Pride Media, Home to Out Magazine and The Advocate, Returns to LGBTQ Ownership
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Pride Media Inc. – which owns some of the most revered brands in LGBTQ media – has new owners and a fresh name, the organization announced on Tuesday.
Equal Entertainment Inc., the owner of gossip brand and news program Celebrity Page, earlier this month bought Pride Media, which has published Out, Out Traveler, The Advocate, Plus, and the namesake Pride magazines since 2017, when it was acquired by Oreva Capital LLC.
The company will operate as “Equal Pride” going forward.
“Equal Pride will now become the leading LGBTQ+ owned and certified voice to the LGBTQ+ community with plans to expand the audience with women and people of color,” the company said in a statement.
Equal Entertainment founder and current CEO of Celebrity Page Mark Berryhill will be Equal Pride’s new CEO.
“Our combined company will be the premier home for LGBTQ+ people — and increasingly women and people of color creators, storytellers, journalists, and businesspeople who want to have an impact through their work with one of the most diverse group of media and digital brands in the world,” he said in his own statement.
Berryhill, along with Equal Entertainment’s other co-founders Michael Kelley and Joe Lovejoy, acquired Pride Media on earlier this month. Kelley will serve as chairman and president of global growth and development in the new company and Lovejoy will be CFO. Other Pride Media executives, including its CEO Diane Anderson-Minshall, will remain at the new company in senior positions.
“We could not be more excited about the opportunity to join forces with Equal,” Anderson-Minshall said.
The previous owners of Pride Media – Adam Levin and Maxx Abramowitz – made more headlines with their political donations and business dealings than their stewardship of the brand. Neither publicly identified as LGBTQ, which became a frequent talking point for critics of The Advocate and Out. By contrast, Equal Pride, as it declares on its website, is “LGBTQ+ owned and operated.”
This would be the fifth ownership change for both magazines since Out founder Michael Goff first sold it to the publishers of The Advocate – considered the oldest-surviving LGBTQ publication in the United States – in 2000. In 2017, Levin and Abramowitz acquired the magazines when they took over the publishing properties of Here Media through the private investment firm Oreva Capital LLC, the same year they separately acquired the legendary cannabis-focused High Times magazine.
Levin, known for stints running the infamous adult entertainment imprint Girls Gone Wild and the defunct social network Bebo, pledged to take High Times public in 2019. He then stepped down as CEO and decided to pivot the brand from publishing to the retail cannabis dispensary business. A number of deals Levin claimed to have secured failed, and High Times became the subject of a 2020 expose in Politico Magazine – revealing it had lost more than $10 million in the first half of 2019 alone.
In October 2018, WWD first reported that Levin had made donations to Devin Nunes, Dean Heller, Josh Mandel, and Dana Rohrabacher, all Republicans in Congress who had expressed opposition to LGBTQ rights. Afterwards, Levin and then-Pride Media CEO Nathan Coyle spoke to Queerty about the donations, with Coyle declaring: “That will not continue. Someone who… expressed support for anti-LGBTQ policies or legislation will no longer be receiving any political donations from Adam Levin.”
In 2020, however, LGBTQ Nation reported Levin had donated $2,800 each to Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Steve Daines (R-MT) that June. (Disclosure: In 2020 this writer was a weekend editor for LGBTQ Nation.)
Over the years – and through multiple owners – employees and contributors to The Advocate and Out complained that the publications were late or failing to pay wages and fulfill invoices. Although complaints date back more than a decade, the issue became industry news in 2018 when those calling out the company went viral online, and one of Pride Media’s contractors sued in 2019. The New York Post reported at that time that Pride Media owed money in unpaid commissions not just to writers, but advertising partners as well.
Despite that, Pride Media publications have continued to produce genre-defining, community-leading journalism. The Advocate received recognition as a trailblazer at the 2016 VH1 Logo Trailblazer Honors. In 2019, Out executive editor Raquel Willis – the first trans woman to hold that position in the company – published “The Trans Obituaries Project” focused on trans women of color who died that year. It would win a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Magazine Article in 2020 – the same year The Advocate won the Outstanding Media Overall Coverage Award.
