The Advocate was first published as a local newsletter by the activist group Personal Rights in Defense and Education (PRIDE) in Los Angeles.

By early 1968, PRIDE was struggling to stay viable and Mitch and Rau paid the group one dollar for ownership of the paper in February of that year.

Under Goodstein's direction, The Advocate transformed into a bi-weekly national news magazine covering events important to the LGBT community, including the gay rights movement, along with arts and culture.

Loosely based on the then-popular EST (Erhardt Seminars Training), it was a two-weekend, all-day series of extensive self-realization workshops to bring self-acceptance, awareness and tolerance within the LGBT community.

He argued even though "our lifestyle can become an elaborate suicidal ritual... our safety and survival depends on each of us and our individual behaviour", as opposed to government public health regulations.

It was during this time that the magazine stopped carrying sexually explicit advertisements, and in 1992 it launched a sister publication, Advocate Classifieds.

Under the leadership of its first female editor in chief, Judy Wieder, (1996–2002; editorial director, 2002–2006), The Advocate brought in a variety of voices, won numerous mainstream publishing awards, and set records for newsstand sales, circulation, and advertising.

[12][13][14][15] Wieder and her staff's coming-out interviews with such diverse gay luminaries as Ellen DeGeneres, George Michael, Liz Smith, Gore Vidal, Chaz Bono, Jim McGreevey, Melissa Etheridge and Rob Halford garnered the magazine much television exposure and helped to lift the status of The Advocate interviews as well as the visibility of the publication.

In a cost-cutting move in 2008, Here Media, conceding that The Advocate print edition could no longer compete with local weekly LGBT newspapers and the Internet for hard news, switched the magazine from a bi-weekly to a monthly publication cycle.

Early in its history, the publication ran single-panel gag cartoons by Joe Johnson featuring effeminate Miss Thing and beefy Big Dick,[24] and "Gayer Than Strange" by Sean.