I was the only out lesbian on the editorial staff that I was aware of. Everyone, though, was interested in improving the diversity of the content—they just weren’t sure how to do it. I suddenly found myself constantly on the receiving end of questions from people in other verticals about pronouns, and recommendations for queer sources for their stories. I was, as I was told, somehow the only lesbian that many of them even knew, which meant I was their gateway to the entire community. At first I was glad they were asking me for help rather than getting it wrong, but eventually it became a burden. Finally Megan stepped in and spoke to the other managers about clarifying to their teams that my job was to be a beauty assistant, not the token gay girl or the local fountain of queer wisdom (my words, not hers).
For my late teens and early twenties, I had mostly stopped wearing makeup, even though I’d always been kind of a fairy princess at heart. But with an infinite beauty closet to play in, I became reacquainted with that part of myself. Eventually I started growing out my hair and wearing lipstick. Suddenly, for the first time since I came out, I was no longer visibly queer—since feminine queerness is not generally legible to the untrained eye. I was shocked to be constantly faced with the choice of whether or not to come out to people; and I was meeting new people almost every day, thanks to the constant industry events I had to attend.
Usually it went something like this: “Men, am I right?”
I’d just sat down at a table toward the back of what was probably the most elegant space I’d ever been in, up a flight of stairs at the Bowery Hotel, to celebrate a perfume or concealer or skin-care miracle—I can’t remember. The woman speaking to me had long blonde hair, which was expertly waved, shiny red lipstick, and a tan not consistent with the season; she was laughing with someone else at the table and generously turned to include me in the conversation, which was, I assume, about their boyfriends or their husbands. Men, amiright?
“The worst,” I replied, with a nervous smile.
It would be weird to say, “Well, actually I’m gay,” .02 seconds into meeting someone, but in hindsight I wonder if it’s any weirder than the assumption that I wasn’t. But I didn’t know a single person there and no one hates men more than straight women, and bonding about that is the best way to make new friends when you don’t know anyone, and I was more than happy to hear about what this woman’s boyfriend/husband did or, more likely, didn’t do.
A few minutes later I’d probably find a way to say something about “my girlfriend,” or even start a sentence with “as a lesbian” and watch them react. In those situations, straight women were generally much nicer to me once they found out I was gay—this was before a lot of other editors pivoted to queerness and I was definitely an anomaly. The niceness could be interpreted in many different ways. Or maybe I wouldn’t say anything at all, making friends with them, and then they’d add me on Instagram, seeing an account full of pictures of me being fully gay. Did they care? I don’t know. Sometimes. The changes in the way someone treats you once you’re out are subtle, unless you’re on the receiving end.
Being a lesbian beauty editor in 2013 was isolating. I felt like I constantly had to explain myself, justifying my own presence. Discourse around beauty as self-care, as something you did for yourself and not for a man, had yet to really take hold. I was constantly surrounded by discussions of which red lipstick men like best. And conversely it was tough to explain my work to my activist friends, especially the older ones, who had devoted their lives to making the world better—and there I was, making lipstick swabs on my hands all day. I knew how it sounded. But I also got a thrill out of making the beauty space queerer, and commenters were responding gratefully. It wasn’t exactly activism, but it was a small difference I could easily make.
After working at Refinery for almost a year, I got an email from someone in another vertical saying that he wanted to do a story (from the perspective of a woman) loosely titled “Gay Men We Wish Were Straight.” In order to achieve balance, he asked me to write a counter story, loosely titled, “Straight Women We Wish Were Gay.” He had cc’d his editor, and she too was on board with this request. I got the email on a Saturday morning. I was stunned at the ignorance. I responded back looping in Annie, explaining why it was problematic to write about wishing someone identified differently just to suit your own desires—it was, I wrote, akin to saying someone was “a waste” for being gay. Annie took me out for coffee later that day to process it, and I felt grateful to have a manager who was on the same page, while deeply disturbed by how little some of my much older colleagues—who were by all means progressive and empathetic—understood about how to talk to and about queer people.
