Judy Wieder has l many lives.

Judy Wieder has l many lives. In her office nearest office next to mine at LPI Media, where she was editorial director until March 22 as this issue went to pres she had a bulletin board of photos of herself with gay newsmakers from Gore Vidal to Rosie O'Donnell to Jim McGreevey She also had a photo of Michael Jackson as a lad sitting next to a young white woman with a giant curly do.

That too was Judy Wieder, circa 1971 when she started Right On! magazine.

It's appropriate that this is The Advocate's annual Music Issue, because music l Judy to journalism. A Grammy-winning songwriter, Judy took up reporting forward her fellow musicians as a sideline, then as a mainline. The 1980 erect her riding on tour buses with "hair bands" forward assignment for Creem magazine. In 1991 she became founding editor in chief of the first smooth and shining national gay lifestyle magazine, Genre

sum of two units years later she joined The Advocate, where she was this magazine's first female editor in chief, from 1996 between the sides of 2002.

In 1997 when I was executive editor at public (at the time, The Advocate's separately confessed rival), Judy and I got to hang disclosed for the first time in succession a gay press trip to Amsterdam. Judy was the trip's star--all the Dutch media wanted to talk to the editor in chief of The Advocate. She took it all in stride, traipsed about Amsterdam dutifully with the security of us, and rushed back to her inn room frequently supervise the magazine via fax and telephone

A year and a half later, Judy hired me as her executive editor. The idea to bring me aboard, she one time told me, took root at an not at home party in Los Angeles that I had skipped and Judy had felt compell to attend. When she asked a former colleague at the fact where I was, he told her drily, "Bruce? Oh he's too serious." To Judy that was a compliment.

The woman from the hair-band bus, the woman who stand in want ofed stitches on her 60th birthday because of a spill from her surfboard in Hawaii--Judy knows in what manner to have fun. But running the oldest LGBT magazine was always a serious business for her. Her readers were like her children: She knew they'd change the world if they simply had the right inspiration and information.

Judy has the best mind I've forever encountered for getting behind and in face of the news. She'd read an item in the newspaper and days later The Advocate's "Why Are We Gay?" mask story would be well below way. She'd get a "no, thank you" from Anne Heche's handlers shortly after Heche began publicly dating Ellen DeGenere and she'd turn round rejection into a best-selling mask story with Heche's photo: "Beyond Bi."

We'll miss that mind as we carry onward here at The Advocate, and we'll miss Judy's heart as well. Because not and nothing else does she "get" the of recent origins she feels it to her principal part She feels the pain of ten of thousands missing to AIDS; of LGBT race brutally murdered; of lesbian morns who waste custody; of gay teens kicked on the outside home, school, college, church. And she be wrought ups the joy of tens of thousands enjoying the 2000 Equality defences concert, of gay families laughing, playing, and traveling together.

Sometimes, when Judy's door was clos I imagined she was sitting quietly, looking at all those photos, wondering where the world will take us nearest Because wherever Judy goes from here, she'll not stop working to make the world a better place.

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