Gay Magazine Forces out a Board Member for a MAGA Hat

Jay Katari lasted about a day once the newsroom decided he was unclean. Equalpride, parent company of propaganda outlets The Advocate, Out, and Them, had put him on the board and billed him as “Strategic Advisor, Growth & Innovation.” CEO Mark Berryhill even told staff on August 31 that he had “full confidence” in the man and that they should make time to meet him. Then an independent writer posted screenshots, the editors issued a joint statement, and by Tuesday afternoon Katari’s name had been scraped off the website.

Katari’s resignation statement was the usual corporate funeral card: he had only wanted to volunteer his time for “the LGBTQ+ community.” Berryhill clarified that the investor group had appointed him, that his job was revenue and partnerships, and that he would never have touched editorial. None of that mattered. The editors of The Advocate and company had already declared his beliefs “antithetical to the mission of our brands.” Given this administration’s “attacks on the LGBTQ+ community,” they said, his involvement was “untenable.”

Here is the part The Advocate itself had to admit. Independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas documented a MAGA hat, pro-Trump imagery, mockery of Joe Biden, and follows of Trump family accounts. He identified no public statement in which Katari attacked gay or lesbian people. The closest thing to a heresy charge was an Instagram bio listing pronouns as “dude/bro/guy/man/Jedi.” The Advocate helpfully noted that those are nouns. PinkNews repeated the same concession: no direct attack on LGBTQ people; a joke about pronouns.

That is the dossier. A Republican donor vibe, a joke at the expense of the pronoun liturgy, and insufficient hatred of Donald Trump. The staff still treated the file as if they had uncovered a Klansman in the conference room.

A private company can fire, sideline, or freeze out whomever it wants. That is not the scandal. The scandal is what Equalpride and The Advocate just told every conservative, independent, or merely insufficiently pious gay and lesbian reader: you are not the audience; you are the contamination.

These titles were built on the old gay press: same-sex attraction, legal equality, the right to live without the state or the mob treating you as a disease. That fight is largely won in American law, which is a commercial problem. Won fights do not keep the lights on. Outrage does. A tiny, loud gender cohort supplies the outrage, the academic vocabulary, and the claim that every election is an existential war. Homosexuals who notice the bait-and-switch are told they have been “erased” for their own good.

Katari’s joke pronouns were treated as an attack on “the community” because, in this industry, the community is no longer gays and lesbians. It is the coalition that needs medicalization, youth transition, and a permanent emergency to stay morally central. Same-sex attraction and opposite-sex impersonation are not the same phenomenon. One is who you want. The other is a claim about what sex is. Lumping them together was a political merger, not a discovery of nature. Plenty of gay men and lesbians have been saying so out loud for years. The magazines that claim to speak for them would rather hunt a board member in a red hat.

Equalpride laid off editorial staff earlier this year, acquired Them, and then discovered it needed a growth advisor. The growth advisor arrived with the wrong president in his camera roll. The newsroom did not ask whether he could sell subscriptions to gay readers who do not live inside the letter soup. It asked whether he had genuflected hard enough toward the faction that now owns the masthead.

They have a right to run a shop that way. Readers have a right to notice that the product is no longer a gay magazine. It is a loyalty test with vintage logos. Katari failed the test without ever having to say a crude word about gay people. That is not protection of a community. That is a shrinking industry choosing the loudest customers and calling the rest of us a threat.