After some more conversations with other senior editors, I decided to take it upon myself to improve the way the editorial staff approached the topic of LGBTQ people by writing an addendum to the style guide. I called it “The Primer for Radical Inclusivity” and, using a lot of things I’d learned in college and at Babeland, went on to outline ways to write respectfully about queer people. I submitted it to the executive editor, who implemented it and told me it had inspired her to create a similar one for talking about race. (“Radical inclusivity” became a core value of Refinery, though those words were used in 2020 to illustrate what many identified as the company’s hypocrisy when it was called out by former and current employees for institutionalized racism.)
When I left Refinery29 for Nylon, I looked very different, even though barely two years had passed. I’d started working there with an asymmetrical pixie cut, my hair thick and shiny in its natural, undyed state, and I wore very little makeup every day: just some black liquid liner and mascara. I dressed in button-ups tucked into pants. By the time I quit, my hair was long and bleached pink-blonde, and I was wearing dresses and lipstick. I wore a knee-length black T-shirt dress to my first day at Nylon, thinking it was edgy but quickly realizing that, compared to my new coworkers, it was extremely boring, bordering on preppy.
Because Nylon was already a pretty queer brand, I didn’t go on the same campaign for change that I did at Refinery, which meant that not everyone knew I was a lesbian until getting to know me. One girl on the publishing side said something to me along the lines of, “You know, I thought you were some J. Crew bitch until I realized that you’re gay, which makes you cool.” I took the compliment, even with the barbs. It’s funny to imagine myself as some J. Crew bitch—me, who on the inside will always feel like a weird art girl with purple hair and acne, making up love songs on my guitar for my best friend and recording them on an 8-track in my bedroom. But I guess we never really know how other people see us.
When I went on press trips, though, it was always a burden to have to decide when and where and how to come out in these new groups of adults in faraway places, while the writers and editors chatted around me about their husbands. I never went on a press trip with another lesbian. Usually I tried to get it out of the way immediately, and absolutely always at some point no matter what the trip was or where we were, another woman, usually older, would get drunk, pull me aside conspiratorially, and tell me secrets. I heard a lot of fun stories this way. In the hills of Northern Italy, for example, after many courses of homemade pizza and several glasses of wine, one publicist whispered to me about the time she fucked a very famous female rock star.
It wasn’t always fun stories, though. Sometimes it was uncomfortable questions like, But haven’t you ever wanted to be with a man? Or, Have you ever had a boyfriend and what did he look like? Is it really better between women? Do you like pretty girls? All the people who asked me these questions thought that because they clarified that they were politically progressive, it wasn’t offensive.
Sometimes it was blatantly offensive. In a hot tub in Mexico a woman told me my armpit hair was disgusting. On a trip to Cuzco, Peru, I asked our tour guide if the rainbow flags around the city were for gay pride, and a shadow passed over his face as he explained that it was the flag of the city, and when it comes to gay people, “We don’t h
ave those here.”
Today, there are so many more editors who identify as queer than when I was starting out. I love seeing people I’ve known for years update their Instagram bio with a little rainbow, or shoot out a declaratively queer tweet. I think of all the people who stopped talking to me in 2008 because I had a girlfriend, and I wonder what they think of the wave of queerness that has taken hold. Maybe they are part of it. I wouldn’t know; I have kind of a scorched-earth policy for people who have wronged me and don’t care to keep track of them even virtually.
