In defense of GQ, when you're old enough

GQ isn't a stylistic-risk-taker the way Esquire is, and it doesn't have the sheer juvenile exuberance of Maxim or the edge of Gear. But it's thoughtful, fun and not as predictable as its critics
insist.

In defense of GQ,
when you're old enough

Unhip, unslick, a bit creaky, but artfully crafted

By Scott Dickensheets

    Wherever I find myself holding forth on magazines--on web sites, in newspaper columns, in windy emails to my media-wonk friends--I invariably wind up mounting a defense of wheezy old GQ.
    I'm usually goaded into this by some media hepcat dumping on GQ as boring and out of touch. Such critiques don't square with my reading.
    Even more than magazines titled after talk-show hosts or has-been twin girls, GQ takes a lot of darts in its hide from media know-it-alls.
    "Looked through it in 15 minutes," an editor friend snorted about the latest issue. A writer I once interviewed termed it "an old, fat, slow person of a magazine."
    Rival editors regularly dismiss it as snoozy and irrelevant. I take those comments to mean: Not enough articles about that "Jackass" guy. Not with-it, not happening, not out there in the scrum of pop culture.
    But isn't that praising with faint damns?
    What's good about GQ is that--whatever its target demographics, however often walrusy eminence Art Cooper, the editor in chief, hires young people to chink the holes in his masthead--it's not hip. (Forget the fashion and interior-decorating content; does anyone really let a magazine tell him what to wear or how to do up his pad?)
    GQ is a resolutely grown-up experience.
    We see this in the May issue.
    Exhibit A: Bob Drury's heartfelt "Journey to My Son." Set on a tempestuous North Atlantic ocean voyage, it's a meditative essay about a father missing a son who lives in France with his mother.
    This isn't a piece for the snarky young go-getters of Manhattan. It's by a writer and for readers with some mileage on the odometer.
    Short on the bite and attitude of so much magazine writing, infused with real emotion, it's a nicely moving, reflective read. Plenty of readers have kids and can either identify with or imagine the anguish of long-distance separation.
    Exhibit B: Peter Richmond's piece on football-star-turned-murderer Rae Carruth. The writer filters his coverage through a consideration of Carruth's relationships with women.
    The piece is lyrical and convincing. I've read a lot of magazine pieces on this case and this ranks among the best.
    Further exhibits arguing for GQ's essential adultness include David Kamp's essay on the problem with American soccer. He argues that soccer moms and camcorder dads have sapped its vigor.
    Terrence Rafferty laments about the absence of fleshy actresses, being all skin and bones these days, like pterodactyls. There is too Tom Long's small appetizer, a parody about media overexposure.
    This latest issue of GQ isn't a fluke, by the way. Last month's edition included such rewarding, offbeat stories as Matt Teague's piece on the real Crocodile Dundee and Elizabeth Gilbert's warm profile of sci-fi nut Forrest Ackerman.
    This isn't to suggest that Coop's troops are churning out one mind-blowing issue after another. The February issue handily refuted that notion with a feature well full of self-indulgent first-personage: My bar-hopping with Edward Burns. My adventures in a swanky spa. My passion for fishing. My misadventures skating with a hockey team. Me, me, me, as far as the I could see.
    The May issue makes a few missteps of its own. There was no need for journalist Hanna Rosin to include such a dose of herself in her unsatisfying profile of Supreme Court jester Antonin Scalia. Building her piece on the experience of having two off-the-record lunches with Judge Scalia, she seems to be making the sole point that she had two off-the-record lunches with Judge Scalia.
    John Sedgwick makes a few unobtrusive cameos in "The Adonis Complex," a breezy recap of the growing phenomenon of male body anxiety--guys who go overboard on dieting, cosmetic surgery, steroids or maniacal working-out.
    The problem here is that the subject is much too vast, too complex, for the whirlwind tour GQ gives it. There are a lot of dissenting voices out there who think the Adonis Complex is full of nonsense. It would have been nice to hear from them.
    But those problems don't overshadow what is, all things considered, a solid issue. Which is why I'm always amused when the editor of some rival rag with downtown attitude and "youthful energy" condescends to GQ.
     Peter Richmond packs more storytelling into one piece than Details or Maxim or FHM or the like can muster in an entire issue. As I get older and begin falling apart like a Russian space station, the more I appreciate solid craftsmanship--things solidly put together.
     GQ isn't a stylistic-risk-taker the way Esquire is, and it doesn't have the sheer juvenile exuberance of Maxim or the edge of Gear. But it's thoughtful, fun and not as predictable as its critics insist.
    Not wheezy. Just old enough.

-Scott Dickensheets is the magazine critic for Media Life.

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