PUBLISHER'S LETTER

I know that it might be hard to believe, but this month OutSmart enters its 10th year of publication. Time truly goes go by quickly when you love what you do and do what you love.

Over the years, publishing OutSmart has been an extremely rewarding experience and, like most businesses today, a sometimes challenging one as well. What makes it all worthwhile are the numerous times we learn that OutSmart is making significant contributions in your life. We love it when we hear that OutSmart has been a catalyst, inspiring community action or empowering personal change. A most flattering comment came recently from a reader who said he couldn't remember a time that OutSmart wasn't a part of the community.

Over the years, I've been asked what inspired us to begin OutSmart. For starters, we wanted to create a community publication that would represent us in a broader perspective, showing how GLBT individuals are neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family. We also wished to show the diversity of gay peoples' lives, that our lives were much more than just night life. We intended to show how GLBT folks are in every profession and that we make great role models.

We created OutSmart hoping it would be a source of information our community would be proud of, a magazine you could leave on the coffee table, and one that could be distributed in mainstream establishments because it wasn't filled with sexually explicit advertising.

We named the magazine OutSmart because we knew that being out and smartly educated is the only way to overcome ignorance and misinformation propagated by the hate-filled religious right. If people got to know us, they would know that we weren't the demons we had been conjured up to be. We believed that if our stories could contribute to our community's pride, visibility, and empowerment, it could contribute to obtaining our equal rights as Americans.

My personal motivation for starting OutSmart came after the AIDS death of Joey Cundiff, my partner of nine years. This loss in 1992 was a devastating crisis for me both emotionally and financially. Losing my partner came first. Losing our home came next. Like many other gay couples, we lacked the legal documents necessary to protect our relationship from a homophobic family. If only our community had a resource for information on relationships and our rights, other people might not have to face similar experiences. Two years later, OutSmart was born.

The word crisis in Chinese is composed of two characters: One character is the word for "danger" and the other is the character for "opportunity." The words are reminders that in every emerging crisis there is either the danger of complacency or a seed of opportunity for action, depending on our perception.

One crisis brewing in the Texas legislature is a bill that bans gays and lesbians from serving as foster parents. This presents a tremendous opportunity to speak out against this inequality of justice and to show that gays and lesbians make excellent parents.

On the federal level, as homeland security measures continue to erode the constitutional rights of all Americans, we have yet another opportunity to speak out. As GLBT Americans, we already live with an inequality of civil rights. We have a chance now to be even more vigilant and vocal to protect the existing civil rights of all Americans while still continuing to fight for the same rights GLBT Americans deserve.

We hope that OutSmart will continue to empower you to become more involved in the community and a more vocal activist of human rights issues.

Thank you again for reading OutSmart and supporting our advertisers who make this magazine possible. Drop us a note sometime. We love hearing from you.

Greg Jeu

Publisher