Someone recently asked me if I’ve always been out at work, and I didn’t know how to answer, because my work has always been tied to my lesbian identity. It’s what got me writing in the first place, and it informs almost everything I do. When I became editor in chief, straight people in media constantly wanted to try to tell me that it didn’t matter that I was gay, that we were living in some sort of golden age for queer people where your value is determined by the quality of your work, not who you are. I could see how they might have thought that based on the sheer number of people who now identify as queer—according to a report by J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group in 2016, only 48 percent of Gen Z in the US identified as exclusively heterosexual. But with no other lesbians at the tippy top of major fashion mastheads, I couldn’t help but feel like it did matter, maybe more than ever. Young queer women still tell me things like they didn’t think it was possible for a lesbian to be an editor in chief until they heard about me. The fact that we live in a world where I can scream from the rooftops about how gay I am doesn’t mean the work is over. It means it can finally begin in earnest.
3 Aren’t You a Little Young?
When she was twenty-eight, my mom married my dad.
For me and my two sisters, twenty-eight became a golden number. Young enough to be fresh faced and glowing—as my mom is in her wedding photos, with short, elegant light-brown hair and a glamorous, thin frame—but old enough to use proper judgment when deciding who to spend the rest of your life with. Case in point: my parents are still happily married.
When we were twenty-eight, my twin sister got married. I did her makeup, but she hardly needed any her skin was so radiant with joy. She was the only one of us to match my mom’s marriage timeline, which we had all idealized.
Marrying someone, though, couldn’t have been further from my mind. In my twenty-eighth year of life, I was married to my job. That was the year I became editor in chief.
To my surprise, the hardest part of getting that title was having to tell people. And I had a lot of telling to do. There was no major announcement around the promotion—no chic cocktail party with designers and actresses to celebrate my success. The news that day, and the weeks that followed, was that the magazine had been folded.
So, I hit the ground running on my own DIY word-of-mouth self-promotion campaign. It was, in many ways, totally embarrassing to have to tell people that I’d reached the top of the masthead at a major publication, as most people who step into that kind of position generate a ton of press for doing so. There was also the fact of my age—and, worse, my baby face. I hardly looked the too-young-for-the-job age that I was. I practiced it in the mirror: “Hi, I’m Gabrielle Korn. I’m the editor in chief of Nylon.” I thought it sounded dubious even to my own reflection.
I quickly learned the difference between people who were happy for me and people who thought I didn’t deserve the title by their response to the news. An eyes-wide “Wow!” was not good; a hand on a heart with an “oh my god” was great. And in general, I stopped telling strangers altogether: being in your twenties and saying, “I’m the EIC of a women’s media company” to someone outside the industry whose only references are Anna Wintour and Miranda Priestly usually caused people to express disbelief. If they hadn’t heard of Nylon, they assumed it was something I maybe started in my dorm room.
If someone was much older than me, they almost always said, “Aren’t you a little young?” My responses ranged from “Well, I’m almost thirty” to “I guess I must be good at it.” But defensiveness and sassiness are exhausting, so eventually I stopped giving details to new people at all, resorting to just telling them vaguely that I was an editor at a magazine.
I felt conflicted about my new role. On the one hand I was enormously proud of myself; it was a huge deal to be the editor in chief, and I was thrilled at the thought that I’d finally be entitled to make the changes I wanted to make. But on the other hand I was terrified and felt like a total imposter. I knew that other women had worked decades before getting a role like mine, and I’d skipped many steps. Despite my outward defensiveness, I knew I was more than just “a little young” for the job.
But really, according to the feedback I got from the world at large, I’d been too young for every single step of my career except when I was an assistant in my early twenties. As soon as I got an editor title I was met with raised eyebrows from peers and people older than me. I don’t think that men face this challenge; what I’ve observed is that men in my industry who get ahead early are called trailblazers, while women who get ahead early are simply not taken seriously. The messaging is confusing: we’re repeatedly told we should want to look young. Our culture is, in fact, obsessed with it; the global antiaging industry was valued at 250 billion dollars in 2016 and has grown year over year ever since. But if we do look young, and furthermore if we are young, we’re treated like we don’t know anything. For a culture that is so preoccupied with maintaining female youth, we certainly have quite a few parameters around what kind of power that youth is allowed to access.
