michaels and the Poison boys on not just halting the use of the word “faggot” and of encouraging them to steer clear of gay-bashing queer men, juxtaposed with the reality that her two childhood friends (twin boys) who had succumbed to the AIDS epidemic, makes for gut-wrenching, important reading.

“It was very crazy to sit on that bus with these young guys and have them say ‘faggot’ every two seconds. And it was like, ‘why do you want to use that word?’” Wieder said. “And I could only go so far with the questioning because, of course, they would become immediately uncomfortable the way anybody who’s just carrying around a lot of homophobic expressions and ideas that are based on zippo. Things start to just melt and they start to get very anxious.”

The AIDS epidemic pushed Wieder toward the closet door that she eventually burst through as editor for the gay men’s magazine Genre, which led to her position at The Advocate.

“When the boys died (her childhood friends), I was going through the mourning for a few years. I realized that I could not sit there without at least fighting [the rock bands], and I did.”

To evince the immediacy of her personal story combined with the universal reach of historical events, Wieder chose to keep the reader in the present tense, peppering the narrative with pitch-perfect dialogue she said she was able to access from years of note-taking, which naturally began with her work as a journalist.

The randomness of her career trajectory is apparent; churning out hits for venerable artists including The Fifth Dimension and writing the disco hit “Star Love;” launching the black teen magazine Right On!; composing pieces about heavy hitters like Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row for rock mags; and becoming the first female editor of the storied Advocate at the zenith of the celebrity coming out explosion in the ‘90s, when content about women in LGBT publishing did not necessarily equate to newsstand gold.

Still, Wieder’s editorial hand moved women and the issues affecting them further into the conversation at The Advocate. She created an important breast cancer issue that bombed, the varied reasons for which she parses out in the book in a chapter that might feel fresh to female editors and writers across all publications.

If reaching a female audience with the issues that affected them proved difficult, so did courting celebrities who might have been on the precipice of coming out. Although The Advocate had become the publication of record for LGBT people, gatekeepers to celebrities like publicists and managers saw it as the “gay” magazine and often nixed Wieder’s interview inquiries with the slamming down of a phone (back when one could effectively hang up on someone). k.d. Lang, Melissa Etheridge and a few others had come out by the time Wieder began working for The Advocate, but others were pushed to take control of the narrative and head to the magazine when tabloids threatened to out them.

“Usually the circumstances where they were being outed and the people usually just said, ‘Fuck it. I know my story and I know it best.’And that’s how we could get them because they were being outed and they were about to be in the National Enquirer and they didn’t want it to come that way,” Wieder said. “Amanda Bearse (of Married with Children) was somebody who came out in the Advocate when I first started working there because she was about to be outed, and there were several people like that.”

As chronicled in Random Events Tend to Cluster, Wieder went on to become the editorial director when the company that owned The Advocate bought Out, a contentious acquisition at the time. Along the way, Wieder oversaw the issue of The Advocate that covered Matthew Shepard’s execution; she persisted until she finally got an in-depth interview with Ellen DeGeneres that delved far deeper than Time’s “Yep, I’m Gay” issue, and she was the one Rosie O’Donnell called when she was ready to come out.

“I was doing my job,” Wieder said of attempts to speak with O’Donnell before she came out. “And when she did [come out], it eventually paid off. She eventually picked The Advocate and me. It took time… Fear is a big thing.”

Wieder’s  memoir relates her time at the magazine and her decision to leave around the time of the internet media boom and closes a few short years after, when Californians narrowly voted against marriage equality. Laying low at the time allowed Wieder time to work through her notes, not only the events of her own life but the historical moments that united, and divided, the nation.

“You don’t ever really know where you’re going,” Wieder said. “There were so many pieces, jobs, places that led me to the right place. You’re the cluster and you can’t know everything.”