 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. I'm here with Richard Schneider, a luminary in the literary LGBTQ community. He's the editor-in-chief and founder of the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Welcome, Richard. Thank you so much. I'd like to start with a biography from the website, if you don't mind, and ask you to add a little to it. Richard received his PhD in sociology from Harvard in the early 1980s. He taught sociology and anthropology as an itinerant scholar for the University of Maryland's European division for the next five years. He then returned to Boston to become the director of research for Boston-based consulting firm. And you live in Boston now, right? Yes, I do. With your partner of 24 years, Stephen Hemmerich, who is now your husband. Yes, and this year, because we're now in 2024, I think we can say 25 years. This will be our big 25th anniversary year. Are you going to do anything? We hope so. We hope to go to actually Venice if it all goes well. I think maybe our big trip. I've been to Venice a number of times, but Stephen never has. So with any luck, we will be on a gondola. At some point later this year, I don't know exactly when. That would be great. It's certainly something to celebrate 25. That would be very romantic, I think. So you returned to Boston, and the name of the Boston-based consulting firm was the Center for Strategy Research, where you remain through most of the 90s. You founded the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review in 1994 and has remained the editor, you have remained the editor ever since. And I would like to follow it up with a quick description of the magazine, although you're probably more qualified to do it than I. The Gay and Lesbian Review worldwide is a bimonthly magazine of history, culture, and politics, targeting an educated readership of LGBTQ people and their allies that publishes essays in a wide range of disciplines, as well as reviews of books, movies, and plays. It's organized as a nonprofit, currently has a print. This is from John Colacchi's article about you. It currently has a print run of 11,000 per issue and is supported by 7,000 subscribers and 750 donors. Does that sound right? That's about right. I think we usually, that's a modest, that's a modest number. I think we usually say that we have 8,000 subscribers because I think we really do, not because we just say it, that didn't come out quite right. But I think we really have 8,000 or so subscribers. And yes, we have a wonderful donor base. I'm not sure if we hit 750 this year. We have this, we are a nonprofit and we have a group called Friends of the Review. And those are people who give at, oh, a certain level of 150 bucks it happens to be. So that's about 400, I think, we're kind of our core donor group. And then we have a couple hundred more who give at perhaps a, or a few hundred more who give at a lower level. So yeah, it totals, yeah, close to 750, which is about 10% of our subscribers actually give a little extra or in some cases, a lot extra to support the magazine. So we're very grateful to them. Well, actually, to give John Kolecki credit, he said 8,000. But then I looked at your website and it said 7,000. Was that right? Okay. Well, maybe Steven maintains that. And he's also my partner is Steven and he's also the publisher who is much more involved with keeping track of those things than I am. And dealing with subscriptions and renewals and all the stuff that I make. I basically put out the magazine. So my job is basically just to make a magazine once every two months and hope that Steven takes care of pretty much everything else. And he does because he's great. That's been my experience. I've been writing for you since 2021. I thought it was longer. But OK, yeah, I thought I would have thought so, too. But yes, we're very grateful. Well, that speaks to the atmosphere that you create with your contributors. And let's switch to the readers. OK. Donations and subscriptions each account for about 40% of the income while advertising fills in the last 20%. Readership is predominantly, and this is from John Kalecki's article, readership is predominantly male 70% over 60 years old with 66% holding an advanced degree. The renewal rate is very high. Do you agree with that assertion? Yes. Wow. Is it really? I thought it was 60%, but he might be right. Maybe it's about 70% or over 60. Yeah. So we do have an older readership and it's and it's definitely dominated by men, but we do our best to try to balance things. And so I always am aware of kind of the way in which our readership is skewed toward men and toward older people. So we look to for ways to reach out to younger readers and women and all kinds of all kinds of people. We want to have a diverse readership. I don't know that we have a terribly diverse readership, but we do our best. We're certainly trying. Well, I was going to ask you how you're hoping to expand the readership. And when I was I am a subscriber to the Lambda Literary Review, which is an online publication, I saw an ad for the Gay and Lesbian Review Writers and Artists Grant. Yeah. Yeah. That's a new program that we've just launched in the last couple of years. So we're now working on actually just our second year of offering this grant because we, you know, we've done OK financially. In part because of our generous donors. So we decided that we were going to launch this grant and then which would be a cash amount for currently working scholars, typically graduate students who are dealing in some kind of LGBT topic and could use a boost. And it's a fairly substantial sum. We give seventy five hundred dollars for each grant. And then a foundation called Leonard Litz came along and they were very interested in helping us out. And when they heard about the grant program, they were very intrigued. And they said, oh, well, we would love to support you on