The media itself is gayer than ever: From the pink mafia at the New York Times to the ambisexual likes of Neal Boulton, it's hard to think of the LGBT community as underrepresented in the mainstream. At the same time, as gays move out to the suburbs and raise kids, it gets harder for them to relate to the urban obsessions of the gay press.

And yet wannabe pink-collar kingpins like Here Media CEO Paul Colichman keep trying. His company is the product of a fire sale thinly disguised as a merger announced late last week. The company is made up of the post-layoff remnants of PlanetOut, the operator of a gay content portal and an online-personals site, along with Here Networks, a subscription cable channel, and Regent Entertainment Media, an indie film studio focused on the gay market.

Colichman (above), the Obama-hating Regent boss whom Queerty dubbed "the whiny queer version of Rupert Murdoch," is reprising the old dream that led a few queer media and tech veterans to start PlanetOut in the first place: Media for the gays, by the gays.

Under former CEO Lowell Selvin, PlanetOut expanded into everything from book publishing to all-gay cruises. An all-gay transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2 proved such a financial disaster that it helped sink the company. But Selvin & Co. were too busy with playing with cruise ships to notice what was happening to the gay market: Having come out of the closet en masse in the '90s, most gays and lesbians found their interests weren't that different from mainstream America. The notion of a gay Web portal, which might have made sense in the mid-'90s, no longer worked in an age of blogs and search engines. And pay classifieds of any persuasion found it hard to compete with Craigslist ads.

Yet the dream of gay-media world domination continues to draw the likes of Selvin and Colichman. It's the promise of being a big pink fish in a small pond. Gay men seeking attention — who'd imagine? But that same dynamic is what dooms gay media moguls to being small fry.

How? Elderkin has launched a new online-advertising network which pulls most of the online gay competition together into a single advertising buy — a knife, in other words, pointed at PlanetOut's heart. The pitch for the network includes all of PlanetOut's standard marketing tricks, including citing the earning power and other attractive features of the gay demographic.

Elderkin's Gay Ad Network is, in itself, a smart move, playing on marketers' interest in targeted networks that allow them to place advertisements more thoughtfully. But that doesn't mean that his new venture is not, at the same time, a supremely pointed slash by the ad world's gay blade at Magee and his old company.

PlanetOut's official history lists Microsoft's MSN as one of the networks that featured the company's content. But that doesn't begin to describe PlanetOut's relationship with Microsoft. PlanetOut also partnered in 1995 with Microsoft's V-Chat Communications (a "visual chat space" that ended up...well, you guess whether it worked out).

"In fact," Valleywag's bearish editor Owen Thomas says, "PlanetOut launched entirely as a channel on MSN, which used to be one of those goofy proprietary online networks before it was an Internet service provider and Web portal. The MSN service totally flopped, and PlanetOut had to do a panicked forced march onto the Web, running out of money all the while. So it's ironic that PlanetOut is getting rescued by Bill Gates - he didn't do that much for them last time around."

See also: Suck.com's 2000 review of PlanetOut, shortly after the site got a $16-million investment despite being, according to its CEO, "nowhere near profitability."

(Photo from Gay.com)