“We just want gay eyeballs.” Josh Rosenzweig has been hearing that from brands for twenty years and still won’t accept it — “What gay eyeballs do you want? Like, which ones?” The Emmy-nominated producer went from AIDS-era short films at USC, to bartending while a roller derby feature kept getting financed and unfinanced, to starting over as a PR assistant in his mid-thirties, to here!TV, to producing Gabby Bernstein’s podcast — until a moment in her studio in January 2025 sent him back to queer media for good. Pride House Media has launched eight weekly shows in twelve months with a lean team, built as a network so brands can buy fitness, nightlife or politics instead of a vague “gay audience.” Plus the sponsorship story every LGBTQ+ brand should read twice.
“We just want gay eyeballs.”
Josh Rosenzweig has been hearing that sentence from brands for twenty years, and he still doesn’t accept it.
“What does that mean?” he asked when we sat down. “What gay eyeballs do you want? Like, which ones? I resent the fact that people lump us all together. That’s insane.”
That frustration is the reason Pride House Media exists — and it turns out to be the most useful thing any LGBTQ+ marketer could hear right now.
Where he started: USC in the 1980s
Josh and I go back to here! Media, but his story starts well before that, at USC in the 1980s.
“I don’t have to tell everybody what was happening in the ’80s for our community,” he said. “If you were paying attention at all, you were scared out of your mind. So everything that I was doing creatively at that point — short films, videos, performances — was infused with what was going on in our community. I didn’t know any other stories to tell.”
He made work about HIV and AIDS. He made films he describes as “super queer.” He traveled the world on the festival circuit with two of them — and he still recommends it to anyone starting out. “If there’s anybody out there who’s an aspiring filmmaker: do the film festival circuit. It’s the best thing in the whole wide world.”
But the early-’90s New Queer Cinema movement — Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, Killer Films — was a New York phenomenon, and he was in Los Angeles. “LA was kind of a wasteland for gay media, certainly in film and television. I was a little lost.”
The reset almost nobody talks about
Then came the part of the story I wish more people in this industry told out loud.
He had a feature film about women’s roller derby. It was financed, then it wasn’t, then it was again, then it wasn’t — for years. Meanwhile he was slinging drinks at dive bars and hotels.
“Everybody I talked to said making movies is just a series of yes, no, yes, no, yes, no,” he said. “I didn’t have that wherewithal anymore… I just couldn’t imagine spending the next ten years getting a film about women’s roller derby made.”
So in his mid-thirties, he started over. Literally.
“I started as an assistant at a PR marketing firm and started literally all over.”
One of that agency’s clients was a small startup network called here!TV, around 2003–04, just after its first DirecTV carriage deals. Josh did their PR. Then here! decided to expand.
“Paul Colichman is awesome, but he’s like P.T. Barnum,” Josh said. “So he comes in and the circus comes in and it’s like, we’re expanding, we’re going to hire a whole team. And I wanted to be part of the circus. I let it be known that I wanted to be part of the circus.”
They poached him. Probably awkward for the agency — and exactly the right move.
That’s the era when our paths crossed. Gaywired.com was here! Media’s first media acquisition, and our team of about ten moved over and roughly doubled the company overnight. Three gay networks were launching at once. As Josh put it, “a really fun time to be in queer media.”
“Have you heard of these things called podcasts?”
Someone recently asked Josh how long he’s been podcasting. His answer: since day one. And he means it fairly literally.
Around 2007, here!’s EVP of programming walked into his office and asked if he’d heard of “these things called podcasts.” He hadn’t.
“The next day — and I only know because the New York Times used to print the science section on Tuesdays — on the front page of the science section was this article about this new form of audio media that was going to take over radio. And it was called podcasting.”
Josh pitched it as a promotional tool for their original programming. Management had other ideas: they wanted him on the mic.
“I said, why would you want me to do a show? I’m not really on air. And he’s like, you’re super gay, you know all the things gay.”
Two hundred and twenty-some episodes later, the point was made.
The moment in the studio, January 2025
Around 2017–18, after here! Media and then Logo, Josh took what he calls a right turn out of queer media — a breather. He landed in wellness, building a video podcast for Tracy Anderson, then producing the very successful podcast of self-help author Gabby Bernstein.
Then came the inauguration in January 2025, and a moment sitting in Gabby’s studio that he describes with total clarity.
“Gabby’s an incredible person and I love her to death. She’s got a great message that she puts out in the world. But it suddenly dawned on me that her message was no longer the message I wanted and needed to put out in the world.”
What pushed him was the rhetoric coming out of Washington — and a realization about his own circle.