that. What if we were to essentially match the amount that you were thinking of of providing and then you could offer two grants? So that's what we've been doing now for our second year. We're launching this program with half supported by us and half by Leonard Litz, two grants each for seventy five hundred dollars. And so that's where we are with it. It's it's been great. So far we've we had three really interesting people selected last year. Actually, yes, three, because two of them split. They didn't really request the full amount. So we were able to split one of the grants into two. We ended up with three winners, as it were, who got the grants. And one of the things they do for us is provide an article for the magazine. So when we so when we got around a hundred applicants last year, so we went through all of them and part of what we were looking for were the people who were doing research that might be of interest to our readers. So that was one of the stipulations for the grant was, you know, you're one deliverable will be that you have to write an article for the magazine. So yeah, so we're just embarking on your number two. We have we have hired a new administrator to take it to take over from the last one. And we are just at the stage now where we're putting out to feelers to universities and graduate programs that have that are likely to have LGBT projects going on to to see what to see who applies this year. Well, and you also have a blog. I listened to an interview where your Instagram account was commended. OK, oh, good. Oh, we do have a blog. Yep. And you have a web designer. Yes, we have a web designer, which is actually a company called the Boston Web Group, and we have a web editor whose name is Alison Armijo, and she's wonderful. She's the one who takes care of our blog. And then we also have this little column called Here's My Story, where because I was getting I get lots of submissions, but most of them are more memoirs than anything. And we don't really publish memoirs because, you know, we're just not that kind of magazine, but we get lots of memoirs. So it was a way to say, you know what, we get all these people who would love to tell their story. So why don't we let them do that, but we'll set up a special kind of place for that, namely our our website, our blog. And so we call it Here's My Story. And we've been doing that for a few years. I think we've published dozens and dozens of people's stories. There are usually a thousand words or so. And people talk about coming out or they talk about a relationship. Sometimes there's typically there's kind of the arch is typically something bad happened, but then they got it worked out and there's usually a happy ending. Oh, that's good. Everybody likes that. Yeah, I mean, people like to people like to talk about the struggles that they've been through and how they overcame them. And that's and so typically, gosh, we get a lot of people who had really unsupportive families and had to come out in difficult circumstances and how they dealt with that and some of the details of that situation that they were facing and ultimately how they how they triumphed in the end and came out that experience the readership for the print edition of the publication. That is the idea. Yeah, it must. That is absolutely the idea. I hope it does. We've been doing it for a few years and I think it's kept us more or less at least on an even keel, at least we're not going down in terms of our subscriber base. So I think it's helping. One thing I want to talk about is your literary editor, Martha Stone. She has contributed to almost all of your 166 issues that you put out and I want to get to how you select books to review. But I was wondering, you know, sort of on a personal note, you've known each other since the beginning of the magazine. How did you meet and how did you start to collaborate? We met just because of the magazine. She came out of the woodwork and she she was kind of looking for something else to do. She's a librarian. She's a research librarian. She's for as long as I've known her, she's worked or she did work. She's never retired. She worked for Mass General, yeah, MGH and as a as a medical research librarian. Anyway, she wanted to do something more literary and she heard about the magazine. I don't know exactly how back in the nineties when we were founded, there were these wonderful conferences called the outright conferences and they went all through the nineties. And so we were always there actively. So it may be. I don't remember exactly, but it may be that she found us there or she saw us there. And the next thing I know she was, you know, either I get back in those days, picked up the telephone probably and called. And so I met with her and said, you know, sure, let's do something and collaborate. And as you say, she's been with us really from the very start. She she's our literary editor. So her main job is is book selection. I'm always involved in the process. But she takes the lead. We get a large number of books sent to us. They get piled up on our dining room table and the two of us sit there. She and she goes first. She sort of takes the lead and goes through and there's kind of like a triage process, I suppose. Some of them get thrown into a bin where they're sold to Tim's used books in Provincetown. And so that's the Tim the Tim box. And some are great. And she's, you know, I think we agree. Yeah, that definitely is something that we should try to review. And then, of course, there's a middle ground that we talk about and try to figure out whether we're going to focus or target that book or not. And so then I compile a list mostly based upon Martha's selections. And she writes little blurbs about each book, which is very helpful. And so I compile those into a newsletter and part of the newsletter called Targeted Books, which allows our writers, our reviewers to select books that would interest them. And we have about so I think it's pushing up toward a hundred people on that mailing list of people who have written for us or continue to do so on a regular basis. And so then I always get a fairly robust response when I send out this targeted list of books. And then I kind of adjudicate that and decide who gets what that's part of the process. But yeah, Martha plays a very key role in that whole enterprise. And it's a key part of what we do is really making sure that we cover the most important books and match people. Writers with a book, the books that they're most qualified and that they're most interested in reviewing. You say in an interview that selecting and curating are the two is the main job that you perform as the editor. Yeah, well, yes, especially for. So that's how we do books. Then, of course, we always say like something like half of the magazine approximately is feature articles. And that's the part that I take care of. And I don't know. People think of an editor as somebody who goes sort of line by line and corrects bad grammar, which is a very small part of what I do. The most important part of what I do is really curating articles. So we get a certain number of proposals sent to us. And that's very helpful. And in some cases, we get whole papers or articles fully written that are sent to us. And so I go through all of those proposals and papers and decide which ones look like they have promise for an article. And then I was always looking for themes. And in some cases, these are a response to themes. Each issue has a kind of theme. And so if I've probably based upon what I have in hand, I decide, OK, now is the time for us to to hit a certain theme, which I've been announcing typically in our on our bulletin board or our cultural calendar section. And at that point, I sometimes have to be crude, like I said, OK, like our next issue, for example, I decided, you know what, I think I have a critical mass of articles about San Francisco, which is a very specific topic, but a specific theme. But we did an article. We did a theme issue on New York City a number of years ago. So San Francisco, I think, has played a very pivotal role in our history. So that was the point at which I said, I think we've got almost critical mass for an for an issue on San Francisco. And then is the point at which I went out and I recruited maybe one more piece just to kind of round things out. I might have actually gone for two. I think I had three articles and I went out and I found two more. And that was that. So that's part of so that's a lot of what I do then. So some some recruiting, some some of it involves just going through this lush pile of as proposals and articles that I've received through our website. And you can find that at georeview.org. Just thought I would get that plug in lest we forget at some point. Of course, yes, we'll display it periodically. Yes, my cat is making an appearance back there. I see. Yes, that's Sparky Sparky. I call her dog that sometimes. I say we're no barky Sparky. She's a she bark. So I'll say no barky Sparky anyway. So back to the books, you try to publish reviews of books that have been published in within six months. Is that right? So you try to try to stay within six months. Now, let's turn to contributors of whom I am one. Tell us how you find contributors and who they are, basically. I would say typically they find they find me. As I said, yeah, I mean, I do some recruiting. You know, like, for example, there's an article in the next. It's actually there's an interview in the next issue of the magazine by a woman who did she was a photographer and she sort of documented lesbian activism in the nineties. And I thought, oh, that would go perfectly with this next issue. So so that was an example of of somebody that I recruited. But typically people will find us through a website, you know, they'll go to specifically Richard Dutch Snyder. I mentioned at gelreview.org as the place to go, if you want to submit an article or a proposal. Typically we get proposals. Most of the time people don't spend the time to write a full-length article until they have some reassurance that it's going to be published. So I get mostly proposals, you know, I don't know what the percentage is, but of the proposals that I get, maybe a third of them or something turned in to actually turn into articles in the end. Oh, and then a certain number of people do just come and say, look, I don't have I don't have any idea for a long article and I have no interest in writing a long article, but I would love to review books for you. That was mine. Yeah, yeah, got lots of those. And then, you know, in my sluggish way, I eventually get back to people and say, or Stephen does, he's usually quicker than I am about this, but I try to respond within a reasonable timeframe to people and say, okay, you know, let me know, what are you interested in? What are your credentials? Could you send a writing sample? I usually like to get a writing sample. Not everyone can write. Many people would like to be able to write, but not everyone has the ability or the experience or whatever it takes. And so I usually ask for a writing sample before I make an assignment because there's a certain risk when you, I don't know, I've got these wonderful, reliable reviewers who have been with us forever and we know that they're good, like you and John Policky, for example, but people who haven't written for us before, there's always a little bit of risk involved. And you don't wanna just send somebody into, you know, the world of writing reviews if they don't have much experience. And so that's part of that process. And then we put this, we put people on this so-called, as you know, as you well know, we have this, we have a list of people who receive the newsletter or receive that targeted list of books. As I said, that's close to 100 at this point. So if people request to be on that list, you know, usually I'll put you on the list. And that's how you find out, you know, what the selections are coming up for forthcoming issues. And so that's kind of how the process works. Let's talk about the contents of the magazine. And you mentioned the cultural calendar and let me just pause and tell you how much I love that. Oh, you do, good. We have a new show that is a counterpart to our interview show. And I do international news and I always try to show a film clip from an international distributor. And so it's a main source of research for me to discover all these films that are being produced around the world. And also another striking feature that people don't often talk about is your by the way column. Oh well, you know, I get a lot of good feedback on that. Really, it's a really important feature and you started doing it in 2001. Okay. And how much research, how do you, you say that you love magazines, you must be an avid magazine reader of other work magazines. Yes, yes, far too much, far too much. It makes it hard for me to read old books. It's like part of my New Year's resolution is to read more books and not bury my nose in so many magazines. I mean, by magazines, like the New York Review of Books is my favorite. So you can just like dive in and never come up for air if you come once every two weeks and it's huge. It's oversized and it's thick and there's too much. But, you know, we also get the New Yorker and then I'm also like a science buff. I love science. So I get, I get Scientific American and National Geographic and I read those articles. And what else? I mean, the New York Times, of course, is indispensable daily basis, but also, you know, the weekly Sunday times we get actually hard copy and the Sunday book review. So I do spend an inordinate amount of my life reading book reviews. But, you know, that partly comes with the territory. I don't, I do a lot of outside reading that isn't LGBT related. And part of the reason for that is because I said, you know what, I do enough already. I know people who just, that's all they do, but that's not me. I need to get out of that world part of my life. And so I have, I'm very interested in science as they say, if only kind of on a layman's, layman's terms. And so I do read a lot of even books on science as well as a couple of books that I, or magazines that I mentioned. Back to research on the by the way column. How do you? Oh yeah, oh yeah, the by the way column, the research. Oh, well, so I do it over the course of the two months because, you know, we're bi-monthly so that gives me a two-month cycle. So during that two months, I will, every time I see something that looks kind of quirky, kind of interesting, kind of unusual, kind of fun, something where I can maybe write something that has like a little twist to it, a little irony, a little something unusual, something unexpected. So that's kind of the guiding light for that column. And so all during that two-month period I am visually collecting potential articles. So by the end of the two-month cycle, I usually end up with maybe 15 or so possible articles. And usually I end up with six of the five, I guess, five of these little squibs. It's a one-page thing. It's usually about 1,000 to 1,200 words. And it's based upon this research that I've done over the course of two months. I find that- A lot of response, a public response to it? Oh yeah, everybody said a lot. So I can't tell you how many people have said that that's the first thing they read. Oh. Because it's humor, it's sort of a humor column. It's at least it's supposed to be kind of funny. I don't think it's laugh out loud. I'm not sure that people are proverbially rolling in the aisles when they read it, but it's supposed to give you like a chuckle or maybe five chuckles. And so, I think we all need a laugh. So maybe that's why people will say that that's the first thing they read. But yeah, I get a lot of good feedback on that. It's fun to write. It's just kind of sort of what I've been doing. I don't have a huge record of publication other than in the magazine, but it's the kind of thing that I've been sort of right, that I like to write at ease. Maybe, you know, it's kind of like, I got this idea from Nietzsche of all people who is his so-called aphoristic style where he would write maybe just a paragraph for 500 words on something. And a lot of times they're just kind of interesting observations, little philosophical observations or even observations about current events. So that's kind of in a way that's sort of the model for this. I think I've ever told anybody that before, but of all people Nietzsche is kind of the model for these little squibs that I write. So yeah, they're fun though. I mean, that's like a very fun part of what I do. The first thing I look for is to look at is the calendar. And then I look at the contents, of course. Good to know. Actually, Stephen compiles the cultural calendar. Well, and I love that he has film festivals and literary festivals. I mean, you know, the whole thing. Wherever you live in the country or the world really, you can plug into something if you're in the area. Indeed, that's the idea. That the model for that is kind of the New Yorker, but you know how the New Yorker is very New York centric and it goes on for pages and it's all the Broadway shows that are opening and it also has film and performances of various kinds. And so we have, yeah, we have a film section and upcoming events and plays and then art exhibitions. So I think they're basically four or five sections, five sections that, and it is national. So we do try to, you know, cover the whole country. And basically we are now, US and Canada are pretty much our focus. Although we are called, the game has been reviewed worldwide and we do try to be international. And I think we are to some extent, but the reality is that most of our readers are in North America. Although I heard an interview with Martha Stone, who said she's really drawn to works in translation. So I love that feature too. They have included that too. Oh, interesting. I'd forgotten that she said that, but yeah, sure. I mean, especially, yeah, Martha, she does like those and I think it's a good thing that she goes for maybe books in, that were published a number of years ago in French or Spanish or whatever, but only now are being translated into English. But are already widely read or considered classics, let's say, in another language. And now English speakers can enjoy them. So while English is very much the international language, it's not that dominant. Certainly there are many books that are published in other languages. And eventually, if they get a reasonable following in another language, eventually they will be translated into English, typically. Yeah. It was always my frustration in graduate school. I wanted to get a degree in comparative lit, but I never spoke any other languages. So I was left with English. Yeah. But then lit, but you know. Reasonable French person. I just based on having lived in Europe for a period of time and whatnot. No Italian for your upcoming Venice trip. Everybody speaks, I've been to Venice. People speak English. Yeah, I've been to Venice too. Yeah. No, I don't know Italian at all. I have to confess. I have some German. I did. I think it's totally in mouthballs at this point. Tell us about Charles Heling. Helping. I can't read my writing. Yeah, Charles Heling. Well, Charles Heling is wonderful. He's been with us pretty much from the start also. With the exception of a few years, kind of in the 2000 decade, whatever that is. He's been with us really from the very beginning. He's wonderful. He started out doing line drawings and that was hit back in the days of sort of black and white and most publishing wasn't in color. He modeled, his hero was David Levine who used to do the cartoons for the New York Review of Books. And, but he did a variety of styles I would say. That was kind of like the key style that he used or that characterized his work for the first period of his work with us. And we were fully black and white in our first decade, let's say. But slowly we added more color, more color pages until now and for quite a long time we've been completely color every page. And so he kind of evolved along with us. And it was very much of an interesting learning curve for Charles because he'd been doing these line drawings for so many years where you have to be and you have to be an obsessive cross-hatcher. You just, there's all this cross-hatching when you do line drawings. He suddenly had to learn how to paint basically. And so he did. I think he did brilliantly. And he uses a program that makes it possible to do this digitally. So that he does his illustrations using this program where I guess you have kind of like a board that's I've never actually watched him do it but it enables you to essentially work on a surface that is similar to working on a canvas but it's all happening digitally and it's all done in layers. And eventually he puts these things together and he's really brilliant. I mean, he's an extremely talented artist. And so he has been doing these wonderful caricatures for many years. You held up the book or at least, I think maybe both of us did it one time. So we can ask the studio to display it. Yeah. So for me, it's reversed because of the way Zoom works. You should be able to see this. So I mean, you might be getting some reflection. Oh, there's Greta Garbo and I see Jean Genet. Just totally, this is just totally random. Charles Ludlow, you can see how pretty he is. And here we are, Langston Hughes. So I could go on, there's 27 in this book but this is a compilation based upon, these are all drawings that he's done before over the years, but we're doing our 30th anniversary now. And so instead of publishing an issue for the January, February, if you're a normal issue for Genfeb 2024, we're doing this compilation issue which involves 27 of Charles' best illustrations from the past, or his favorites basically. And I let him be the judge of what he considers to be the best ones. So that's what we've got for this issue which is the one that's on the stands now, we sold in bookstores. So I don't know what you say for bookstores. It's not news stands, but rather in bookstores, mostly Barnes and Noble. And then we did like a little supplement. I saw that. Yeah, well, we had to do that because we have some advertisers and we have book reviews. We don't want the books to get, the books just keep piling up and the book we really need to do that just to make sure we don't fall behind. So it's just a little 16 page supplement to go along with this book. But that's what we've got going for the 30th anniversary issue. And it's a way to get a quick dose of Charles, a large dose of Charles Hefling all wrapped up into one package. He's been working with you from the beginning? Yes. And this is a companion piece to your other special issue that you put out in 2021. Yeah, that was for our 150th issue. And now, as you said, we're up to 167 or something. I think that's what that one was, issue 167. So it was so successful, I think, and so wonderful the first time he did it, that we decided to do a follow up. Actually, we kind of had it in mind right from the start that we would do it in two parts to tell you that I'm remembering. And so the first one was called casual outings. And the idea was that we're sort of outing people who were kind of closeted from the past. And so they're starting like in the 19th century, figures like Franz Schubert, and then going forward from there. And so that was kind of like a little play on words for casual outings, get it? So we were kind of outing them, but in a casual way, because they were people who were already, had already, I mean, I don't think we, we didn't out anybody who hadn't, who wasn't already either known or suspected to be LGBT. But this time it's outer appearances because these are people who are pretty much out already. So we get it, they're outer than the people in the first volume. I don't know how many people will pick up on that little pun. But so it's outer appearances in the obvious sense that also more out is the secondary meaning for that title. And that's designed to address popular culture. Is that? Yeah, right. So the first one, more high culture in the second group and more popular culture. And that's why the second group tends to be later. There was kind of a little historical thing going on. So there's sort of, more of them are post stone wall or maybe just pre stone wall, but so the people in the new book are mostly people who are, who weren't, let's say, in the closet. I don't know if some may have been to some extent. And they tend to be more recent and they tend to be more popular culture. Although interestingly enough, Langston Hughes is in both books. I saw that. It was a mistake. Because he did Langston Hughes twice and it was only after, I mean, we realized it at some point in the process. You know, we're doing, you realize, because the first book is supposed to be so-called high culture. And the second is supposed to be pop culture. Well, he's been trying to get it. We're including Langston Hughes in both. And so, well, yes, of course. I mean, you could, a lot of these people, you could include in both of those categories. It's not hard and fast by any means. Menard Bernstein, I mean, wrote some fun musicals for Broadway, but he also is considered a very serious composer of classical music. And Susan Sontag, too. Susan Sontag, too. You could certainly say. And in fact, I think Susan Sontag really wanted to be considered a serious writer. And she was a serious writer. So she might not like being considered a pop culture writer. But she was though. I think she would actually like it. I think she loved the idea that she was sort of a public intellectual. Identified strongly with being that, with being that, because it gave her a forum, it gave her a voice. People could take her quite seriously. And she would, she would hand down, she got to hand down pronouncements about contemporary culture. And people would take her seriously because she was brilliant. And they would listen to her. And she had incredibly smart things to say about contemporary culture. She's great. I'm not a fan of, yeah, I love, I love Susan Sontag. You sort of, she's so intriguing, isn't she? Yes. Also, so I was gonna ask you about the principles of selection. And it was dictated by your colleague, the illustrator's choice. He chose the pictures and then you decided. And the accompanying print selection was drawn from earlier issues of the machine. Yeah, there was some back and forth. I mean, we had, I mean, I had some input, but it was mostly Charles. I mean, he basically gave me a list of his best drawings. And I narrowed it down to the 27 that I thought would work best in combination because I wanted there to be a reasonable number of playwrights and visual artists and activists and writers and performers. Those are the five, those are actually the five categories in this issue. So I kind of helped with the final selection, but they're really mostly Charles ideas of, he has what he calls his A list. And he has his B list and he has, he's graded him, he was a professor for many, many years. So I guess that comes naturally for him. So he's kind of graded his own work. And so he chose from his A list and he came up with, maybe there were 30 some and then I kind of knocked it down to 27, which is the number we ended up with for both books. But he's done hundreds. So I guess that means a total of 54 with two of Langston Hughes. But of those, so those 54 are really only a handful of his total, which is, oh, I don't know, hundreds of characters that he has done over this 30 year period. I wanna make sure that I ask you a reflective question, although we still have some time. Over the past 30 years, what changes have occurred, would you say, in publishing and what are your predictions for? I mean, I fear that I can only state what may be obvious to everybody. And that is that publishing has tended to, it's gone online. It has become digital. It has moved away from hard copy to some extent. And yet, I will say this. 20 years ago, people predicted, look, they're all magazines and books are soon going to be digital. There's not going to be any hard copy. And 10 years ago, people gave me the same or any time along the way, predictions that there wouldn't be a market for hard copy magazines in the future that everything would be simply digital. And yet we're still here and there still is a market for hard copy magazines. In fact, there are more titles than ever. What's changed now, I think, is that you have many more niche magazines. You don't have any or many of the magazines like, let's say, Life Magazine or TV Guide or something that would just publish tens of millions of copies. Those kinds of magazines have tended to go online. And so you end up with lots of niche magazines, which is exactly what we are. And you have devoted readership that really likes the idea of having something tangible to hold onto. I'm on. Yeah, so we still have a market. We're trying, it's a struggle to maintain our 8,000. Maybe we are down to seven, I don't know. But we've struggled to maintain our readership. But it hasn't dropped dramatically. I mean, we still have a fairly healthy, robust number of people who subscribe to us in hard copy. Now, having said that, we are, of course, available online. And so you can get a digital edition or you can just get the, you can just pay a certain amount, I don't even know how much, to subscribe just to the website without even getting a digital edition. Just gives you full access to all. Without getting a print edition. We have a huge archive, which is available online. And it only goes back to 2003. It doesn't go all the way back to 1994. But, because we changed formatting. But you can go back to more than 20 years at this point. So if you are a digital subscriber or if you subscribe only to the website. Publishing itself, I mean, it really has changed a lot though. Certainly, work publishing has changed. There's a whole lot more self publishing. I mean, it's not the healthy, robust industry that it was, I think, 25 years, 30 years ago. I mean, it's still, I don't mean to suggest that book publishing is in trouble or it's gonna go away. But, I mean, I noticed that, publishers, they publish in smaller lots. The idea of just huge blockbusters, I think, is less. We were born in the 1990s, which is the decade of the so-called gay publishing boom. When suddenly there were lots and lots of new titles coming out and they sold in large numbers. And I think that's going away. Where you would get, I don't know, somebody like Gabriel Rattello or Michelangelo Signorelli or some people who could just write a kind of general treatise on the state of gay LGBT rights. And it would sell hundreds of thousands of copies or something. I think those days are gone. I think it's mostly become a, it really is a niche genre at this point. And there's a lot of self publishing. But on the other hand, I shouldn't leave it there. I mean, a lot of publishers like, I mean, even like FSG for our stress and Peru and the university presses, especially North Carolina, Chicago, Illinois, Wisconsin, I don't know why the upper Midwest, that Minnesota, a lot of them are very strong in LGBT publishing. And so they are still supporting our world. And those are the books that we review. So book publishing has changed, I think not just for LGBTQ readers and writers, but for the whole world. And so we're just kind of like a subset of what has happened to everybody. Well, and I remember the predictions that independent bookstores were all going to close because of alcohol and so forth. And that hasn't occurred either. Well, interesting, you kind of did, but then we're starting to reopen again. I know, I know. There's been a resurgence, which I'd like to- There's been a little resurgence, I know, but there are many fewer though. Well, yeah, and I was an aficionado of the women in print movement. And of course, that underwent a decline, but feminist presses still going and Lou is still occasionally publishing. And one of the scholars I follow is Julie Inser who suggests, as you were saying, that the university presses are picking up a lot of what the old women's presses. Yeah, the university presses have been great. That's true. And they have continued to support LGBT publishing and picked up a lot of the slag. I mean, you don't have like, I don't know, Michael Denney died last year. He was the wonderful editor at St. Martin's Press who really launched- Oh, yes, I remember. Yeah, who launched sort of like, I don't know, gay publishing in many ways. It existed before Michael came along, but he founded Stonewall Editions and which was really the first imprint of LGBTQ books. And that was at St. Martin's Press. And St. Martin's was wonderful back then and they published it. And I don't think they do much anymore. So yeah. And I mentioned FSG, let's see who else. We get Rutledge still publishes a lot again, but they're kind of pretty much in an academic press. Beacon Press does- Yeah, we're seeing as really progressive for a while. Are they still? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, they're owned by the Unitarian Church. Oh, I didn't know that. Well, the Unitarian Church is big in Boston and it's kind of, but Stephen and I are actually members. As two of both of us being essentially agnostic or maybe we answer to sort of Buddhist inflected in our beliefs, the Unitarian Church is a wonderful welcoming place for people who are maybe refugees from the Catholic Church like Stephen or from the Protestant or a Protestant church like me. It's great. So I don't know why I'm putting in a plug for the Unitarian Universalist Church, but hey, they own Beacon Press and they're here in Boston. They're very popular here in Montpelier also. Oh, cool, that's good. I guess they're pretty much centered in New England. And yet, I know there's, Stephen's sister lives in Naples, Florida and she goes to a UU Church down there. So, you know. What are the current, I'm sorry, what are the current projects of the magazine? I know you have Martin Duberman's book coming out, which is a collection. Yeah, that's how. Martin Duberman's book is out. Oh, it is out. Yeah, I think so. I think I have a copy over here somewhere. Line of Descent, right? It's called The Line of Descent and it's a compilation of articles that it's written for us over the years and it's published by, so along with the book on Stonewall and now we've done these two books of illustrations by Charles Hefling, this was a new venture for us because it was not replacing an issue of the magazine, but rather just an extra curricular book that we put out based upon his many articles that he has contributed to the GNLR over the years. And it was his idea. He came to us and said, would you like to do this? And I said, yes, sure. I don't know if I would do it again. It turned out it was a lot of work and well, those two, what you were just asking about. Finally, the issue for us, we did the book, I think it's great. I think it came out really nicely and I would recommend it highly for anybody called, as you say, The Line of Descent by Martin Duberman. But publishing has changed and our biggest problem was distribution and trying to figure out how to do this. And it turns out unless you're big enough to get into Barnes & Noble, a hard copy, which we're not, you're pretty much stuck with distribution online. Well, once you decide to just do it that way, it's all about books on demand. There's like, you don't publish, I thought we would probably publish a few thousand copies and we were using it as a promotion for people who are like new subscribers, which is great, but we probably need a few hundred maybe for that, but so we've struggled with distribution. Like how do you actually get this? We can use our website, we can point people to Amazon or Barnes & Noble so they can subscribe online, but ultimately it comes down to, each book is sort of produced on demand. It's a crazy concept. So that's pretty much how it goes. So for many books that are published, I guess there's no such thing as a print run of like a thousand or 5,000 copies, which used to be quite typical for a, do your best to get the word out, but you're kind of on your own. Wow, that's so interesting, isn't it? Yeah, I know a lot of people are dealing with that essentially. We're getting to the end of our time. Tell us what last words, do you want validatory comments you have for our audience? Well, boy, that's a tough one. You could go a number of different directions with that. I would certainly want to encourage people to subscribe to the magazine or just visit our website. I think I mentioned our web address is glreview.org and that will give you a good idea of what the magazine is like. Hi, sweetie, I hope Greta is used to going out at about this time. So I hope she doesn't start to bark. Give you, maybe validatory is a good word for it because I'm no spring chicken. I've been doing this for 30 years. So I don't know how much longer I will continue. I am slowly starting to look for ways to develop a succession plan, which is to say that I don't really have a succession plan, but I think I need one. And I'm hoping that the magazine will continue. I hope it will continue as a hard copy magazine for the foreseeable future. We have no plans to go online. That's always an option going online and becoming a digital magazine, but I think that really changes the character of the magazine when that happens. So the plan is to keep going for the foreseeable future and maybe not, I don't have any ideas for changing the magazine too drastically. We will continue to do what we've been doing for as long as we can hopefully into the foreseeable future. We have this, I mentioned Alison Amijo earlier who is very young, but she's wonderful and she's sort of been working, haven't quite designated her as our book editor quite yet, but I think she's moving in that direction. And we're trying to get- Is Martha looking to cut back herself? Yes, Martha is cutting back actually. Martha is starting to reduce her role in the magazine now that she's retired, she's moved to Providence, she no longer lives in Boston. And so yes, that's the case. And she's my age. So we need younger people, we need younger readers, we need younger editors to get involved. So we'll be looking to see how that's gonna work out. I'm sure that whoever takes over the magazine will probably change it and want to bring about, we want to sort of put their own stamp on it. And that's good. I think it should, I've been doing this for a long time. I try to keep it fresh. And I've tried to change my own approach to editing with changing times and attitudes and nomenclature. I know we used to be the game that has been reviewed. Now we go with, we've tried to, that's a very retro kind of name. So we really just try to emphasize our initials, the G and LR and nuts, like kind of like the NAACP and not stress kind of the historical origins of our name. I didn't mention, we grew out of a Harvard publication called, and we were called the Harvard Game that's been reviewed for about the first six or seven years of our existence. But anyway, so I think my answer is we are gonna keep doing what we do best for the foreseeable future with a realization that change is in the air. And assuming that we still live in a democracy a year from now, and that all hell has not broken loose in terms of our ability to just continue with a LGBT magazine, I would hope that we will continue into the foreseeable future. And I think many, by the way, after the election of 2016 when Trump was elected disastrous year of election, in the election of 2016, we suddenly had an insurgence of donors and subscribers and yeah, I mean, it was interesting, people saw us as kind of a refuge just as they saw like the ACLU suddenly had a big resurgence because our whole mission has been promoting LGBT rights and freedom and free speech and trying to advance a kind of positive outlook and approach to our history and culture. And that's, I think, what we really are all about. We've tried to, what is the old song, emphasize the positive and de-emphasize the negative or however that goes. And that's always been kind of the philosophy and we shall see how this year goes. I don't know about you, but I'm nervous. And so for those of us and for some readers who see us as kind of a refuge from the horrors, potential horrors of right wing takeover or something, I think of us that way too to some extent and we'll continue to do so. So I guess that's the best I can do for the future. Because we just don't know what's gonna happen. Our fingers are crossed. And it's been 30 years and you've continued for 30 years and I think you'll prevail and I hope we all prevail. I hope the magazine, I don't see myself going on for another 30 years. I would love to see the magazine last for another 30. That would be wonderful. And who knows, we'll work on that and see how it goes. But I will probably not be here to register. Let's go for five years at a time, I think that makes sense. Richard Schneider, thank you for joining us. This has been delightful. Oh, well, thank you, Ann. I'm so happy to do this. And I'm thrilled that we were able to have this conversation. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.