Within that catch-22 was the issue of compensation. In the women’s digital media boom of the 2010s, writers and editors were not paid a lot, even while we worked for companies that experienced commercial success. I was thrown into luxurious situations that I never would have been able to afford on my salary—press trips around the world, exclusive spa visits, reservations at the nicest restaurants in the city, even haircuts by celebrity stylists. And I was propped up in front of cameras, hosting videos and sometimes attempting to model. I frequently borrowed clothing in order to fake the appearance of being expensive, and in order to convey the message that I belonged.
I was surrounded by other women in their early twenties who were feeling the effects of that disconnect; the way we were paid so little yet treated to so much. Many of us were told that our youth was the reason why we weren’t paid more, while at the same time that youth was clearly what got us attention.
To me, it seemed like the model was to hire young, ambitious women, work them as hard as possible for as little money as possible until they burn out, and then replace them with a younger, cheaper person from the metaphorical line of people waiting for the chance to have a byline in a beloved publication. I was terrified of burning out and being replaced. I feared that one day I would wake up and simply not have any more ideas, and that would be the end of my career.
At the same time, I was amazed that I was even making money as a writer at all. Like many entry-level writers, I was hired at Refinery29 with a salary of $40K. It was exactly the amount I had asked for, and I was thrilled with it. I’d been trying to make it in digital media for two years—the first year as an editorial assistant at On The Issues Magazine ($15/hour), and the second as a freelance writer taking whatever gig I could get my hands on, which included recapping True Blood ($30/article), writing marketing materials for a documentary about women’s sex lives ($15/hour), and eventually the fashion column at Autostraddle (a one-time bonus of $500), which got me noticed by Refinery.
That first year as a beauty assistant, my writing was responsible for bringing in a solid chunk of traffic to our vertical. (I knew this because we had complete transparency into the numbers through production reports that tracked exactly how we were doing.) Plus, because I was so vocal about how we needed to be more inclusive of queer people, I had very tangibly shaped the direction of the content. I looked forward to getting a promotion. But a yea
r in, when it came time for promotions and raises, my title was changed from beauty assistant to assistant beauty editor, and I was given a raise of one thousand dollars. I didn’t think my new title was fair—in my mind, it wasn’t even really an upgrade, just a word switch—and the raise was actually less than a cost-of-living increase would have been. I protested up the chain of command until my complaints reached the editor in chief, who agreed to raise my salary to $45K and gave me the title of associate beauty editor.
I was grateful, but not satisfied. Thanks to our regular champagne toasts when the company landed million-dollar deals, I knew there was money around, and I felt like I was being taken advantage of. I (clearly) didn’t understand how profit margins worked but I thought it seemed ridiculous that editors and writers weren’t compensated proportionally to their contributions. I was sick of working in such a glamorous environment without a glamorous paycheck to match it. But the final straw was that after I fought for that extra $5K, two people who both had less experience than me were added to my department in roles senior to mine. It felt like a slap in the face. I complained to management and was told my Instagram following wasn’t big enough to consider me for a senior role. They were investing in “industry stars.” I wasn’t one.
I also didn’t understand that to get significantly more money, you usually have to get a new job. But that ignorance served me; if I’d had a better understanding of how it all worked, I wouldn’t have fought so hard for myself. As Elaine Welteroth wrote in her memoir about her own professional trajectory, “PLEASE NOTE THE ABSOLUTE INSANE AUDACITY OF A MILLENNIAL IN HER TWENTIES.”
I am truly astounded by this younger version of me. But like, get it, girl.
Because my byline was out there, it was easy to hit the job interview circuit, and I met with editors until I got an offer for $55K from Us Weekly for a staff writing position. I wasn’t really excited about the opportunity, so I used the offer as leverage to get a matching offer from Refinery, and my title was changed to beauty editor. Word spread quickly about how difficult and demanding I’d been, but it had been worth it. I was thrilled with the amount—it sounded like so much money!
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 4
