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gay london atsign iansie.com
This is what I wrote in 1999: QX,Boyz and The Pink Paper are still going as at 21/6/04.
As the gay scene slowly moves out of the ghetto with an increasingly wide range of neo-post-gay venues, one certain way to tell if you're in a bender bar is to look around for the gaypers.
London's gay newspapers are freesheets that cover their costs from personal and public advertising. You don't pick up these papers for the quality of their journalism: they have very tight dead-lines and they're chronically underfunded, so much so indeed that sometimes it seems they can't even afford basic spell-check software. On the other hand, they're in-touch, they're up-to-date, and they're everywhere.
Titles come and go: Axiom News (originally intended to serve the HIV+ community) may survive the transition to a mainstream magazine and become a successor to the largely-lamented Capital Gay; Metropolis (formerly Thud) died quietly at the end of 1998.
The Pink Paper is the closest thing we have to a gay paper of record. Its quasi-nation circulation survives largely by virtue of its politically-correct share of public-sector recruitment advertising, so it tends to eschew the escort ads and the club-oriented dizzy queen journalistic style that characterises its rivals - and is considered rather boring as a result.
Boyz, as its name implies, aims for a much younger crowd. The street-wise laddy tone that made it so much fun under its previous editor has paled a little under new management, but its geographically arranged listings are still the best source of information about who's doing what where and when. (A note of warning though: these papers rarely have the money to keep their data-bases accurate and up-to-date; don't plan any major expeditions without asking around or ringing ahead.)
The London-only QX, which grew out of New York's distinctly club-oriented MX magazine, is smaller, ruder and stranger than either of the above possibly because, unlike the others, it goes to press on Monday night, when half the staff are still suffering from the effects of the previous weekend. No magazine that survives on its advertising revenues will ever be able to afford to be totally frank in its reviews of clubs and bars, but QX is often franker than most ('We were so trashed by the time we got there that we don't remember much about it' is a much nicer way to describe an empty bar than 'refreshingly spacious' .)
These gaypers arrive in pubs, bars and clubs late on a Wednesday or Thursday evening. Just like the rest of us, they spend the weekend sitting around waiting to be picked up and taken home. And, just like the rest of us, by Monday or Tuesday they're trashed. Sic transit gloria gaynor.