Founding
OutWeek was originally conceived by musician and producer Gabriel Rotello. As a member of the activist group ACT UP, Rotello felt that New York needed a publication that would represent ACT UP’s new, more radical approach to activism.
At the same time, businessman and ACT UP member Kendall Morrison was planning to start a New York magazine that would provide a venue for advertising his popular gay phone sex businesses. Although neither Rotello nor Morrison had any experience in journalism, the two decided to team up, with Morrison acting as publisher and Rotello as editor-in-chief.
From its first issue on June 26, 1989, OutWeek attracted considerable attention and the magazine repeatedly broke major stories both in New York and nationally.
Its coverage of the Covenant House sex scandal, and its exclusive interview with Father Bruce Ritter's main accuser, Kevin Kite, helped bring about Ritter's resignation.
At about the same time, OutWeek ignited a major local controversy by revealing that Mayor David Dinkins' newly appointed Health Commissioner, Woody Meyers, advocated the quarantining of people with AIDS. The subsequent controversy pitted Dinkin's gay supporters against his black supporters (Meyers is black), leading the New York Times to call the dispute "by far the most bitter" of the Dinkins administration.
By repeatedly breaking major stories, and through its intense coverage of the AIDS crisis, OutWeek became a significant journalistic presence in New York and was considered a "must read" in political and media circles far beyond the gay and lesbian community.
Read more about this topic: Out Week
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)