About
Founded in March 2009 and still run by a dedicated team of indentured masochists, Autostraddle is an intelligent, hilarious & provocative voice and a progressively feminist online community for a new generation of kickass lesbian, bisexual & otherwise inclined ladies (and their friends).
Autostraddle is a serious labor of love -- a personal dream that one day became a start-up and then somehow became the world's most popular independently-owned lesbian website with over 400,000 unique visitors and 2 million views per month. We are also extremely proud to be the winners of the 2012 Bloggies' Weblog of the Year Award, the most prestigious award of its kind.
Autostraddle recently launched the first stage of what will eventually be a fully-functional social networking element, Autostraddle Social. We've thrown parties, arranged worldwide meet-ups and launched a very successful line of t-shirts, calendars and stickers. In April, we will be holding our first-ever A-Camp weekend in California: four days in the mountains, jam-packed with activities, workshops, panels and performances designed by the Team.
If you're new here, you can get acquainted by checking out some of our very best articles.
Wanna get your brand noticed by this untapped demographic? Advertise with us.
Our business model involves multiple revenue streams: primarily, donations. Secondarily; advertising, merchandise sales and events.
Content:
Daily Fix: Autostraddle publishes breaking news stories anywhere from 2 to 8 times a day. These posts both inform and analyse queer and feminist issues including Marriage Equality, Coming Out, Don't Ask Don't Tell, Adam Lambert and the whereabouts of Kate Moennig. Articles we don't approach in depth appear in AlsoAlsoAlso.
Feature Articles: Additionally, we regularly debut four magazine-style feature articles per week - video, roundtables, personal essays, recaps, top tens, interviews & more in categories including politics, television, feminism, style, books, technology, sex & relationships, social justice, herstory, cyberculture, travel, business, comedy, music and DIY culture.
Video: We are the proud owners of Julie & Brandy in Your Box Office, starring Julie Goldman & Brandy Howard and their dog Nacho. Autostraddle's first narrative video series, Unicorn Plan-It, premiered in the summer of 2010 and stars Haviland Stillwell, Ashley Reed and Sarah Croce.
Regulars:
Get Baked With Autostraddle: A roundable of recipes for persons of all dietary persuasions, with a theme -- Lemons! Comfort Food! Dips! Valentine's Day!
How to Be Gay: How to date and come out and break up and survive the holidays with your girlfriend and combat airborne homophobia. Stuff like that.
Queer Beauty Bar: Queer Eye for the Queer Girl, from bathing suits to perfume to fall style.
Read a F-cking Book: Also includes Autostraddle Book Club and our famous Pure Poetry series, which aims to open your eyes to the magic of poetry.
You Need Help: Seriously you have a lot of problems, so we're just gonna try and help you out with that.
Movie Nights: We pick a movie and food that goes with that movie and then we all eat and watch it together.
Playlists: Playlists for all your feelings and desires such as mourning, exercising, heavy rock, having a shitty day, camping, being the shit, dating someone you really like and having no fucks to give.
Lizz's Latest Thing: Lizz has a passion for fashion and would like to share it with you.
Recaps: We recap lots of things, including The Real L Word, Pretty Little Liars and Skins.
xxboy Meets World: Sebastian on issues and celebrations relating to being a highly regarded transman-about-town.
Annika's Diary: Just your typical Urban Hipster Femme Twentysomething Trans Lesbian.
Lily's College Lesbianage: Intern Lily navigates lesbian college life at Barnard.
DeAnne Smith is Funny: World-famous comedian DeAnne Smith shares laugh-out-loud funny columns of pure hilarity.
Autostraddle Calendar Girls: photographer Robin Roemer shoots a new hot/smart lesbian every month for our 2012 Calendar.
The Autostraddle Interview: Autostraddle has interviewed and done photo shoots with tons of super-important people, including Jennifer Beals, Toni Collette, Tegan Quin of Tegan & Sara, Tila Tequila, Kim Stolz, Amos Mac, Liz Feldman, Dani Campbell, Marisa Meltzer, Sandra Bernhard, Michelle Tea, Erin Foley and Kaki King.
I'll Have What She's Wearing: Our style team stalks queers on the streets, tells you how to look like they do.
NSFW Sunday: NSFW Sunday provides you with things related to fingerblasting and sex.
Team Picks: Just stuff we found on the internet that we like.
The Autostraddle Roundtable: Firing off on issues like religious upbringing/sexuality, the lesbian generation gap and getting fired from work.
We like the macro and the micro, the international and the close-to-home. We take a queer sensibility to everything — ’cause something doesn’t have to be GAY to be, you know – gay.
We owe everything to our incredible team.
Our Mission
Autostraddle’s girl-on-girl culture is rooted in basic social values and ideals — we want women to feel good about themselves, we want equality and visibility for all marginalized groups and ultimately, we’d like to change the world.
We seek to be a fresh, energizing voice for queer women, one that takes the reader seriously and encourages intelligent discourse, one that entertains with funny, uncensored & brutally honest conversation & content and one that also provides photos of hot girls.
We endorse an “it takes a village” approach to the GBLTQ webiverse. We encourage community and support amongst women on the web and do not encourage competition between websites or other media outlets. We believe change is best accomplished when we are working together as activists, artists and thinkers.
We’re here to listen, to change and we do not ask what our users can do for us, but what we can do for our users!
Autostraddle's Values
Honesty: ‘Cause at this point anything but sincerity just makes us all look like clowns. Honesty is progress, trust is essential and transparency is elemental, especially for our core audience. By living openly and visibly, promoting and endorsing genuinely and speaking frankly; we endear our community to do the same. We do not censor, obscure or compromise.
Community: We build community by eradicating shame and showing open doors towards pride. A strong community of self-confident and self-aware women who feel comfortable with each other and with themselves? That’s what we call revolution.
Furthermore, We’re aware that many of you live in areas where talking as openly as all this simply isn’t an option. We hope to encourage compelling discourse on women’s rights, feminism, homophobia and transphobia, media visibility, gender flexibility and Shenny.
Courage & Integrity: We stand up for what we believe in, no matter what the odds. Accurate and positive representation of our lives in the media is a crucial tool to shatter stereotypes, gain social capital and show universal connections of common human emotion and experiences.
Laughter & Fun, Fun, Fun! Because life is fundamentally kind of ridiculous … and we’re really f*cking funny. Our number one value is LOL.
Art: Art is necessary. Our creative team represents designers, musicians, writers, visual artists, actors, dancers and other creative innovators. We want raw, uncompromised perspectives. The internet isn’t the end of an era, it’s the beginning of a new phase in creative development.
Inclusiveness: This isn’t a website exclusively for queer girls. We hope there’s something here for peoples of all orientations and genders.
We don’t wanna be your guilty pleasure: At the risk of sounding like a diet snack food, we want to be a place where quality rules over quantity and where we can make an active attempt to even out the seemingly arbitrary relationship between Fame & Success and Actual Talent & Goodness. We wanna hear about and talk about the raddest things going on out there, big or small, radical or fringe. High-brow and low-brow are tired categories; almost anything can be talked about with intelligence. [See, that's what one learns from years of L Word recapping. One would hope.]
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Have a story for us? