When "The Advocate" arrived in a "privacy wrap"

Long ago and far away --- in a time before the internet (and recycling) --- I was an enthusiastic consumer of magazines, many on a subscription basis, others purchased at the news stands of various bookstores visited weekly, if not more often.

Among them was The Advocate, the leading news magazine for what then was called (and still is sometimes) the gay community. Very few people in Winnebago County, Iowa, where I lived at the time, subscribed to The Advocate, so I always was able to pass it along. Others piled up and that was one reason why, as the years passed, I switched to digital --- and still feel guilty sometimes about abandoning print.

I was thinking about The Advocate this weekend after watching a 2018 documentary entitled "A Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate Celebrates 50 Years." Briefly, The Advocate was published first in Los Angeles during 1967 as a mimeographed newsletter, evolved into the dominant source of LGBTQ news nationwide at a time when mainstream media coverage was snarky at best, and continues to publish --- every other month. Its principal presence now is, as you might imagine, digital.

For as long as I subscribed, first in a little town named Thompson where I picked up the mail at the post office, then later in Mason City, where postal carriers delivered, The Advocate arrived in what was called a "privacy wrap." I remember this as an opaque plastic bag with a simple return address in one corner. There was nothing salacious inside (ok, the classifieds were kind of racy until spun off into a separate publication), however ....

Privacy was necessary then --- not only in small Iowa towns but in considerably larger cities across America, too. Livelihoods, family relationships, even safety sometimes depended upon it.

The publishers discontinued the privacy wrap in 2007, I believe. But by that time, as the mainstream media expanded their horizons and improved coverage, I had discontinued The Advocate. But I'll always be grateful for that pioneering publication.

Unless you lived it, you have no idea what that slick magazine in its plain wrapper and the news it contained --- not only of current events but also the arts, literature and more --- meant to those of us who subscribed or were fortunate enough to know someone who did. It was, as they say, revolutionary.