Why Gay Times hit the buffers

Gay Times, the longstanding monthly magazine formerly aimed at gay men – but now repurposed as an ‘LGBTQ+’ title – is in trouble: it has lost 80 per cent of its advertisers in the last year, and £5 million in advertising revenue as a result. ‘Good old-fashioned discrimination’ is to blame, according to its chief executive Tag Warner. The real reason is rather more straightforward: Gay Times‘s troubles show, once again, that if you go woke, you risk going broke.

The Guardian suggests instead that Donald Trump might be to blame. ‘There has been a backlash in the US over corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past 18 months, which has led to some big names rolling back their plans,’ the paper reports.

‘I know that media and marketing is also going through a challenging year anyway,’ says Warner, ‘but when we’re thinking about other organisations that don’t talk to diverse themes [note the use of grim activist language], they’re not nearly as impacted as we are…This is just good old-fashioned discrimination. Because discrimination doesn’t have to make business sense. Discrimination doesn’t have to be logical. Discrimination is discrimination.’

Really? This seems to me like a rather desperate example of what the young people call ‘cope’. What is more likely, I wonder: that advertisers are backing out because of poor returns, or that they have suddenly all turned into raving homophobes because of Trump?

Gay Times might not like it, but the painful truth is that this is one situation in which the buck doesn’t stop with The Donald. The magazine’s situation is rather sad. Gay Times has been a fixture, in one form or another, since the 1970s. When I first became aware of it as a teenager in the 1980s it was an eccentrically typeset publication filled with baffling jargon, which still bore some of the traces of its origins on the radical left. As attitudes changed, it became glossier, more professional, and a lot less political. I rather lost touch with it in the 1990s and 2000s, when it seemed sometimes to have transmogrified into a raunchier version of a magazine for teenage girls, Jackie with slightly more body hair; hunks from Hollyoaks in their knickers, pop promo pieces and fashion tips.

But then, of course, about ten or so years ago, came gender mania. The Guardian article refers to a ‘gold rush’ of advertisers moving in during the high days of gender, as always chasing the wind of a trend. Gay Times and similar titles like Attitude took the trans shilling gleefully, shifting their emphasis away from their core, bedrock readership of gay men.

The April 2025 front cover features an image of two ‘trans men’, i.e. what appears to be two women with mastectomy scars. Is it really so much of a mystery that gay men don’t want to see that or read about it? (Indeed, who does?) Or that advertisers would get cold feet about trying to flog their wares in such a publication?

My only surprise is that it’s taken so long for Gay Times to hit the buffers. One of the oddest things about the gender mania of the last decade is the willingness of businesses to lose money hand over fist. What happened to the bottom line?

We are at a curious stage in the gender war, with high-profile wins for the sex realist side, but with lots of powerful institutions, stuffed with gender true believers, reluctant to shift with the tide. Clearly, it’s still very uncomfortable to back out.

Gay men still can’t even meet without pledging allegiance to the gender cause. A recent event convened by the ‘gender-critical’ group Human Gay Male in Brighton was cancelled, seemingly after the pub at which the group was due to meet caught wind of its ideology.

The truth is that the fight for common sense has not yet been won. We are in the ‘winkling out the partisans street by street’ stage of the gender war. At least the erstwhile advertisers in Gay Times have an excuse readily to hand as they back off the trans train; ‘It’s Trump, you see, our hands are tied. Oh, isn’t it awful’. For the other holdouts – like the Scottish government, or the Metropolitan Police, or councils up and down the land – it’s going to be a lot, lot harder to pull back.