The February issue of Out magazine had lots of problems in it—so many problems, I decided to write a post about them. This issue was the first one under a new editor in chief, Phillip Picardi, who wrote in his editor's letter that the magazine was "put together by a brand-new team of editors, photographers, stylists, journalists, and designers."
The trouble starts in that editor's letter, when the new boss's title is capitalized in this sentence: "As your new Editor in Chief, that's my pledge to you." Picardi put ", EIC" after his name at the bottom of the column, and some people think the expanded version of abbreviations should take initial caps. But we capitalize abbreviations to make it clear they're abbreviations and not regular words; making an abbreviation doesn't automatically convey proper noun status on the words used to form it. I, of course, don't know if that was the rationale for capitalizing Picardi's title, but I think it's a good guess.
By the way, these stories aren't available on the web at this time, so I can't link to the online versions. I don't claim this is a definitive list of all the problems in the magazine; I didn't set out to scour the whole issue for every error I could find. And as you may have already guessed from my tone thus far, this post is going to get a mite pedantic. So if you're not up for that right now, go listen to this gorgeous, decade-old song by David Mead1 I've been singing to myself a lot lately and come back some other time to read my post.
On page 36, in an article called "The Queer Canon," "It's" should be "Its" in "It's central characters are warriors fighting a battle that will change the course of our history." That's regarding the movie the magazine calls Beats Per Minute but whose actual title seems to be the (to my thinking) pointlessly more complex BPM (Beats Per Minute).
On page 41, a story about actor Andrew Rannells has the headline "PLAY IT STRAIGHT," which reads like a command; "PLAYING IT STRAIGHT" would make more sense because, as the story mentions, Rannells, who's gay, is playing a heterosexual Wall Streeter in his latest television project.
In that story, the following sentence shouldn't have a comma after "list": "His luck would quickly run out sometime in between noticing Wilson Cruz of My So-Called Life was also on the audition list, and being asked about his 'mix' by the casting director, who mistakenly thought he was part Asian." In between is acting as a compound preposition (aka a phrasal preposition) there, and noticing and being are the beginnings of gerund phrases that act as objects of that compound preposition and so shouldn't be separated with a comma.
The article also asserts that Rannells and his fellow cast members of the Broadway musical Hamilton won a Best Musical Theater Album Grammy. Rannells was part of the cast of The Book of Mormon that won that Grammy in 2012. Jonathan Groff was the original King George III in Hamilton and so was part of the cast that won the Grammy in question in 2016. Rannells filled in for Groff in that role for only a few weeks and didn't appear on the album.
Later, there's a reference to a scene in his new TV show, called Black Monday, in which a bag of cocaine explodes "all over the floor of the Stock Exchange." Since that's not a reference to a specific exchange, like the New York Stock Exchange or the Australian Securities Exchange, the S and E should be lowercase.
Finally, it's noted that Rannells is taking a role from a straight actor, the opposite of what often happens in Hollywood. Then we read, "For Rannells, it's a refreshing—but nerve-racking—change of pace." The quote that follows should explain why working on this new show is nerve-racking yet refreshing and also somehow tie in with the gay-man-playing-a-straight-man theme. Instead there's a quote about the time when he was working on the TV show Girls and he had to block out (meaning, establish the positions and movements of the actors in) a sex scene because "nobody knew how gay sex worked." That paragraph is a mishmash of ideas that don't flow in a comprehensible fashion.
Next up is a story about drag queens with a deck (aka a subhead) with a repeated "TO THE":
If you don't get the reference, Lady Gaga says "Don't be a drag. Just be a queen." a few times in her be-yourself anthem "Born This Way."
On the second page of the story with running text: "And even then, the most prominent roles cast cisgender, heterosexual men to dawn drag." I would argue cast doesn't work there; the roles don't cast themselves. And of course, it should be don, not dawn. And, incidentally, don is one of those words, like shod and clad, that I object to seeing in print because no one uses them conversationally. Have you ever heard anyone use don in a sentence like, for instance, "I should don my Halloween costume now so we're not late to the party."? No, you haven't.
On the last page of text: "Predictably, she is portrayed not by an actual queen, but by the cisgender, hetrosexual actor Harold Perrineau." The editors at Out are so queer, they can't even spell heterosexual. 😆 I would also argue the comma after queen isn't needed.
And on the last page of the article, there's an issue in this caption accompanying a photo of Bianca Del Rio, who won the sixth season of RuPaul's Drag Race and is well-known for her biting sense of humor:
The first B in Big Brother should be in italics.
My favorite Bianca Del Rio quote, addressing fellow contestant Adore Delano, whom everyone in the sixth season made fun of for being not so bright: "I know what you got on your SATs. Ketchup."
The final article I'm critiquing is a profile of Steven Canals, who's the first of four "Hollywood go-getters making tangible change for LGBTQ+ representation" presented in a feature called "Scene Stealers." Here's the first paragraph:
Working class should be hyphenated. Both co-executive producer and Golden Globe-nominated should have en dashes instead of hyphens because co modifies executive producer, not just executive, and the latter is a classic example of a two-or-more-word proper noun starting a compound modifier that precedes a noun or noun phrase. A comma should follow producer because the serial comma is used elsewhere in the magazine. And the comma after show is unnecessary because Golden Globe–nominated show is simply a description of Pose and Pose isn't the only show that description could apply to, so we shouldn't be treating that show title as a nonrestrictive appositive.
Here's the third paragraph in the story:
I think something like "in a movie" needs to be added to the sentence starting with "The documentary." I was going to say that really shouldn't be broken after the re, but after consulting the dictionary, I stand corrected on that.
Here are the last two paragraphs:
The word know is repeated in the sixth line. "As one of only five people in the Pose writers' room ... his new industry voice is equally as important as everyone else's." That reads odd to me: the small number of writers doesn't necessarily mean all voices are equally important. Canals is also a co–executive producer of the show, so his voice is presumably more important than his fellow writers'. And finally, the quote marks between shut and My should be eliminated or, if there were words in between that the writer didn't want to quote, replaced with an ellipsis like the one I used above.
1I read, elsewhere on YouTube, that Mead's mother is the woman on the train with him and he's thinking about life without her once she's passed on. I couldn't find an interview with him online confirming that, but given the lines in the chorus "But now you're fast asleep / And I am so alone," the reference to "the orphanage," and the countdown of the stations until there are "no more stops to go," that explanation makes sense. I've been a huge fan of Mead's for many years, but his latest album, Cobra Pumps, isn't clicking with me. It's more guitar driven than his music usually is, and the melodies aren't as pretty. By the way, New Jersey Transit's Morris & Essex Line serves the Oranges, Chatham, Morristown, and Convent Station but not the Caldwells and Somerset.
UPDATE on March 5: My friend Stacy, who used to live in one of the Oranges, commented on Facebook: "Caldwell is close to the Montclair-Boonton Line, and Somerset, really!?!?" Caldwell is in Essex County, a bit west of the terminus of the Montclair-Boonton Line, and its biggest claim to fame is being the birthplace of Grover Cleveland, the only president born in the state I hail from. West Caldwell is *drum roll* west of there. Somerset is a county. And also a neighborhood in Ewing, the township where the college Stacy's husband, Hal, and I graduated from is located, and a community within Franklin Township in Somerset County. No trains go to either of those Somersets.