Gay lifestyle magazines and comment moderation

I hadn't bought a gay lifestyle magazine for a couple of years or more. But when London Preppy blogged that he'd written a short article which had been published in the December 2007 edition of AXM, I had a perfect excuse to go and buy a copy to see what they're like these days.

Of course, the original gay life style magazine in the UK is Gay Times. It's been going since 1984 and it's still around, although it now seems to have been re-branded "GT". In the United States they've got The Advocate which has been going for even longer, since the late 1960's in fact. In the mid 1990's I can remember a couple of others being launched in the UK, namely Attitude which is also still going, and Phase which isn't. I recall how the first edition of Phase was printed in quite a large font, for readability according to the editorial, but a lack of good writers with good ideas seemed far more plausible to me. No wonder it didn't last very long!

The first thing which struck me about AXM was how hard it was to find a copy. Eventually I managed to get one from the W.H.Smiths newsagent chain near the bank where I work, but that was the fourth place I tried. The second thing that struck me about AXM was how full of sort porn it was, in the sense of fit guys wearing few (if any) clothes. But perhaps that helps explain why it was difficult to find a copy!

Looking at the December 2007 edition, the front cover features a cute young blond guy wearing only some 2^(x)ist undershorts, and the articles being advertised are about naked footballers and fight club sex fantasies. Being honest with myself, I admit that I do sometimes enjoy reading this kind of material :-), on a short flight or train journey perhaps when one doesn't want to concentrate on anything too taxing. But it's very superficial stuff.

And then there was London Preppy's short article, occupying the whole of page 56 exactly as he'd promised. It wasn't attributed to londonpreppy.blogspot.com of course, but since he claims that it's his article on his blog, I suppose it's a reasonable assumption that London Preppy and the named author are one and the same. But are they? The reason I ask is because whereas London Preppy's blogging style has an enjoyable cocky confidence about it, the AXM article doesn't!

Perhaps the article's subject matter is the reason for this, because it's all about why male models are insecure. Although modelling isn't London Preppy's main job, with lines like " ... occasionally a photographer or somebody from a magazine will have a lapse of judgment and ask me to do a photoshoot or something ..." and "I know I'm not attractive enough to make a full-time career from modelling ...", he manages to illustrate a model's insecurities very well. But maybe he didn't mean to, because in his blog he says that he's not happy with AXM's subtitle to his article which says that he's insecure. However I reckon that the article's subtitle describes the article perfectly!

All this got me thinking about comment moderation. London Preppy's blog has comment moderation switched on, but so do a lot of other blogs I know, such as HBH's blog, DL's blog, Monty's blog, BV's blog, GBD's blog etc. Is comment moderation a sign of insecurity? When I first started blogging I didn't even allow comments at all, but after about six months I decided to allow comments with moderation. A few months later I realised that I'd hardly rejected a single comment (in fact I'm not sure if I rejected any comments), so I decided to ditch the moderation and try living it fast and loose for a change! But originally, I probably was a bit insecure about my blogging, and in that state of mind comment moderation was useful.

In spite of the occasional malicious or spiteful comment, and in spite of occasional comment spam, I do think that unmoderated comments are much better. One of the advantages of the digital age is the speed at which so many things are now possible, and without doubt comment moderation is an unnecessary brake on the evolution of our thoughts. On top of that, most of the time there's very little difference between deleting a published comment and using moderation to prevent the comment appearing in the first place. Inappropriate comments reflect badly on the comment author rather than the blog author. That applies to anonymous comments too, because even if we don't know who the anonymous commentator is, the commentator himself knows, and the bad karma from leaving bad comments will get him in the end!

So if any blog authors reading this still have comment moderation turned on, why don't you switch it off? Living life in the fast lane is much more fun :-)!