Oh, Yes I Am!: Quizzing a Gay Man Who Made It Big at 'Star Hits'
David Keeps talks being queer in teen-pop publishing in the '80s
June 20, 2025
Most people who know me know that the bulk of my career was spent as the founding EIC of Popstar!, a teen-entertainment magazine most commonly compared to Tiger Beat.
From 1998-2012, I was Editor Guy Matt, serving exclusive Q&As with everyone from Britney Spears to the JoBros to JMac to, at the end of my run, Ross Lynch and One Direction. My talented Editor Girls did a lot of the interviews later on, but I was in charge of the whole operation, creatively, deciding who got in — and on — a magazine that, at its very peak, went out in numbers around 250,000 per month.
I’m popular at parties with 30-year-olds when I casually mention I knew Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. Some young women even remember the magazine specifically. The things we read when we are coming of age are like sacred texts, even if the text is often filled with exclamation points, questions like “would you ever date a fan?” (I should hope not, they were mostly tweens) and, of course, absurdly unlikely MEBs (most embarrassing moments).
But like Jesus, there was a God before me, and the God was, if not Tiger Beat and the entire Laufer organization (Bop! BB! 16! Teen Beat!), the all-color, all-glossy, alarmingly cheeky U.K. teen bible: Smash Hits.
Smash Hits, published by EMAP, appeared every two weeks from 1978-2006, feeding the youth of London everything they needed to know about the latest pop stars, often with a sense of humor an American teen’s parents might find too knowing. My own magazine was once dubbed a teen Playgirl by a contributing photographer, so you will not be surprised that I was obsessed with Smash Hits as a kid because, not in spite, of its edge.
It was also, after all, where a Michigander could find different and better images of Madonna and Eurythmics. Only Japan did publishing better, and Japanese magazines were all but impossible to lay my hands on until I went to college and discovered mail order.
From 1984-1989, Dennis Publishing, headed up by British publishing maverick Felix Dennis (1947-2014) — the first person to say “cunt” on TV in England — published a U.S. version of Smash Hits. Unable to use the same name, Felix settled on Star Hits.
Star Hits was much easier for me to find than Smash Hits, and was more immediately relatable. For example, every teen mag worth its salt was tasked with obsessing over whomever was no. 1 with a bullet that week, so Smash Hits could sometimes devote an awful lot of pages to faces and names an American kid may not know. For the punkers (really, more like New Wave-wannabes) in my school, it was their ticket to insider knowledge about cool bands like the Smiths and Strawberry Switchblade. But Star Hits was an excellent bridge to London — it was saturated with Americans (Madonna! Cyndi Lauper! Van Halen! The Go-Go’s!), yet it still had a quirkily Anglocentric vibe, offering endless covers of the marginally popular Billy Idol and sometimes force-feeding us anomalies like Sigue Sigue Sputnik. (Legendary deputy editor Suzan Colon recently told me Sigue Sigue Sputnik was a hill she’d been willing to die on.)
When it came to British Invasion II acts, who were as popular in the U.S. as in their homeland, Star Hits seemed to have a much more direct pipeline to Duran Duran! Culture Club! Wham!
Plus, Star Hits was music-driven, whereas magazines like Tiger Beat felt more like physical manifestations of what put little girls into heat; my buying a music mag vs. my buying a crush catalogue hit differently at the B. Dalton or Hamady’s cash register.
See, it was hard being a boy fan of teen-girl magazines. I sublimated as best I could, plastering pop princesses all over my walls (and even my ceiling). “Matt really likes girls!” the dad of one of my friends once remarked. Mission: accomplished. (The only men on my walls were Boy George, who was half girl, and Corey Hart, who had one tiny pinup buried behind my door I could practice kissing.)
When I grew up to be an actual teen-mag editor, after a short career in porn publishing (many, if not most, teen mags have porn connections; Dennis published Maxim, and his silent partners in Pilot Communications published actual porn), I was very out and proud, but I still carried a touch of that self-consciousness, professionally. Not only was I trying to hide from our readers and their parents that Popstar! was published, initially, by the same company that produced — to name a few — Juggs, Inches, Blacktail and Oriental Dolls, but I was also sometimes a bit reticent about advertising my own sexual orientation.
In the mag and at photo shoots, I was sexless Editor Guy Matt. I remember the handsome brother of handsome Rich from LFO asking me about a beautiful girl and having to say for the first time explicitly that his brother was more my speed. So many of the acts we covered came from Orlando, the perfect metaphor — a hot city where it wasn’t cool to be out, where you could be gyrating in a boy band with frosted tips, yet half-hugged your homies hello and dated members of girl groups. I remember when Lou Pearlman owned Chippendales for a hot second, he invited me to come have a look, but did so only after sidling up to me privately in a mall where a shoot was happening and making the offer as delicately as he could, like it were behind closed doors and not in front of a Claire’s.
Teen magazines were devoid of irony, but teen publishing pulsed with it.