The year was 1993. Nearly a million people had just marched on Washington demanding LGBTQ+ rights. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would be signed into law by year’s end. And in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Richard Schneider Jr. was preparing to launch what he hoped would fill a glaring void in queer publishing — a publication for the sophisticated gay and lesbian reader who wanted more than party guides and dating advice.
“In 1993, there was nothing in the gay world corresponding to the New York Review of Books or the Times Book Review or Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker that featured intelligent essays,” Schneider told The New York Times in 1998. “There was a huge niche or vacuum in gay and lesbian letters which I hope we somewhat filled.”
Three decades after the magazine’s 1994 debut, that “somewhat” characterization feels more than a bit lacking. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, originally The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, has published 159 issues, featured more than 1,400 writers and established itself as what Library Journal once called “the journal of record” for discussions of LGBTQ+ topics.
Now, as Schneider prepares to step back from day-to-day operations, he’s handing the reins to Jeremy Fox — a longtime contributor, former Boston Globe reporter and editor, and devoted reader of the magazine for nearly 15 years. Fox will assume the editor-in-chief role in 2026, marking not just a changing of the guard but a rare moment of continuity in an era when LGBTQ+ media faces unprecedented challenges. While the publication landscape has shifted dramatically since the early ’90s — when dial-up internet was cutting-edge technology and social media didn’t exist — GL&R has maintained its mission of providing a forum for enlightened discussion of issues and ideas important to LGBTQ+ people.
Born from a newsletter
Schneider’s path to founding the magazine began with an unlikely starting point. In the late ’80s, he was recruited to create a newsletter for the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus alumni organization, where he learned editing and desktop publishing. “I was expanding the newsletter and I was trying to publish more transcripts from talks that were given on LGBT topics at Harvard,” Schneider told Pride Source, “and eventually it just kind of exploded or burst beyond the scope of a newsletter.”
The catalyst came when Andrew Holleran, author of “Dancer from the Dance,” returned to Harvard for his 25th reunion and gave what Schneider describes as “a wonderful talk.” When Schneider asked to print the transcript, Holleran agreed with one condition: “You must use it in its entirety.” The talk was long enough that it sparked the idea for something beyond a newsletter — a full magazine that could publish substantial literary and scholarly work.
In the early ’90s, Schneider decided to expand beyond a newsletter format, initially envisioning “an annual supplement” for members. But after the first issue appeared in winter 1994, the magazine “was starting to get national distribution,” he says, and the vision quickly expanded to reach “LGBT people across the country and maybe even beyond.”
The timing was significant. A wave of LGBTQ+ publications launched in the early and mid-’90s. Out Magazine debuted in 1992. Our own publication, Between The Lines — Michigan’s largest LGBTQ+ newspaper — began publishing in 1993. Genre, MetroSource and others joined a media ecosystem that included The Advocate, publishing since 1967. These publications arrived as AIDS treatment was beginning to shift. By 1995, AIDS was the single greatest killer of men ages 25-44 in America, but the FDA’s approval of the first protease inhibitor that year ushered in new hope.
Schneider founded The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review in 1993, volunteering while maintaining his consulting research work. In 1999, he left his day job to dedicate himself full-time to the magazine. Schneider holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard and spent the ‘80s teaching in Europe before returning to Boston. In 1998, the magazine reorganized as a nonprofit and, in 2000, dropped “Harvard” from its name, becoming The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
From its first issue, which featured Holleran’s 10,000-word memoir “My Harvard,” GL&R established its voice. This wasn’t a magazine interested in club openings or fashion trends. It wanted to grapple with Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, with the history of queer organizing and the future of LGBTQ+ rights.
Each issue is created around a unifying theme — “The Science of Homosexuality,” “Human Rights Around the World,” “Virtual Communities” — and offers approximately half a dozen essays across disciplines, reviews of books, movies and plays, poetry, artist profiles and an international spectrum column. The archive spans contributions from historian and biographer Martin Duberman, now in his 90s and working with Schneider on a collection of his 14 GL&R pieces, to Holleran’s ongoing meditations on gay life before, during and after the AIDS crisis.
Throughout, emerging voices appear alongside established ones.
One of the magazine’s most distinctive features has been the work of contributing artist Charles Hefling, whose illustrations have graced covers and profiles for decades. “He’s an amazing artist and he’s been with us from the start,” Schneider says. Hefling worked in the tradition of David Levine, who created caricatures for The New York Review of Books. “I don’t think he actually knew David Levine. They might have corresponded a little bit,” Schneider notes.
For the magazine’s first decade, Hefling created black-and-white line drawings in the classic caricature style. After a sabbatical, “he came back and completely reinvented himself and learned how to do color, which he hadn’t done before,” Schneider explains. Working with digital tools, Hefling developed a new style — detailed three-dimensional portraits that, as Schneider wrote in an introduction to his work, go “beyond the conventions of caricature” to “reveal something essential about the person being portrayed.”
The magazine published two collections of Hefling’s work: “In Search of Stonewall” (2019) and “Casual Outings” (2021), featuring his illustrated portraits of 27 artists and writers. The title “Casual Outings” refers to what Schneider describes as “outing people who tried to hide their sexuality at least some of the time.” His subjects range from Franz Schubert to David Wojnarowicz — figures from Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf to Langston Hughes and Leonard Bernstein, many of whom created queer personas in their work but “could never quite admit the terrible truth in real life.”
Holleran, now 81, has been the magazine’s most consistent contributor, writing over 100 articles across three decades. “He’s an amazing writer,” Schneider says. “He writes very quickly, producing 2,500-3,000 words. He likes to work [on editing] over the telephone, so I get to talk with Andrew Holleran for an hour or two every couple of months.”
