On Becoming a Gay Media Mogul: Q&A with Chris Crain

I
am a Southerner. I was born in Arkansas and grew up in Memphis. I went to college
in Tennessee at Vanderbilt, and to Harvard Law School up in Boston, which was
my first exposure to the North. I worked in Washington for a few years out of
law school. Fell in love with that city. I ended up moving to Atlanta, for love.
That was six years ago. But I practiced law for a long time, maybe six or seven
years. It was challenging, but it didn’t fulfill me. And I don’t know,
one of the things about discovering my own–being gay–was that I think
I look for a little more fulfillment from my professional life than I would’ve
otherwise, because I didn’t have a wife and kids. So I think that I just
demanded more from my career than it could give, practicing law.

I
wanted to get back into journalism, which I’d done in college and after college.
I’d worked for the morning daily in Nashville, the Tennessean, for
about a year. So I applied for the managing editor job at Southern Voice,
which paid probably a fifth of what I was making as a lawyer. They wouldn’t
even interview me because they knew the salary difference was so great. I thought,
"Well, if I can’t get a job there, I’ll put together a group of
people to buy the paper." And that’s what we did. We put together a
group of investors who saw the potential of the newspaper and we bought it. We
had the concept of putting a newspaper group together from the very beginning,
because it’s worked in all other forms of media, including straight newspapers,
so why not in the gay press?

The
national ads are the ones that really hurt, that had the biggest decline. We didn’t
see much of a drop in local ads at any of our papers. Some of the large pharmaceutical
companies that were buying ads to market HIV medications, a lot of them cut back.
But they’re coming back. I think when you’re a larger company, you have
the ability to withstand those blows a little more than smaller papers. I haven’t
seen many papers go under during this particular slump, but I know a lot of them
are hurting.

It’s
about 70-30 straight. And that was the big leap that the gay press did back in
the late 80s, early 90s, that really made it viable economically. They started
saying, "Wait a minute, we don’t have to just have gay bars and businesses,
we can go out and get mainstream businesses that know they have a large gay customer
base and get them to buy ads too."

I
think that niche publications are generally good, because when you pick up a publication
you know what you’re getting. The downside of niche publications is there’s
a lot of stuff that you might be interested in learning that you won’t happen
across if you’re only picking things that just apply to your narrow taste.
Which is one of the great things about newspapers like the Blade. Even
if you’re picking it up for the theater reviews, you’re going to see
news stories, and so you may well come across some news stories that interest
you as well.

We
brought that slogan in when we bought the papers. Where it comes from is, the
Times has "All the news that’s fit to print" as their slogan.
We thought it was a nice way of saying–you know, people say homosexuality
is a lifestyle, and we say, no, it’s not a lifestyle. But, we thought
coining that phrase–"all the news for your life" says we cover
hard news. And "your style" says we have the other stuff, too. It’s
a way of doing that and also a play off The New York Times.

I
think right now we’re consolidating what we have and making sure we’re
running what we have well and serving the communities we’re in. But we’re
growing a newspaper group, and we’ll do more acquisitions down the road.
The idea is, every place we go into, we help create a better newspaper there,
by putting more resources behind it and sharing content. We have 20 or so journalists
working at our company. We have the ability to cover stories in a way that no
gay media company’s ever had. And that only gets better the more publications
we have.

My
main motivation is what happened to me as a kid growing up. I had a great family,
but I also came out in my late 20s, partially because I was in such a conservative
Christian family–I saw homosexuality as wrong and I prayed to God that I
would change. I mean, to this day–I’ve been in a relationship for seven
and a half years, my parents have never met my partner. They haven’t called
my house in seven and a half years, because they’re afraid he’ll answer
the phone. So all my parents do when I go to their house is ask me about my dogs,
because it’s the only safe subject we have. It motivates me to change society
so that kids who grow up struggling with sexuality don’t have to go through
what a lot of us went through. Because I think that the press is often the engine
behind social change. To me, the big side benefit of what we do, through journalism,
is help create the social change that’ll make life better for people who
grow up in conservative families.

I
agree that we ought to hold public figures up to the same standard we hold everyone
else up to. It’s perfectly fair to ask Rosie O’Donnell whether she’s
gay or not. People’s sexual orientation is not a private fact–to me,
if you’re a public figure, knowing who your partner is is one of the basic
things the press covers. We all know who Rudy Giuliani’s wife is, and who
his mistress is! So we should all know who Rosie O’Donnell’s girlfriend
is. You know, she made a coy reference to her during the Daytime Emmy awards.
Well, enough with the coy references, the media ought to be able to report who
her girlfriend is.

I’m
all for those questions being put. But there’s a privacy line between talking
about someone’s sexual orientation and snooping into whether someone has
a personal ad on the Internet–whether or not you approve of what it’s
seeking. That to me is mean-spirited and an invasion of their personal privacy.
I like Mike Signorile, and I think he does a lot of good work. And Andrew takes
shots at people too; he’s a big boy. But what standard does that set? I mean,
[Signorile] was saying, "Sullivan’s a hypocrite because he criticized
Clinton for the Lewinsky affair." Well, does that mean that no one can get
involved in a public discourse about sexual issues unless they come to the table
without any sexual sins of their own? Is that the kind of people we want having
that debate? I don’t think so. To me, he really crossed a line that shouldn’t
be crossed, and I thought it was really unfortunate that he did.

But
you ought to ask Rosie O’Donnell who her girlfriend is. Actually, when New
York magazine did that "Gay Life" cover–

In
New York City! And a lot of the people he wanted on there are not even closeted.
They just didn’t want to be on a gay cover. Do you think if New York
was doing something on the 15 most influential African-Americans in New York people
would say, "Oh, you know, I don’t…" It’s crazy. And Rosie
O’Donnell’s people, after that article came out, said, "She’s
never been secretive about her sexuality," which is not true. And they still
wouldn’t confirm it. She’s enormously influential in Middle America,
where a lot of people’s lives could be changed if she came out.

Or
at least have a debate about them. The thing that I’m probably the most proud
of about the Southern Voice is that it’s the town hall for Atlanta’s
gay community–when there’s a topic of conversation in the gay community,
it’s taking place in the pages of the paper. And that is exactly the role
I’d like the New York Blade News and the Washington Blade to
play in their communities as well. I think having an editorial page and a bigger
op-ed section will do that.

I
don’t know yet. I probably will come up here. I’ve been to Washington
Pride, and I’ve obviously been to Atlanta Pride. So New York would be a new
experience.