THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Rex Wockner: You're the first thing I look at every morning.

Andy Towle: Really?

RW: Yeah. How did this start, Andy Towle?

ANDY TOWLE:It started with sort of a curiosity to pass on information to people and an interest in sharing information with people, which sort of grew out of my working at Genre magazine as an editor there.

RW: How long has it been going on?

ANDY TOWLE:Almost six years now, but only in its current form for about 3 1/2 years, I guess, as a news source and with the intention of being news for people.

RW: You post about 18 to 20 items a day. How many articles do you read before you choose those?

ANDY TOWLE:I don't know that I read all of the articles but I definitely scan and look over a few hundred articles every morning before I even begin writing anything. I scan headlines to see what's happening, and then the things that interest me I will usually linger on, and if I linger on certain topics or headlines or articles, then I'll know in my head that it's something that would interest me and might interest my readers, so I will continue on and sort of pursue that line of news.

RW: How many hours a day do you work?

ANDY TOWLE:Generally from like 6:15 in the morning till 7, 8, 9 at night.

RW: Is your boyfriend OK with that?

ANDY TOWLE:Not really. He'd like me to work probably about six hours less than that but, you know, it pays the rent and it's what I need to do to sort of keep the site going, so, you know, he understands.

RW: How do we keep up with the flow of information? You and I have similar kinds of jobs. I feel overwhelmed regularly. Do you?

ANDY TOWLE:I feel overwhelmed right now because I'm not reading and I'm doing this interview instead, but, you know, it's how I regularly feel if I'm out or whatever. It's like there is always a constant barrage of news and things happening, so the struggle to keep on top of it is a constant challenge and I think anybody who's in news these days understands the same thing—that it's just, you know, like a 24-hour thing and to stay on top of it, you just have to constantly keep reading.

RW: I left to get on the subway in Queens four hours ago and we went to dinner three hours ago, so I've been offline four hours and you've been offline three hours. That's a long time for us, isn't it?

ANDY TOWLE:Yeah, I can probably say that right now in my news reader there's between like 600 and 800 articles that are waiting for me to sort of like scan to see what the headlines are, see if there is anything of interest. But, you know, it's sort of par for—I've kind of gotten used to it, I guess.

RW: How do you scan 800 headlines?

ANDY TOWLE:I don't know, I think it's sort of something that I've, you know, it's something that you learn to do after a while. You just learn to look for what you know will be of interest to people, and it's kind of a little bit like speed-reading, where you go through things and you can see instantly certain things, you can pick out things that you know are going to be of interest.

RW: What do you think Towleroad's ultimate contribution is?

ANDY TOWLE:I think just sharing information with people. I think that's always been the goal of mine with the site. When I started it I felt like I would just share information with people, and share information that I found interesting to myself. Because if I did that, then I would not get burned out from it. ... So, I thought that I would probably want to do things on a variety of topics so it would continually be interesting personally to me.

RW: You've sort of become a man of influence. How does that feel? Is that weird?

ANDY TOWLE:I don't know what kind of influence you mean. If it's an influence born out of, like, presenting people with things that they're interested in, I'm happy to fulfill that need. I don't know what role I have beyond that.

RW: Well, if you're critical of something, say some gay leader or something, that kind of matters. What you think, if you write a snarky headline or a one-liner at the end of an item, that matters, doesn't it?

ANDY TOWLE:I think with the audience I have at this point, I do have a certain responsibility for things that I say and things that, you know, I say I believe in, and, I've tried to be, you know, fairly objective along the way since doing my site and stuff, but eventually, my opinion does work its way in, and so I understand there is a responsibility that comes with that and I try to be fair to people and fair to issues that are happening. That's all I can do.

RW: I think you're not only interested in the gays, I think you like astronomy.

ANDY TOWLE:I do! I love it! I love space, I love nature, I love science, I love all those things. And that's all part of sort of, you know, the original mission I had with the site, which is to keep things on it that I find interesting so it remains interesting to me. And, actually, probably the most positive comments that I get on the site are when I put those kind of things up, because I think a lot of people have interests beyond things that are just solely gay and lesbian, you know? I think people have broader interests than that and I think that's one of the reasons that Towleroad has succeeded, because it's not just one topic, it's a lot of different things.

RW: If you remove from the mix gay bloggers who don't blog primarily about gay issues—in other words, if you take Andrew Sullivan out of the mix, Dan Savage, John Aravosis—Perez Hilton really isn't a gay blog either—do you think you're the most trafficked gay blog there is? Do you have data on that? Or who would be bigger?

ANDY TOWLE:I'm not sure. We are very widely read, so I'm not sure. I don't know specifics.

RW: What do you see in the future for the blog? It clearly has evolved from a personal blog where you wanted to write to your friends about things you found interesting into one of the most important news sources for gay people on the Web. Any plans down the road for anything different or any modifications?

ANDY TOWLE:I hope to keep the site evolving and keep it interesting for me and for everybody who is reading it. I would love to be able to expand it. Personally, I think I'm a bit of a control freak and a little bit of a micromanager, as I think most people who are in charge of their own businesses are, and, you know, I give a lot of credit to my business partner, Michael Goff, who has helped me expand the site in a lot of ways and taken a different role on, more behind-the-scenes, but I hope that in the future that we can expand it. I have some writers writing for me who do some great weekly columns and I hope to keep expanding in that way and possibly adding some more people on a regular basis, so, you know, I think there's a lot of opportunities right now in media to open it up in a lot of ways—the ways that traditional print media has taken on, like the local aspects of gay media and things like that, so we're exploring a lot of different things.

RW: You already have a weekly music column, right?

ANDY TOWLE:And a film column. I used to have a tech column. I had Jon Barrett writing it—he's now the editor of The Advocate—and I actually wrote it one time by myself, so that was a cool part of the site that hopefully I'll get back one day. Things like that, I think, add a lot to the site. I also have a theater column that's written sort of seasonally by Kevin Sessums. Those are the sort of ways we're looking to expand the site and, hopefully, I'm looking to get somebody else writing on a regular basis as well.

RW: This interview will go to a wide audience, so we need to clear up the single biggest question about Towleroad.

ANDY TOWLE:Oh-oh. OK.

RW: It's not towel, it's toll, and it's a pun on toll, like a toll road.

ANDY TOWLE:Exactly. It seems like it's the hardest name to pronounce in the English language as far as I am concerned, because so many people say Towel Road or Towler Road or Tower Load—Tower Load is a big one. We've purchased several domains because of the mispronunciations, but I never actually thought it would become what it is, so I started it with a very personal name, which is a play off my own name, and it grew into this so, um.

RW: And now there's nothing you can do about it.

ANDY TOWLE:Yeah, there's not a lot I can do about it. I can't really change the name because you're sort of like tied into these domain names once you create them, so, you know, there you go! I guess, I mean, I've thought about putting a pronunciation key on the site and all that but, you know, it's a little bit of a mystery, I guess.

RW: Thanks, Andy.