Where Did All the Lesbian Bars Go?
The number of dedicated lesbian bars in the U.S. has fallen by more than half in three decades. The people trying to bring them back are rethinking what a bar even needs to be.
Read the piece →LNmag is an independent magazine for lesbian, queer, and non-binary women — covering culture, lifestyle, news, and community with the depth that a scrolling feed doesn't leave room for.
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto / Pexels
Queer book club picks are trending toward short story collections this season — easier to finish between everything else going on.
A wave of new queer-hosted interview podcasts are skipping the origin-story episode entirely and starting mid-career. Refreshing.
Sapphic subtext is out; sapphic text is (finally, slowly) in. More on this in an upcoming Culture feature.
The group chat has fully replaced the group text, and no one under 30 will explain why to anyone over 30.
This volume's featured stories, browsable by beat below. We're web-only right now — there's no print edition yet — and numbering it this way lets each volume hold together as its own thing, with room for an advertiser to sponsor one. Any writer can pitch any beat; see Contribute.
The number of dedicated lesbian bars in the U.S. has fallen by more than half in three decades. The people trying to bring them back are rethinking what a bar even needs to be.
Read the piece →Leaving a marriage is hard enough. Leaving a marriage that took years to be legally allowed to have complicates the grief in ways straight friends don't always understand.
Read the piece →Most medical schools spend less than an hour total on LGBTQ-specific care. Here's what to ask for, and how to find a provider who already knows.
Read the piece →Long before dating apps, rec league softball was where lesbians found each other. A new generation is bringing it back — with a lot less pressure to be good at softball.
Read the piece →Legal protections for queer women vary enormously by state and country — sometimes down to the county. Here's why that patchwork exists, and why it isn't going away soon.
Read the piece →Planning a trip as a same-sex couple still means a layer of research straight travelers skip entirely. A few questions worth asking before you book.
Read the piece →Long before "mutual aid" was a hashtag, lesbian networks were quietly running informal safety nets — rides, meals, rent money, childcare. That instinct never really went away.
Read the piece →A guide to finding — or altering — suits that fit across the masc-to-femme spectrum, without paying alteration fees that outprice the jacket.
Read the piece →Ethical non-monogamy isn't a personality trait, it's a set of skills. What the actual conversations sound like — and where they overlap more with traditional partnership than either side likes to admit.
Read the piece →A studio-tour profile of a couple's shared 650-square-foot space, and how they split it into two distinct personalities without a single argument about the shelving.
Read the piece →A general-interest look at how one part of LGBTQ history dealt with losing its physical spaces — and what every part of the community can learn from it now.
Read the piece →After years of community life moving almost entirely online, a handful of cities are seeing renewed interest in physical LGBTQ community centers — not as nostalgia, but as infrastructure.
Read the piece →A new generation of out actors and musicians are done doing media training on their own identities. That shift is changing what press coverage of them looks like, too.
Read the piece →As legacy lesbian magazines close or fold into bigger outlets, a wave of tiny independent zines and mailers are filling the gap — mailed, not posted, and proud of it.
Read the piece →Dating apps, community boards, safety tools — a running look at the tech that's built with lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in mind, and the tech that just says it is.
Read the piece →A running, unserious collection of the small good things happening in queer life right now. No analysis required.
Read the piece →Before there was an app for any of this, there was a phone number you had to already know. A start at collecting the community history that mostly never got written down in the first place.
Read the piece →Lisa Hartouni has spent four decades photographing the people institutions overlook. She's also a lesbian elder this community owes real, ongoing support.
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