Equalpride lays off staff at Them after purchasing the publication from Condé Nast

Whether relationship advice on dating within your friend group or rollbacks to trans rights, Them has been a publication where campy culture coverage thrives alongside essential news for the queer community online.

And until earlier this year, Them was owned by Condé Nast and housed in the One World Trade Center in Manhattan alongside its sibling subsidiaries, including The New Yorker, Allure, GQ, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. In February, the award-winning queer publication was purchased by Equalpride, not long after the LGBTQ+ media company also laid off top staff at Out and The Advocate.

Now Them is facing devastating cuts to its newsroom under its fresh ownership, according to social media posts by a number of staff members earlier this month announcing they were being laid off. Equalpride did not respond to The Objective’s inquiry over email about the workforce reduction at Them.

“This job meant a lot to me,” Samantha Riedel, a long-time contributing writer who received a notice that she would no longer be writing daily news for Them on a part-time basis, said. “I could make my living on this for a number of years, and that is an increasingly rare prospect for queer journalists.”

As layoffs and mergers wrack journalism, queer and trans journalists face marginalization in newsrooms — if they’re able to get a staff job. Them has been providing needed diverse representations of queer and especially transgender communities, but its capacity is now dented while the number of U.S. anti-trans bills proposed, predominantly targeting healthcare, education, and sports, are on track to exceed that of 2025. 

How Them diversified the “trans internet”

Them will continue to publish LGBTQ+ stories and media, but without a full-time staff writer and consistent contributors, its scope could shrink — potentially affecting the coverage of underreported queer and trans communities that other mainstream publications have failed to thoroughly cover.  

Tre’vell Anderson, executive director of the Trans Journalist Association and lead contributor to the Trans News Initiative, said that the lack of media representation has only fueled hate and misinformation against trans people.

“It is truly life or death for people to get access to the trans internet,” former Teen Vogue politics editor Lex McMenamin said about Them’s importance in the trans news ecosystem. “There’s only one trans-led outlet that does daily blogging, combined with culture coverage, combined with politics coverage, combined with healthcare coverage, which is so important in states that you can’t even learn about the existence of trans people in schools.”

Stories about resilience and resources have made up the smallest share of the 195,000 stories about transgender rights the Trans News Initiative has analyzed, dating back to 2020. Them has stood out as an outlier in the national media landscape, its namesake explicitly centering an expansive gender politics that refuses categorization.

“Historically, it felt like [other gay] publications catered to the cis, white, gay experience, and they left out trans people and Black and brown people,” Anderson said. “Them was embracing the fullness, the diversity, the vastness of our LGBTQ community.”

Queer illustrator Vic Liu said Them was one of the few publications interested in featuring their work on “The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration” when the book was published in 2024.

“Them wanted to talk to me about prison abolition and why my queerness is such a key part of how I navigate the world and therefore my art,” Liu said. “The more we consolidate our press into just conglomerates owned by very rich people with only certain opinions, the less we hear about stories of marginalized populations.”

Them also employed several trans journalists and offered a level of job stability, both increasingly rare in journalism. The Trans Journalists Association estimates around half of its membership are freelancers.

“We had a five-person trans table at the office where we all ate lunch,” Lex McMenamin, former politics editor at Teen Vogue who was laid off by Condé Nast in November, recalled. McMenamin, who was also a contributor to Them, said that rare shared camaraderie — and critical mass of trans staff reporters — across publications in the same building no longer exists. “Between October and March, we were all either laid off or fired.” 

Former Bon Appétit journalist, Condé Union member, and founder of the NewsGuild’s Trans Guild Caucus, Alma Avalle, was fired in November of last year after protesting cuts at Teen Vogue that she described as the media conglomerate’s capitulation to the conservative backlash of the Trump administration. (Condé Union is part of the NewsGuild.) Condé Nast did not respond to The Objective’s email about the layoffs and firing of trans journalists across their publications. 

Related: Vogue guts Teen Vogue Politics team

Can independent trans media fill the gap in national media coverage?

National media outlets are withdrawing their investment in LGBTQ+ news and queer reporters at a time when trans rights are being increasingly targeted. 

“They’re [not just] taking away the door,” McMenamin said of the austerity cuts at Condé Nast disrupting a pipeline for queer and trans writers. “They’re deconstructing the house.”

NBC News dissolved its queer vertical, NBC OUT, during layoffs last year. PinkNews, which calls itself the “world’s largest and most influential LGBTQ+ led media brand,” laid off reporters last month as it shifts away from “a reporter-led newsroom.”

“It is really hard and very rare to come by responsible, well-researched, and well-funded queer journalism,” Riedel, the former Them contributor, said. “There are fewer places that are interested in both publishing queer stories and paying for them.”

McMenamin said that publications like Them and Teen Vogue helped to usher in a new generation of queer journalists and gave them a level of national credibility. “We were so many writers’ first byline,” they recalled. 

Patrick Johnson, a professor of journalism and media studies at Marquette University, said that as marginalized audiences feel less represented by mainstream media, they’ll turn to creating or consuming other sources of news. 

“The rise of more independent media allows for our stories to be found, seen, and told,” Johnson said, adding that visibility doesn’t always equal sustainability. “It’s costly to not just run these kinds of publications, but to make sure that you’re able to have insurance, to have legal counsel, to travel.”

Evan Urquhart has seen a need and a desire to see trans news expand — and knows the struggles of starting an independent news outlet first-hand. He had tried to pitch himself as a staff writer to cover trans news at several publications, and there was some interest, he said. But ultimately, he wasn’t hired. 

So Urquhart decided to start his own publication in 2022: Assigned Media. 

He’s since balanced his full-time job as a writer and the commenting community manager at Slate while managing the publication. The independent newsroom publishes breaking news alongside a free newsletter delivering topline stories on transgender rights. 

Last year, Urquhart was awarded the prestigious Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for his work covering trans healthcare. But, he said, “I’m not making a ton of money through this … We don’t have full-time staff at Assigned Media.”

Still, Urquhart said he’s hopeful readers still crave LGBTQ+ reporting that puts the truth first, distinct from influencers’ and online creators’ work. 

“I think we’re in a time of experimentation,” he said of the fight to make queer and trans independent media financially viable. “I just hope that with enough people trying, something will emerge.”

Update, Apr. 21, 12:44 p.m.: This story has been updated to clarify that Alma Avalle was founder of the NewsGuild’s Trans Guild Caucus, and also part of Condé Union.

Jireh Deng is an award-winning multimedia journalist born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles who has written for NPR, Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, LA Times, Business Insider, The Guardian, HuffPost, and more.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Jen Ramos Eisen.

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