Josh Azevedo
Josh Azevedo covers music and wider queer culture for Gayety, focusing on how artists, platforms, and marquee events shape LGBTQ visibility and community life. He is a seasoned events and media professional who reports from major red carpets such as the Out100 Awards and The Queerties, bringing a celebratory but grounded lens to queer entertainment. Across music news, art features, history pieces, and industry coverage, his work consistently centers the creative labor of LGBTQ people and the infrastructures that support or endanger it.
Queer art hubs and visual culture
Azevedo devotes significant attention to queer art ecosystems, spotlighting projects that preserve and elevate LGBTQ creators when traditional institutions retreat. In his coverage of Queer Art Hub, he describes a searchable, permanent archive that catalogs queer work across painting, photography, sculpture, film, illustration, and multidisciplinary practice, framing it as a safeguard as museums and galleries pull back from LGBTQ programming. He writes about these initiatives not just as exhibitions but as long-term cultural infrastructure that keeps queer art visible and discoverable.
His reporting on Artsy’s Pride initiative similarly focuses on how major platforms can reorient their power toward LGBTQ artists. By highlighting campaigns designed to spotlight queer creators rather than simply market Pride, he underscores the difference between performative celebration and sustained support. Features like his profile of the artist turning Instagram into a “queer history playground” extend this thread, showing how individual creators repurpose mainstream tools to archive and narrate queer stories. Across these pieces, Azevedo’s distinguishing trait is his attention to both the art itself and the systems — archives, marketplaces, social platforms — that determine whether queer work endures or disappears.
Trailblazers in plain sight: LGBTQ history
Azevedo’s history writing foregrounds LGBTQ figures whose contributions were central to U.S. culture but largely erased from dominant narratives. In “Trailblazers in Plain Sight: Black LGBTQ Figures Who Reshaped American History,” he traces how Black LGBTQ Americans influenced civil rights organizing, avant‑garde art, and broader ideas of freedom while being written out of the stories they helped build. His framing makes clear that these are not marginal characters but foundational architects of social movements and cultural innovation.
Within Gayety’s history coverage, he also turns to photography and nightlife to capture queer past and present, including pieces that document “glitter, love, and” the atmosphere of LGBTQ spaces over time. By pairing narrative essays with visual records, he shows how images, venues, and community rituals carry historical weight, not just anecdotal charm. This focus on memory, erasure, and recovery distinguishes his work from routine lifestyle history features; he treats queer history as a living archive that informs how current artists and audiences understand themselves.
Books, storytelling platforms, and queer readers
Azevedo writes extensively about how LGBTQ readers find and build their own literary and storytelling spaces. In his exploration of why LGBTQ readers keep turning to Wattpad, he examines the platform as an alternative to traditional publishing, emphasizing the appetite for stories that reflect queer realities and the community dynamics that form around them. The piece treats Wattpad not merely as a tech product but as a site of grassroots queer narrative production and discovery.
His “Best LGBTQ+ Books to Read Right Now” reading list complements this platform coverage by curating titles that speak to different facets of queer experience. Rather than presenting books as generic Pride merchandise, he positions them as tools for understanding history, identity, and community, reinforcing his broader emphasis on narrative as a core part of LGBTQ cultural life. Together, these articles show a reporter who connects the dots between digital storytelling, traditional publishing, and reader behavior, with an eye on where queer audiences actually find themselves represented.
Music, media events, and pop culture
Within music, Azevedo covers major releases from high‑profile artists through a distinctly queer lens. His piece on Sam Smith announcing the album “Hazel Eyes” and releasing the euphoric love song “My Guy” situates the news within the artist’s ongoing relationship with queer audiences, treating the record not only as a commercial drop but as part of a broader story about visibility in pop music. He approaches these moments as cultural events that resonate deeply with LGBTQ listeners rather than as isolated promotional cycles.
His pop‑culture reporting extends to television and drag, including coverage of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’ tenth season and its new “Tournament of All Stars” format with the largest returning cast in the franchise’s history. In that work he highlights the competitive stakes and fan‑driven anticipation, emphasizing how the show functions as a recurring focal point for queer community and online discourse. Azevedo also tracks shifts within LGBTQ media itself, such as Ludwig Hurtado’s move to lead *Them* as executive editor and the debut Jinkx Monsoon project that signals the publication’s new editorial direction. By tying executive changes and new series to their impact on queer storytelling, he separates his coverage from generic industry news.
On the commercial side of pop culture, he writes about Pride collections and LGBTQ‑owned businesses that “actually” deserve support, focusing on offerings that move beyond surface‑level rainbow branding. Combined with his red‑carpet reporting from events like the Out100 Awards and The Queerties, this gives him a broad view of how music, fashion, nightlife, and media intersect in contemporary queer culture. Across these beats, what sets Azevedo apart is his insistence on tracing the relationship between the creative work, the business and institutional structures around it, and the lived experience of LGBTQ audiences.
4 more music journalists.
Aisling Murphy
Aisling Murphy is the theatre reporter and critic at The Globe and Mail. She stands out for writing about theatre as both art and infrastructure, with coverage that links new Canadian stage work, awards culture, and pop-inflected criticism. She covers theatre, music, and pop culture in a detailed, conversational style, moving between reviews, reported features, and analysis of the systems that shape what gets produced. Her beat includes the Dora Awards, Toronto stages, new writing, intimate productions, and smaller venues, as well as controversy where artistic decisions meet politics and community response. Before The Globe, she was senior editor of Intermission Magazine, and her bylines include The New York Times, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, and the Baltimore Sun.
Alex Hudson
Alex Hudson is Editor-in-Chief of Exclaim! and leads coverage of music’s links to sports, literature, and technology, with a strong focus on Canadian artists. Hudson reports on how music intersects with other fields, not as a separate industry. Recent coverage has included Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer on how playing piano saved his career, Ottawa Bluesfest’s Canada-wide soccer watch party, Lakes of Canada’s Margaret Atwood-inspired album Transgressions, Hannah Mary McKinnon on The Beaches influencing her rock-themed novel, and Alexander Nilsson’s 1001 Albums Generator as a tool for broadening music discovery beyond algorithmic recommendations.
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz is a commerce writer whose distinct focus is the buying and streaming side of music, entertainment and lifestyle, helping readers decide how to watch major events and what to purchase around them. She is an e-commerce specialist at Rolling Stone, covering products, platforms and deals tied to award shows, festivals, sports and everyday culture. Her beat blends music streaming guides with shopping and product recommendations across fashion, beauty, tech, food, wellness and drinks. She reports through experience-focused service journalism, using lists, comparison roundups and step-by-step guides to answer concrete questions about how to stream major cultural moments, where to shop and which products to choose. Her background includes commerce and lifestyle writing for consumer publications such as Esquire, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Daily, Women’s Wear Daily and Billboard.
Allie Gregory
Allie Gregory maps how audiences encounter new music by tracking the practical pathways of releases, tours, festivals, platforms and projects. She is a managing editor and news writer at Exclaim!, where she is a primary editorial contact for forthcoming releases and news tips and helps shape the outlet’s daily agenda around new music and its broader entertainment context. Her reporting centres on timely album and tour announcements, live logistics and festival programming across indie, metal, country, pop and adjacent film and streaming news. She writes direct, information-heavy pieces that foreground calendars, support acts, set times and programming structures, while also producing longer-form interviews, cultural stories and staff-pick recommendations that connect artists’ work, controversy and creative campaigns to how audiences encounter music and entertainment on the road, at festivals and on screens.