The name means love in Icelandic, and it was chosen deliberately. When former flight attendant Liam Campbell launched elska in September 2015, his first solo trip outside the UK at age eighteen had been to Iceland — a journey that encouraged him to come out and eventually turn his photography hobby into a career. The magazine he built from that personal history is unlike anything else in queer publishing: each issue is made in a different city, featuring photospreads of local gay, bi, and queer men alongside personal stories written by the men themselves.
From Reykjavík to Bogotá, Mumbai to Salt Lake City, Perth to Montréal, Campbell travels to each location, puts out an open call, and photographs whoever responds — regardless of age, race, body type, or conventional attractiveness. The result is something that has been described as part intellectual queer pin-up magazine and part sexy anthropology journal: images of real people in their real homes and neighbourhoods, accompanied by candid, sometimes raw stories about identity, migration, faith, and desire. In a media landscape that privileges models and celebrities, elska insists on the beauty and significance of ordinary lives.
Published six times a year and now based in the United States, elska has produced more than sixty city-specific issues alongside companion zines called Elska Ekstra. Campbell was named one of Attitude magazine's 100 LGBT trailblazers in 2021 — recognition for a project whose ambition is not to make readers lust after or admire its subjects, but to fall utterly in love with every one of them.
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