[LINK] "Fab Magazine's (Almost) Glory Days"

[rfmcdonald]

Toronto writer Paul Aguirre-Livingston first appeared on my blog back in June 2011, as the author of a controversial front-page article in The Grid, "Dawn of a new gay", that argued that the time for a specifically gay culture had passed. In a Toronto Standard article, Aguirre-Livington makes a similar argument about the soon-to-be-defunct Fab.

Thoughts?

This is not a eulogy. It is an understanding. But what could I say that hasn't already been said? I don't know where to begin, but I know when. Growing up in the city, I often find myself in the chorus of unpopular opinions. I had the Internet before I found the Village, and I had Edmund White before I knew of any gay city-centric print. I had the freedom of Toronto above all else. Fab has never represented me, and thus it does not represent some sort of cornerstone of my gay youth. It holds no special “place in my heart.” Unlike many who lament the closing of such an “iconic” gay publication, Fab was never that publication for me. After all, it was the MSN Chat that shaped my future and allowed me to slip comfortably into my sexuality at my own pace, to find my way to a space I felt okay about occupying within. The problem with Fab, I found, was that it was always aspirational in the wrong ways (body issues, diversity!), in ways far more damaging than wanting, say $1,000 shoes in Details.

[. . .]

And then Phil Villeneuve happened. Originally hired on as a music columnist, Villeneuve took over as Fab's editor in 2012 with a tone that was endearing and electrifying. His Fab was a Fab I found myself almost able to care about. He spearheaded a splashy new design aesthetic, modernizing the visual. He imported a history column to school those who take our history for granted. He brought in more diversity, in all ways, than I had ever seen in a decade of reading. He expected something more, something intelligent for, and from, its readership.

Until Villeneuve's leadership, Fab suffered sorely from its preoccupation with the way the “scene” was, not the way the scene was changing, blending, disappearing, greying. Villeneuve's attempt at making his Fab accessible to new hoards of homos – who, largely, probably, did not identify with the community for which the mag was originally created – were not in vain. The more Villeneuve attempted to bring the pub into 2013 along with its ever-evolving cohorts, the more I found myself with renewed faith in the power and voice of this publication, of what it could probably represent for a new era within the community and its melting boundaries beyond the Gay Ghetto. He made Fab “cool” again because of his approach from the outside-in, an allegiance to the city before the Village.

Yet, his new direction felt restrained and resisted, and while Fab's columnists flourished, its feature stories always stopped short of any sort of epiphany. Readers noticed, I noticed, but readers pushed back. (I remember one issue, for example, in the front of book letters, a reader accused Villeneuve of hiring his west-end gay friends to the detriment of the spirit of Fab.) And when Villeneuve is quoted as referring to Fab as “Xtra’s little sloppy and drunk party-girl sister who just wants to talk about underwear and shoes,” I'm reminded of why the change felt fruitless, and why, while I wanted to understand this new Fab and its courage to be some sort of “modern gay,” I always found myself asking, so what? Maybe, just maybe, we needed more compelling stories across the LGBT spectrum and less fluff pieces on “sexy” beards? Everything good about Fab is that it, well, looked good, and that was also its own worst enemy, often favouring style and sex over any sort of palpable substance.