In May, Attitudemagazine turns 30 years old — we know, we know — we don’t look a day over 21. Here, we look back on our glittering history… and our staggering suite of covers
Words Jamie Tabberer
‘I just got a text from Cheryl…” says a panicked member of Team Attitude. The year is 2008 and I am a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed intern listening with poker-faced fascination as the magazine’s Girls Aloud cover hangs in the balance for reasons I won’t get into here. The ensuing tea is scalding (or would have been, were tea a metaphorical concept back then), but everything works out in perfectly sequinned GA style in the end.
It’s surreal that 16 years later, the girls are back — minus their shiniest member, Sarah ‘walking primrose’ Harding — and I’m now a member of Team Attitude, tasked with reviewing our 30-year history: an often amazing (seven Kylie covers!), occasionally embarrassing ( James Corden? Seriously?), but never boring ride. (In 1995, we ran an exclusive interview with Oscar Wilde, his ‘first in 100 years’. Go figure.)
I was eight, and the Conservatives’ John Major was in power when Attitude, ‘a men’s magazine with a twist, tailored for a largely, but not exclusively, gay male readership’, first hit the shelves in May 1994. (“It’s not just full of cock and arse — there’s some intellect in there,” our OG cover star, Culture Club’s Boy George, later said.)
I read my first issue in 2001 — I think I might have shoplifted it. For a lost queer teen like me, it was a lifeline. Then, the cloud of HIV/AIDS loomed large. “You’ll probably die of it,” I was told at school, where homophobic bullying was rife under Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28, which banned ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities until it was repealed in 2003. Fortunately, Attitude and its writers and editors, some of whom I’d go on to meet, were my mentors. (As was our three-time cover star Geri Halliwell!) As our community inched closer to equality with the Gender Recognition Act (2004), civil partnerships (2005) and marriage equality (2014), Attitude grew into a fully inclusive, cross-platform title, teaching me all I needed to know about our rainbow family.
But the essence of Attitudewas there from the start — notably, in our mind-blowing early exclusives: Madonna, Jean Paul Gaultier, Naomi Campbell, Pedro Almodóvar, Diana Ross and Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant’s coming-out interview, to name a few. It was also there in our tone of voice: ferociously intelligent, sexually liberat
