LNmag.

LNmag exists in the tradition of the grassroots newsletters, mailers, and magazines that came before it — reader-written, unglamorous, and stubborn about sticking around. We're building forward, but we're keeping faith with what got us here.

Every generation of lesbian media has had to fight to exist. We're not pretending otherwise, we're just reaching out with what we know and love.

Editor's Letter

This is Volume 1 — and this issue is about what's happening in the meantime: who's dating who and how honestly, whose apartment we'd want to see, what a good rec league looks like now, and what we owe the people who built the spaces we're standing on. We hope it feels like all of that at once.

One more thing worth saying plainly: we're becoming a magazine after years as a scrappy, handmade zine, and that's a real shift, not just a redesign. Be gentle with us while we find our footing in the new format — we're still the same people, just figuring out a new shape.

Also, real talk: for this first issue, I asked a handful of writer friends to send me pieces without actually handing them submission guidelines, a word count, or a clear sense of what images we'd need. So if this issue reads a little uneven in places, that's why. Not an apology, just an honest account of where we are — we're rebuilding this thing in public, in real time.

We also want to be clear about something: we're not trying to be the only place doing this. There are other journals, magazines, sites, resources, and IRL and hybrid events out there doing the same kind of work, and our attitude toward all of it is simple — the more, the better. This isn't about competing for the smallest possible piece of attention. It's about keeping the flame lit, together, from as many directions as it takes. We were made to be out here and thriving right now, and that's exactly what we're doing.

Contributors, please get in touch with me ASAP so we can add your proper pronouns to your bios, and I need your art/revisions pls.

— The Editors

Contributors

Rowan Vance
Culture & Community beat.
Elena Morales
News & Politics beat.
Sherri Jackson
Life & Relationships beat.
Sylvie Chen
Style & Home beat.
Kai Sterling
Health & Sports beat.
Maren O’Connell
Celeb & Travel beat.
Dana Blake
Twee beat — social, cute, and feelgood wildcards.
J. Monique
Editor — editorial operations: sales, distribution, and classifieds.
Team (Vintage)
Our Vintage beat — community history, for and about our elders — is open with no assigned writer yet. If that's your story, you're first call.
Team (Tech & Apps)
Our Tech & Apps beat — dating apps, community tools, and what's built for us — is also open with no assigned writer yet.
Team (Visual Arts)
Our Visual Arts beat — photography, illustration, and the people behind it — is open with no assigned writer yet, though it already has a real featured piece.

Ask Us Anything

"My best friend started dating my ex four months after we broke up. Am I allowed to be mad about this forever, or is there a statute of limitations?"

There's no statute of limitations on being mad — feelings don't run on a timer. But there is a practical question underneath the one you asked: do you want your friendship back badly enough to say what happened, out loud, once? Most versions of this that heal do it through one honest, awkward conversation, not through waiting it out silently until it stops hurting on its own. It might not stop on its own.

— The Advice Column, running in every issue. Send your own.

The Last Word

"We keep asking what we lost when the bars closed, like the answer is a building. It was never the building. It was a place you didn't have to explain yourself before the door even shut behind you. We're trying to build a few more doors like that. This is one of them."

— From the founding editor's notes

About LNmag

Before it was a website, this magazine was a photocopied zine called Lesbian Nation — made by hand, left in queer bars and bookshops around Washington and California for whoever picked one up. It never had a following. It wasn't sold, mailed, or tracked. It was just something one person kept making because it felt worth making. Somewhere along the way, in a move, the copies got lost. This is that zine, coming back — online this time, under a new name: LNmag.

LNmag today is an independent digital magazine supporting lesbian, bisexual, and queer women across the LGBTQ community, covering celebrity, culture, lifestyle, news, and community. We publish reporting and personal essays that don't require translation for an outside audience first.

Lesbian spaces — bars, zines, meeting places — have been disappearing for decades. We're a small, reader-facing attempt to keep one more of them open, built independently for now, with an eye toward more permanent, community-accountable stewardship as we grow. Right now, everyone working on this — writing, editing, building the site — is doing it as a volunteer.

The zine's original name, Lesbian Nation, also drew on Jill Johnston's 1973 book Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, a touchstone of 1970s lesbian separatist feminism that imagined an autonomous lesbian community. We're not a continuation of that book's politics, and it's a different era — but the idea of imagining a space that's fully your own is exactly the spirit the original zine was borrowing, and the spirit LNmag is still borrowing now.

We're small and building slowly, same as always. If you want to write for us, tell us what we're missing, or happen to have an old copy of the zine somewhere in a box, reach out.

A note on our name

LNmag was born from a small, handmade zine called Lesbian Nation, which had no commercial distribution or public following. "LN" nods to that original name — the full name simply wasn't available to us as a domain, so LNmag is how we carry it forward online. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a continuation of Lesbian News, LGBTQ Nation, or any other past or present LGBTQ outlet. Any resemblance in name to those outlets is coincidental or referential, not a claim of lineage.

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