It’s crunch time for Well Well Well, a French lesbian magazine out on the newsstands for the first time Friday in a country where lesbians are struggling to get their voice heard.
The first issue features everything from an interview with film director Celine Sciamma — who came out as a lesbian publicly during the 2007 Cannes Film Festival — to a comic strip depicting a mother’s interest in her daughter’s lesbian lover, and where to go out. With that eclectic offering, the biannual glossy hopes to fill the void left by the closure of three lesbian publications in 2012 and 2013.
“A magazine by and for women who like women seemed crucial to us. Because we have so little visibility. And because practically no one reaches out to us. Too often shunned by the gay press, we are near absent from mainstream media,” editor Marie Kirschen writes in the first issue.
Photo: AFP
Lesbian media emerged in France in the 1970s alongside the feminist movement, but gradually lost steam as the mainstream took over.
In 2012, Lesbia — which had been going for three decades — shut down. La Dixieme Muse followed suit and closed in 2013, as did online magazine tetue.com, marking the end of lesbian publications in France.
By comparison, Curve was still going strong in the US after its 1990 launch and Diva remained active in Britain after a years-long run.
Lesbians are ‘Invisible’
The French lesbian magazines closed just as homosexuality lept to the fore in France as the government pushed through a law allowing same-sex couples to get married, sparking a lively, sometimes acrimonious debate.
But even then, says sociologist Natacha Chetcuti, “gays were given way more airtime than lesbians.”
“On the one hand gays are over-visible, on the other hand, lesbians continue to be invisible.”
But, she said, the situation was beginning to change.
The controversy surrounding the gay marriage law, for instance, also touched on hugely sensitive issues such as medically-assisted procreation for homosexual couples, which is currently offered only to heterosexuals facing fertility problems.
While the government quickly abandoned the idea of integrating this into the same-sex marriage bill — which finally came into force in May 2013 — the issue sparked considerable debate, allowing lesbians a brief step into the limelight.
Then the high-profile Cannes Film Festival awarded Blue Is The Warmest Colour, a film about a lesbian couple, the top Palme d’Or prize.
Earlier this year, Jeanne — an online magazine for lesbians — saw the light. And now, Well Well Well is born.
But despite these small in-roads, lesbian media faces an uphill struggle as much-needed cash is hard to come by, says Kirschen.
There is a small pool of readers and advertisers are not always forthcoming.
“The problem in France is that either brands don’t want to be associated with gay media, or they don’t see gays and lesbians as clients,” she says.
And when they do see the potential, they fall into age-old cliches, she adds, pointing to the fact that people “think of gays as well-groomed men who buy lots of moisturizing cream while lesbians are women who don’t shave and never buy moisturizer.”
Kirschen says some advertisers in the US have no problem targeting gay and lesbian communities.
Oreo, for instance, designed a cookie in 2012 with the colors of the rainbow squashed between the trademark black biscuits, and Absolut Vodka has in the past brought out limited edition multicolored bottles.
But in France, brands are wary of community-specific advertisements in a country that prides itself on liberty, equality and fraternity and frowns on singling out specific populations.
‘Diy’ Economic Model
And while the gay community in France has a hugely famous and rich champion in the person of Pierre Berge — the partner of late designer Yves Saint Laurent who until last year owned gay magazine Tetu — lesbians do not.
“Investments have been made in the gay press that were never made in the lesbian press,” says Marie-Helene Bourcier, a professor at Lille 3 University and a well-known activist.
“We don’t have a lesbian equivalent of Pierre Berge, no one injects cash into the lesbian economy in France.”
As such, Kirschen and her team are operating on a “DIY” mode, working for free and distributing the magazine to Paris retail outlets themselves.
They are hoping that people outside the French capital and abroad will order the magazine online. The money needed for printing costs, meanwhile, was raised thanks to crowdfunding.
“We all have a job on the side,” Kirschen says.
“We work (on the magazine) in the evenings, on weekends, because we want it to exist.”
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS