If Elska Magazine was run with business and profit as the primary motivator, things would be a lot different. For one, we’d be filling our pages with all celebrities and models. For two, we’d be replacing the personal stories with articles by professional writers. And for three, we’d be trying to get you to order our magazines from our website rather than writing a blog post encouraging you to buy them in shops, even though it would mean a lot more revenue for us if you ordered directly from our website.

at Papercut Shop in Stockholm, Sweden

Clearly we’re guided by other values, which is basically about doing whatever we want to do. This leads us to selecting feature destinations based on whim and geographical diversity more than marketability. That's why we keep participation open to anyone who wants to be in Elska rather seeking 'types' and curating content. And that's why we let the men featured decide how they want to represent themselves, both through what they write about and what clothes, if any, they choose to wear.

at Brown University Bookstore in Providence, RI, USA

Aside from the dollars and pounds and euros and crowns of it all, the fact is that we need bricks and mortar stores that give space for LGBTQ media and art. It makes us more visible, and this visibility gives legitimacy and power. It also inspires more queer artists and writers to put their work out into the world. In the image shown below we see Elska being alongside some other lovely queer mags like Headmaster, LSTW, Girls Like Us, Gayletter, and the now sadly finished Hello Mr.

a real community of LGBTQ publications for sale at McNally Jackson in New York, USA

While I don't know if this latter publication decided to call it a day for financial reasons or otherwise, it's sad to see any queer titles go. I want to see this shelf completely full of mags by us and for us. While it's true that sometimes we make a financial loss supplying Elska to shops, and this is the same for many independent publications, overall we believe that visibility is important. We just hope that as we continue to be on shelves around the world, more and more people will notice us, buy us, and keep the community of LGBTQ publishing alive.

For a list of shops that sell Elska, see the 'Stockists' page on our website. You can guarantee that all of these stores also sell a selection of other great queer indie mags.