“I didn’t realize at that moment, because I never put the pieces together, just how many of my close friends were trans. I have so many trans brothers and sisters who are very close to me, and I knew I needed to do something.”
Then the honest part, the part a lot of people our age feel and don’t say:
“I don’t have the wherewithal to get out there and march on the street anymore. I did it for decades. I did it. And I don’t mean to say I can’t and won’t — but that isn’t where my superpower lies any longer. So I was just like, what can I do?”
The answer was sitting in front of him.
“I realized that I have this ability to create podcasts end to end. I can help develop your show and I can get it all the way on the air. And I decided at that moment that I was going to dedicate the rest of whatever I have to amplifying queer voices and getting them out there.”
The shows don’t have to be political, he said — because they already are. “They are political by nature, in my opinion.”
Why a network instead of a show
Here’s the business architecture, and it’s smart.
“It’s a network, right? The idea is really to create a collective — as opposed to producing one show and trying to sell a show. And you know how difficult that is. Everybody’s looking at the CPM: what am I getting, how many numbers do you have?”
One show is a spreadsheet problem. A slate is a strategy.
In the last twelve months, with what he freely calls a very lean team, Pride House Media has launched eight original shows, all weekly. That’s the whole point.
“My objective is to take those brands who want the eyeballs of our community and say: here’s fitness, here’s nightlife, here’s politics. Because it’s not all the same show and it’s not drawing the same audience.”
Which brings us back to the eyeballs.
“Are you Scruff and you want the boys who are interested in going to the underwear party? Or are you the gay candle maker and you want the dudes over here who go to Hudson and will make the candle?”
He reached for Larry Kramer to land it.
“Larry Kramer, who I loved, said ‘I hate using the word gay community. We’re not a community. We are a population.’ And I get it — he was right in his assessment. ‘Community’ is just an easier word, falls off the tongue better than ‘gay population.’ But I know what he was driving at. We are just many types of — we’re just people.”
Segmentation isn’t a nice-to-have in LGBTQ+ marketing. It is the marketing.
The sponsorship story every brand should read twice
Josh told one anecdote I haven’t stopped thinking about.
A prominent LGBTQ+ brand was in conversation with him about sponsoring a show. Their founder wanted to be a guest. Josh asked the obvious question: is this a paid founder interview, or are you pitching him as a booking?
Their answer: they don’t put money into podcast advertising, because they’ve found it doesn’t work for them. But when the founder goes on podcasts, they see a bump in sales.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” Josh said. So he proposed the version that does: put him on the show, and build the entire episode around him. Pre-roll ad, host-read mid-roll, the whole container. A real sponsored buy.
They said no.
“But you just said you get a bump.”
That’s the gap in a nutshell. The results are showing up in the sales data, the credit is going nowhere, and the media that produced them isn’t getting paid. If your brand has ever said “podcasts don’t work for us” while quietly booking your founder on podcasts, that’s worth an internal conversation.
On AI: he was a brat about it, and he was wrong
We also got into AI, because we’re using it more on this show ourselves for promotional clips.
Josh got an early forced start. Back around 2022, before it was an everyday buzzword, Gabby Bernstein made the whole team take AI classes.
“I’m an old dog, right? I’m like, I don’t want to learn a new trick. And I was such a brat about it, to be honest,” he said. “But I have to tell you, it was the smartest thing anyone’s ever done for me — because it was before the onslaught. I was in early.”
Now it’s load-bearing. He works in tools like Descript and Riverside — text-based editing off the transcript, pulling clips, generating show notes, cutting five-minute versions.
“I could not do what I do, unfortunately, without AI. It saves me personally so much time. I use it every day.”
That’s worth sitting with. A lean independent queer media company producing eight weekly shows is running on tooling that didn’t meaningfully exist four years ago. This is how small teams compete now.
What this means for your 2027 plan
Podcast audiences are loyal and genuinely attentive — headphones on, 30 to 60 minutes, no scroll. And in a year when a lot of brands want LGBTQ+ engagement that’s real without being a national billboard, a host-read spot inside a queer show is close to an ideal fit.
What’s been missing is scale, professionalism and segmentation in one package. That’s exactly what a network is built to provide — and it’s the same argument Tracy E. Gilchrist and News Is Out are making from their corners of this industry. The institutional jobs got fewer. The people who held them became founders. The audience went with them.
Watch the conversation
Our full talk with Josh Rosenzweig — including a trailer showcasing the Pride House Media slate — is up now on the Pink Media / #ILoveGay YouTube channel. Watch it here.
Find the shows at pridehousemedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts. As Josh put it: “There’s something for every queer person in the world.”
