Richard Rouilard sticks his fingers in his mouth and gives a piercing blast.

'\o7 'Attenzione!"\f7

Hopping onto a stool in the cocktail lounge of Trump's, the editor-in-chief of The Advocate, the nation's largest gay and lesbian publication, addresses the crowd: "As a flaming homo, I'm delighted to be here!"

He is greeted by hoots and claps.

Representing some of the country's leading gay and lesbian organizations, the audience has gathered to see Army veteran Dusty Pruitt and Russian gay activist Roman Kalinin honored as The Advocate's woman and man of the year.

The occasion is serious, but not \o7 too\f7 serious. After all, Rouilard--party creature and former society editor--is an L.A. host par excellence.

Lifting the pant legs of his formal navy Versace suit, he shows off a pair of black motorcycle boots and giggles, "These are the \o7 real \f7 part." He raves delightedly about how \o7 everybody \f7 from the David Hockney affair in the main dining room is emptying into his cozier, kinkier gathering, having discovered that Madonna wasn't showing up for the artist's soiree after all.

"All the closet press is here," Rouilard says impishly.

Since he took the reins of The Advocate in June, 1990, Rouilard has been promoting the biweekly with the sort of celebrity panache few journalists can muster. At 24, the country's oldest homosexual publication of note was badly in need of pep pills. A sluggish pulp-paper magazine, it featured such lifestyle articles as how to tell your parents you've been diagnosed HIV-positive and a salacious array of pretty boys advertising their anatomical wares.

"Middle-aged leather daddies with handlebar mustaches," one young new reader cattily says of the magazine's former fans.

Rouilard, never shy, says he has changed all that "vastly." His mission has been to make The Advocate credible to a broad spectrum of the gay community, while appealing to the new activists. To this end, he has given the magazine a news orientation, attracted younger readers as well as gay women and minorities and run spicy personality interviews that have garnered kudos from mainstream journalists.

Bounding around his West Hollywood office one morning, he is indeed the picture of a dynamic, driven editor--but with a difference.