The Blair Bitch Project

Back when they first discovered the inter-nets and the world wide webs, there weren't a lot of young folks making their own web pages, blogs and manhunt profiles. But Richard and Bryan, two gay, Asian, skater (pre?) med students at Columbia University in NYC, started Blair, their online magazine inspired by the domineering bitchiness of Blair on The Facts of Life. Every gayboy needs a role model! I discovered it around 1995 back in DC when I was surfing the text-only web at work on my monochromatic monitor on a 386 computer at blazing speeds of up to 28.8kbps. Ah, the magic, and free time, of youth.


They ended up doing seven issues, and all of them have hilarious casually-written features thrown online in what now seems like remedial HTML, but at the time was standard and actually really pulled together! Features on the corporate takeover of Sassy magazine, Gay or Eurotrash? (we used to call this Flamer or Foreigner when I was in college), Lamar Latrelle from Revenge of the Nerds, and a hilarious writeup about the International Male catalog are just some of the highlights.

These boys were way ahead of the pop culture curve too, writing about robot dancing, the Beadazzler, Lacoste shirts and Wallabees way before any of them hit hipster mainstream!

Blair #6 is the highlight for me though, with great features on Wayland Flowers & Madame, electric wheelchairs AND Carol Channing! It's almost too much comedy to take!



It seems the boys have retired from the Blair biz, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for my first favorite web zine, Blair.