AfterElton Has No Sense of Humor
Everytime we read something about how homophobic Details magazine is we're reminded of this piece Michael Matin wrote for Nerve.com years ago about whether or not the magazine was totally gay. (Alas, Nerve just isn't the site it used to be, and we cannot find the essay, "Details' High-Class Hustle" anywhere online.) Sometime in the seven years since that piece ran, the dialog shifte from whether Details is gay to whether it's homophobic. We're guessing it happened around the time the magazine started running it's "Gay or..." feature. Which we always thought was really freakin' funny.
Now, Chrisclanks over at AfterElton is bitchin' about Details' 10th anniversary issue. The one with Robert Pattinson on the cover. In that issue—along with RobPat's infamous vagina allergy quote—is a recap of the best "Gay or..." features and a semi-topical piece on gay men and Grindr and online hookup culture. All of which Clanky has a prob with:
"Oops! They did it again. You would think that Details would have learned their lesson by now. Mixing crude humor with outdated stereotypes doesn’t exactly make us gays feel all fuzzy inside. Remember when they introduced us to the “Douchefag” just last December?
...I mean, I get that it's supposed to be funny. I really do. It’s just that rehashing years of bad jokes at our expense simply isn’t. The worst part is they say they've been posing the age-old question, “is he or isn’t he” for years and they've supposedly come to the conclusion that “telling gay from straight stereotypes is impossible.”
Yet they keep on trying. Maybe one day they’ll actually succeed in finding a way to make it funny, but probably not."
Oh for Christ's sake. We've never understood why everyone has such a problem with Details. It's just a douchey fashion mag, but it's not nearly as douchey as, say, Maxim. We've always felt like Details could get away with the gay jokes cause it was, like, with the band, you know? Sure they're not a gay magazine, like Out, but as Michael Martin wrote in his piece for Nerve—paraphrasing here—why does a men's magazine have to be gay or straight? Can't it just be bi?
Chrisclanks' post just reads like a humorless knee-jerk reaction. Seriously, if a gay rag printed those articles, you'd laugh. You'd be like, No she di'in't! and shrug it off.
And as for that Douchefags charicle: Seriously, we agree with every word!
