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You May Also Like International Know Your Straddler Week. Reply to This Comment. This post makes me feel many feelings. These are so cuuuute! You totally made my morning. Firefox is bugged on my iMac. I hope this is where the whiskey comes from.. Damn you! So much cuteness!! I came for the kittehs!
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It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. How Autostraddle went from the edge of closure toward a robust and successful! Pandemic fundraiser 1 Autostraddle brought me on part-time in November as the first development professional that the organization ever had. It was certainly not an ideal time for a fundraiser. The need for transparency After the fundraiser, we dug deep into a post-mortem assessment of it.
I thought that was the last one. So, taking the feedback, between the first fundraiser in April and the second one fundraiser in August, this is what happened: We paused and sent out a toolkit. We continued reporting to our supporters. We stayed connected with our donors. The work in the interim With Autostraddle though, we believed that if we were going to welcome new people into our network of supporters, we had to have no barriers to information access.
It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. Kim on July 7, at pm. Great development work! Thank you for sharing. Tory Morris on July 8, at pm. Submit a Comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. This website uses cookies to improve your experience.
To find out more, read our privacy policy. By clicking the accept button, you agree to our use of cookies. But as we've seen in recent years, when online queer publications such as AfterEllen and Into relied on corporations run by straight people to provide financial backing for queer stories, the results were disastrous. And, I would be lying if I didn't admit that it's hurtful to see LGBTQ verticals at places like BuzzFeed or brand-new publications like Conde Nast's Them receive accolades for revolutionizing queer media when Autostraddle, Tagg, and dapperQ have been here for years, quietly and dutifully doing the work.
It's hard not to think of all that would be possible at these publications, or other sites with the same ethos, run independently by queers for queers, if they had that financial backing, too. Founded in , the same year as Autostraddle, dapperQ began as a style blog for masculine-of-center women and trans individuals. When Dolce Vita took it over one year later, she immediately began expanding the vision and the scope of the publication, and she now calls it "a queer fashion revolution, one of the most stylish forms of protest of our generation.
Something that separates dapperQ from the other two lesbian-owned publications discussed in this piece is that it is not run for profit. Dolce Vita works a full-time day job, and everyone who contributes to the site does so on a volunteer basis. Though tired and often frustrated at being left out of the conversation—in when AfterEllen shut down, Dolce Vita wrote an article for Huffington Post specifically listing publications owned by queer women of color —Dolce Vita has no plans to stop her work with dapperQ; and by many metrics of the word "success," dapperQ is highly successful.
A reader engaging with dapperQ's content on their website, or on Instagram, or on Pinterest—which Dolce Vita says has been a surprisingly important platform for her company—might not guess that dapperQ is helmed by a team that does not make a profit from their work. Tagg Magazine faces similar erasure in the conversation about women's media, and while it is not quite as old as Autostraddle and dapperQ—Bell founded the magazine in —it succeeds in some of the same and some different ways as the other two publications.
Tagg publishes a bimonthly print publication in Washington, D. When I asked Bell why she thought Tagg is often left out of the conversation, she cited race as the number one reason. Discussing one particular article that didn't include Tagg, Bell shared her thought process: " Was this on purpose? Or was this just another example of our white liberal allies completely leaving us out of the narrative? Was it something like, oh, Tagg doesn't count? I really don't know. And the sad part is, you just get used to it.
And I hate that. I hate that I have to get used to being left out of the conversation. The central question of the piece is spelled out explicitly in the subhead: "How do you survive a system set up for you to fail? But Autostraddle is not mentioned once; Tagg is not mentioned once; dapperQ is not mentioned once. A 2,word essay that aims to explore how to survive a patriarchal capitalist system that forces publications run by young ish women—even seemingly wildly successful ones, with robust communities that mourn these losses loudly and vocally—to shut down in spite of their popularity, completely ignored three publications that might have, each in their own way, answered a piece of the thesis question.
This article was not the first to completely ignore lesbian and queer women's media when pondering women's websites; it was one in a large compilation of disappointments, as yet another feminist writer I admire did not acknowledge the work queer women's websites do. About a month later, Into magazine abruptly closed when Grindr, the corporation financially supporting the editorial venture launched in August , laid off the entire staff.
Multiple hot takes swirled in the wake of this news, and Slate published " The Lesson Of Into ," concluding that "as long as queer media depends on corporate support, it will always be conflicted and precarious. But curiously, this deep dive chose not to delve into multiple queer media publications—all run by women—that were launched years before Into ever entered the scene… and which are still hanging on today, however precariously, without any corporate support at all.
The Slate piece does suggest an alternative to corporate funding models, referencing Efniks , an independent outlet founded in that centers queer and trans people of color and relies on donations and volunteers. I was pleased to see a small independent queer publication mentioned in an article aiming to find a solution to long-term sustainability for queer media at large, but it seemed strange to highlight a project launched in and completely ignore multiple other publications launched years earlier.
The overlap in this Venn diagram is so obvious it's almost boring to spell it out. In one circle, conversations about women's media. In the other circle, conversations about queer media. In the center: conversations about queer women's media, or queer media run by women. While it would make sense to include the center overlap in both conversations—especially because the publications that sit there are still alive and doing the work! One potential reason why media folks might be leaving the independent women-owned queer publications out of their conversations about women's media is because queer individuals, some of whom started out working for small independent queer publications, have brought queer stories to mainstream media.
And that's a good thing, mostly. While Korn stepped down from her position after five years this past summer reporting a story about the media landscape in is truly wild because the environment changes on a literal daily basis! Korn and I met in as baby dykes studying gender and sexuality at New York University, and were hired to write for Autostraddle at the same time in She is one of many talented writers and editors Autostraddle has lost over the years, many of whom simply could not afford to work for the low rates Autostraddle is able to pay.
Korn's lesbian sensibility became a hallmark of her tenure at NYLON, and extended into the ways traditional topics in women's media were covered at the magazine.
One of the advantages of queer people heading up not explicitly queer publications is that they are able to lift up other members of their community with them. NYLON has consistently supported independent queer publications, paid queer writers, and highlighted queer stories. Keating brought up the history of queer media, and how it was originally created by and for queer people out of necessity, a far cry from the millions of views from queer and straight readers alike that the stories that mainstream media companies like BuzzFeed and NYLON publish today.
Voices like Korn's and Keating's, lesbian voices from inside the queer community, seem to innately understand why it is important to raise the profiles of independent queer publications, not simply bring queer stories to their more mainstream publications.
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