Andy Towle Departs Influential Gay Blog Site Towleroad
After nearly 18 years, gay blogger Andy Towle is departing his influential website, Towleroad.
In a letter published to the site on Sunday, Towle explained that "There's no one reason I've decided it's time for a change. When you do something for nearly two decades you start to wonder if there's anything else for you out there. And when there's a global pandemic and you're stuck in isolation for a year obsessively absorbing the actions of a fascist in charge of the country you start pondering those 'life' questions even more."
Towle created the site in 2003 — a few years prior to the now-domineering force of social media — after serving as editor-in-chief for a now-defunct gay magazine, Genre. Towleroad began as a blog designed to deliver news to, as Towle said, "a niche audience in a rapid manner, with interaction between readers and writers that had not existed before."
He also note how much progress has been made in the time since: "George W. Bush was president, and nobody knew what a 'blog' was. There were no hate crime protections for LGBTQ people, the military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy was still in place, and gay and lesbian people couldn't get married anywhere in the United States. There was no YouTube, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, and no iPhone!"
Towle summed up the last two decade of his work as "thrilling...and a lot of hard, rewarding work," noting that Towleroad is "one of the few independently published LGBTQ news sites left." Along with EDGE, of course.
Business partner Michael Goff, who joined Towleroad in 2005, will take over running the site.
Confessing he has no idea what he plans to do with his free time, Towle does contend "I want to get back to creating things. I want to see what else is out there for me. I want to take a deep breath and finally maybe have a weekend off.
"I also want to explore my interest in the visual arts — I've been doing a lot of painting and I'd love for those of you who are art fans to follow my art Instagram account HERE."