by Fred Kuhr

Troy Masters may have most recently worked as founding publisher of the Los Angeles Blade, until his death last year, but his work in New York is what brought friends and colleagues together on March 30, 2025, for a memorial service and celebration of life at the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan. Masters, who died on December 11, 2024, was 63 years old.

Masters first made his mark in New York as founder of Lesbian and Gay New York (LGNY) in 1994, which he initially ran out of his East Village apartment. It was relaunched and rebranded as Gay City News (GCN) in 2002.

“I know that a lot of the impetus behind Troy’s passion about queer media came from the horror that our community faced during the worst periods of the AIDS crisis,” said Paul Schindler, the founding editor of GCN and organizer behind the memorial event. “The scars from that period always motivated him to continue pushing forward, and it made him uncompromising in his dedication to a media for, about, and by our community. He never retreated from that mission,” he said, as reported in GCN.

Masters actually began his career in advertising at New York’s OutWeek magazine in 1989, but it closed its doors soon after. “He was determined, however, to keep a vibrant queer voice alive in New York,” said Schindler, according to GCN.

The newspaper noted, “Masters was with Gay City News until 2015, at which point he moved to Los Angeles. He partnered with the Washington Blade to create a sister LGBTQ paper, the Los Angeles Blade, where he continued the same mission that inspired Gay City News: keeping queer media alive in communities that needed it most.”

Other speakers at the event included noted author and broadcaster Michelangelo Signorile; John Sutter, former publisher of Community Media LLC; journalist and political satirist Susie Day; GCN contributing editor for news Duncan Osborne; and Matt Tracy, the newspaper’s editor in chief.

Dawn Ennis, journalism professor at the University of Hartford and former writer for the Los Angeles Blade, noted, according to GCN, “that despite the struggles that Masters and countless others faced at the end of 2024 when the 2025 US election results came in, queer media refuses to be silent. Two of Masters’ pioneering publications, Gay City News and the Los Angeles Blade, continue to bring award-winning news to the largest queer markets in the country, leveraging community support to bring inspiration.”

“Troy, you did it,” Ennis said. “You did it.”

Prior to the memorial, Signorile told GCN, “Troy was a tireless pioneer for queer media. In a business that was often economically challenging, Troy was committed to creating and maintaining platforms for LGBTQ journalists to do the work that is sadly lacking in the mainstream press.”

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Volume 27
Issue 4