focuses on Bermuda's gay sex laws.

The Advocate is working on a feature story about New Jersey accountant Mr.

Bill Courson, who is spearheading a campaign to amend Bermuda's criminal code and make gay sex legal.

Ms Sharen Johnson, international editor for the 75,000-circulation glossy publication, said the article will highlight Mr. Courson's efforts to change gay sex laws in Bermuda and the Isle of Man.

"We're one of the most quoted (publications) by other gay media, and by the straight media,'' Ms Johnson said in a telephone interview from Manhattan yesterday.

"We've been referred to in other gay publications as the publication that the mainstream media looks to when it wants to find out what's going on in the gay and lesbian community.'' The magazine is published every two weeks and the article which reports on Bermuda's gay sex laws will appear on newsstands on January 26, Ms Johnson said.

Homosexual sex between men in Bermuda can lead to a 10-year jail sentence, even if the consenting partners are in private. Few cases have ever been prosecuted.

Though the influential publication "is not targeting Bermuda,'' Ms Johnson, a lesbian, said there is no way she would visit this country before the criminal code is amended.

"Why should I ever go to someplace where I could, for whatever reason, face legal sanction for what to me is natural, when there are other places I could go where I would not?'' she asked. "To me, it's just common sense.'' Mr. Walt Marlowe, administrator of the Florida-based International Gay Travel Association, has said his 600 gay travel firms would back a boycott against Bermuda over the country's gay sex laws.

Ms Willy Bruijns-Miller, the magazine's director of marketing, said The Advocate has a paid circulation of 75,000 and a total distribution of 100,000, almost all of it in the United States.

The Advocate featured stories about a gay and lesbian boycott of Colorado over its gay sex laws, and "we have a very important political voice,'' Ms Bruijns-Miller said. "I know that our readers react to this.'' A 1990 survey showed the average reader had a household income of $62,000 US, and was a college graduate between 30 and 40 years old, she said. Fifty-nine percent of readers had taken a foreign vacation in the last three years, she said.