Friends and colleagues of Troy Davis Masters, a pioneering LGBTQ media publisher in both New York and Los Angeles, will be held on Sunday, March 30 at 1 p.m. at the LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, in the third floor auditorium. Doors will open at 12:30.
Masters, who died at the age of 63 this past Dec. 11, entered the queer media industry in 1989 as an advertising executive at Outweek, a news magazine that reflected the brash spirit of the early ACT UP years. When Outweek closed in 1991, he went on to launch QW magazine, which published for 18 months until the death of his principal funder.
Determined to keep his dream of helming an LGBTQ publication serving New York alive, Masters, in 1994, worked initially out of his East Village apartment to create LGNY, which published biweekly issues until 2002. That year, under the ownership of John Sutter — the publisher of The Villager and Downtown Express — LGNY was relaunched as Gay City News, a newspaper and website in continuous publication for the past 23 years. Gay City News is now part of Schneps Media.
In 2015, Masters, once again feeling the itch of creating new media ventures, left Gay City News for Los Angeles. There, he partnered with the Washington Blade to create a sister publication, the Los Angeles Blade, where he served as publisher until his death.
Andrew Beaver, who worked at the Blade, recalled how Masters leveraged the newspaper’s influence during the 2022 mpox outbreak to ensure that available vaccine doses were distributed in communities most at risk.
“Nobody wanted to take the issue on,” Beaver said, describing how Masters put together two town hall meetings focused on the outbreak — one in predominantly white West Hollywood and the other in Monterey Park, a neighborhood more accessible for Latinos. The Blade reported that roughly half of Los Angeles County’s mpox cases were among Latino men.
Author and journalist Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a daily radio show on SiriusXM and writes a widely-read Substack column, was friends with Masters since the two met working at Outweek.
“Troy was a tireless pioneer for queer media,” Signorile said. “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.”
Masters is survived by his mother, Josie Kirkland, and his sister, Tammy Masters, both of them of Greenbrier, Tennessee, his father, Jimmy Davis Masters, of Gallatin, and his former partner and friend of 23 years, Arturo Jiminez, of Los Angeles.
Tammy Masters, recalling how her late brother lived proudly as a gay man his entire life, with the loving support of his family, said, “He was a tireless advocate for the LGBTQ community and leaves a tremendous legacy of fighting for social justice and equality.”
Those attending the March 30 memorial are asked to RSVP at TroyMastersMemorial@gmail.com.
