The question came from publisher Reiner Jackwerth, addressed to Manuela Kay, then editor-in-chief of Siegessäule, Berlin's biggest queer city magazine. It was 2002, and the answer was: not much. There was no professional lifestyle magazine for lesbians anywhere in the German-speaking world. Kay, who had been born in Berlin-Neukölln in 1964, had worked at the pirate radio station Radio 100 in the 1980s, co-produced what is widely considered the first German lesbian porn film in 1994, and spent a decade running Siegessäule, took the challenge literally. "Frau Kay, denken Sie sich doch mal was aus," Jackwerth told her. Think of something.
She thought of L-MAG. A free pilot was distributed at six consecutive Christopher Street Day parades across Germany in the summer of 2003 — Hamburg to Munich — directly into the hands of skeptical lesbians who weren't sure they trusted a magazine that put their identity on the cover. It took three format attempts before the publication found its footing: the free launch edition was financially unsustainable, a pocket-sized sales format disappeared on newsstands, and it was only when Kay switched to standard A4 that L-MAG began to build the readership it needed. By the time it found its stride, the magazine was available at over 2,000 sales points across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.
The editorial approach was deliberate: a professionally produced lifestyle magazine modeled on the format of mainstream women's glossies — sex, love, money, career, fashion, culture — but written entirely from a lesbian perspective. Kay, a self-described radical feminist, saw L-MAG not just as a publication but as an instrument of visibility. A 2005 postcard campaign helped bring the American series The L Word to German television. In 2013, for the magazine's tenth anniversary, Kay initiated Germany's first Dyke\* March in Berlin, modeled on similar events in the United States. The march has since spread to Cologne, Hamburg, and Heidelberg.
In 2012, when Jackwerth retired and dissolved his publishing house, Kay and colleague Gudrun Fertig founded Special Media SDL to take over L-MAG, Siegessäule, and the gay magazine Du & Ich. The two women became managing directors of the only independent LGBTQ publishing house in Germany. In 2015, they received the Augspurg-Heymann Prize for lesbian visibility. In 2022, Kay was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz. L-MAG sees itself in the tradition of the lesbian magazines of 1920s Germany — Die Freundin, Garçonne — the last publications of their kind before the National Socialists destroyed them. That it exists at all, more than twenty years later, is not just a publishing achievement. It is an act of historical repair.
Explore L-MAG at <a href="https://www.l-mag.de/" target="\_blank">l-mag.de