The magazine has featured the literary work and analysis that defines queer intellectual life. Essays on Hart Crane and Truman Capote. Scholarly examinations of Susan Sontag and Willa Cather. Profiles of contemporary activists and artists.
Writer and activist Larry Kramer told The New York Times in 1998 that GL&R was “our intellectual journal. If you want to deal with scholarly intelligent arguments, there’s really no place else we can publish.”
To understand what GL&R offers, consider this passage from David Masello’s tribute to the late poet Mary Oliver, which appeared in the magazine: “Prior to the reading, amid a crowd of Birkenstock-clad, gray-haired fans with PBS tote bags, young lesbians sporting multi-colored hair, and other fans of all ages and persuasions, she graciously handed me a sealed envelope. She shook my hand and said with genuine modesty: ‘I hope that what I wrote is good enough.’ As a longtime reader of hers, I felt as if Sappho herself had waded from the Aegean to hand me new verse on a scroll.”
That willingness to write about beauty and transcendence without irony — Masello notes Oliver’s unapologetic use of words like “beautiful, love, beloved, prayer, loneliness, God, holy and heaven” — characterizes much of what GL&R publishes.
“I think one of the things that we’ve done,” Schneider reflects, “is to go back and rediscover our past.” The magazine has featured examinations of figures like renowned novelists Henry James and Thomas Mann, exploring queer readings of their work and lives even when the historical subjects didn’t use contemporary terminology for their identities. “We don’t subscribe to this idea that just because they didn’t call themselves gay or didn’t use one of our words, you can’t talk,” he says. “I think we can infer people’s sexual orientation by how they lived and what they wrote in many cases or what their art was like.”
The magazine tracked the expanding umbrella of LGBTQ+ identity. Initially focused primarily on gay and lesbian issues, GL&R has increasingly featured bisexual and transgender voices. As contemporary figures like Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner brought trans issues to mainstream attention in 2014-2015, GL&R provided deeper context — examining decades of trans activism and scholarship, profiling transgender artists and analyzing legislative battles.
The survival of GL&R — alongside regional queer publications like Between The Lines, The Advocate and others that launched in the ’90s — represents something remarkable. Most publications from that era have vanished. OutWeek, a gay and lesbian weekly news magazine published in New York City during the peak of AIDS activism, shut down in 1991 after just 105 issues. Genre, Instinct and countless others have ceased publication or moved entirely online.
“We’re some of the survivors of LGBTQ media,” Fox observes. “There used to be a much more robust array of queer publications if you go back 20, 30 years ago. And these days, it wouldn’t fill a very big magazine rack.”
GL&R’s survival is particularly notable given its model. With a circulation of 11,000 and supported by 8,000 subscribers and 750 donors, it operates as a nonprofit without corporate backing. “Donations and subscriptions each account for about 40 percent of the income, while advertising fills in the last 20 percent,” Schneider explains.
“The most surprising thing is that we’re still here,” Schneider says. “As a hard copy magazine.” Fox, Schneider says, has “talked about this, how people like hard copy and how you can cuddle up in bed with it. I think all that’s true.”
While digital transformation continues, Schneider observes that committed readers maintain their connection to print. Many have been with the publication since the beginning, with some saving every issue. Perhaps, Schneider muses, print is on the verge of a comeback.
A 15-year courtship
Fox’s relationship with The Gay & Lesbian Review spans nearly half its existence. He discovered the publication “at least 15 years ago, maybe 16 or 17,” drawn to its literary and historical focus that reminded him of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
In 2013, Fox became a contributor, writing movie reviews. Around 2017, he became an associate editor, proofreading galleys of each issue. After 14 years at the Boston Globe as a reporter and editor, plus teaching journalism at Harvard Extension School and Northeastern University, Fox was ready for a new challenge.
“When I first became involved as a contributor, it was a job that I had dreamed I could have someday,” Fox says. “I thought, Richard must have more fun working than just about anybody because you get to read so many different perspectives and so many different underexplored or nearly entirely unexplored areas of LGBTQ history.”
When Schneider mentioned the opportunity, Fox said he “jumped at the chance.” Fox, Schneider said, is “very smart.”
The timing became urgent when Fox left the Globe. “Jeremy suddenly became free and available and I jumped on that opportunity,” Schneider explains, “since I’d been thinking, ‘God, how am I going to pass this thing on? I don’t want the magazine to die.’ But it’s really hard to find somebody who’s got the time and the specific skills to edit a magazine.”
Fox sees his role clearly. “I’m basically stepping in to continue raising Richard’s child for him,” he says. “[Schneider has] given me big shoes to fill there,” Fox says. “One major goal is to be able to maintain that voice and maintain the high quality of the writing in the magazine.” He also recognizes opportunities for evolution. At 50, Fox wants to “bring in younger writers who can express the viewpoint of the generation below me as well as my generation and the generation above me.” He’s focused on featuring more ethnically diverse contributors, more trans and nonbinary contributors and more people across the full spectrum of the LGBTQ+ community.
It’s a vision rooted in both editorial excellence and community necessity. Attacks on trans people and LGBTQ+ education have intensified, making the magazine’s role as a platform for varied LGBTQ+ perspectives more critical than ever. For a publication that has documented three decades of LGBTQ+ intellectual life — from the depths of the AIDS crisis to the victories of marriage equality to current attacks on trans rights — the work continues.
“I hope to see the magazine around for another 32 years,” Fox says. “I joke that I expect that I’ll probably be dead by that time. But if it can last another 64 years or another 96 years, I would be that much happier.”
The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide is published bimonthly and available by subscription at glreview.org.