Looking ahead, CEO Tag Warner is ready to continue the publisher’s legacy and make an even bigger impact in the next 40 years through partnerships with brands like Google and Calvin Klein, original content like Snatched!, and events like GT Honours that celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
ADWEEK spoke with Warner about the company’s next act, the formula for staying relevant and why LGBTQ+ publishers matter.
ADWEEK: How would you describe Gay Times’ legacy in one word?
Warner: I would like to say impactful. I feel like as a company we’ve had significant impact within our community and for our community over the four decades that we’ve been around in so many different areas.
Whether that’s community activism, politics, raising voices, celebrating queer excellence, celebrating queer creativity, breaking down barriers for queer people, and bridge-building between queer people and the rest of the world. That impact is something that has been part of the company for a really long time.
And that’s always personified when I get to meet people who have read Gay Times for 30 or 40 years. They always have a story. They always will show and tell you about something that Gay Times did or said or was involved in the ’80s or ’90s. And you can test and measure that impact by the way people respond to you. If it wasn’t impactful, people just wouldn’t remember it—it wouldn’t mean something to them.
With so many publishers folding and LGTBQ+ rights being under attack on a global scale, is Gay Times more relevant than ever?
There’s a need, and there always will be a need, for an organization like Gay Times, and that’s probably why we’ve managed to maintain that relevancy the whole time. Because we know that progress isn’t linear. This isn’t a straight line to full acceptance and celebration in the world.
We feel we’re taking a step forward, and sometimes two steps back. And that’s really relevant right now, especially as our U.S. presence grows and just thinking about how the queer experience in the U.S. is under attack in a way that it wasn’t in the last few years. That increases the need for good quality queer media that is all about actually celebrating the power in queer people and showing the rest of the world and ourselves all the brilliant sides of us, because otherwise the prevailing view from mainstream media or other titles nearly always focus on the negative.
