the staff of out and the advocate would like a word with their own boss
via The Advocate and Out, reporting on themselves, off an investigation by independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas.
The strangest byline on the internet Monday belonged to three reporters at The Advocate who had to write a news story about their own company's board.
The editorial staffs of The Advocate, Out, Them, Pride.com, Out Traveler and HIV Plus, which is to say most of the American queer press, put out a joint statement about Jay Katari, a board member of their parent company equalpride whose title is Strategic Advisor, Growth & Innovation. "Our editors became aware of concerning reports this morning," it read, "that Jay Katari, one of the board members of our parent company, equalpride, may have espoused beliefs that are antithetical to the mission of our brands." Then the part that tells you what they were actually worried about: "Please know that Katari's position has not influenced our reporting."
what the reporting found
Ortega-Rojas documented Katari's social media activity: wearing MAGA apparel, sharing pro-Trump imagery, mocking Joe Biden, following members of the Trump family and senior administration officials. Worth saying clearly, because it is the part that gets dropped in the retelling, the reporting identified no public statements from Katari attacking LGBTQ+ people. He is a man who appears to like Donald Trump, sitting on the board of the company that owns nearly every gay magazine you have heard of.
Katari has not publicly responded. equalpride declined to comment.
the two weeks in between
On August 31, CEO Mark Berryhill emailed employees to announce Katari was taking a bigger role. Katari "genuinely loves what we do at equalpride and believes deeply in our mission," he wrote, and added that he had "full confidence in Jay."
By Monday, in an internal meeting, the framing had moved. Berryhill said "not everything is always known about board members," and that Katari's role was limited to developing new revenue sources with no editorial involvement. Fourteen days is a short distance to travel between full confidence and not everything is always known.
The staff, by their own description queer and trans journalists including people of color, are asking management for clarity on who he is and what he does. It is a modest ask. It is also the kind of ask that only gets made out loud when it has already been made quietly and not answered.
There is a version of this that is nothing: a revenue guy with bad politics and no editorial reach, which is roughly what Berryhill is describing. There is another version where the largest owner of queer media in America has a governance problem it did not disclose to the people who write for it. The distinction matters, and the only people who can settle it are the ones currently declining to comment. Gay institutions have had a rough year explaining themselves to their own constituencies. Utah's biggest gay rights group endorsed the Republican over the gay Democrat last week and is still answering for it.
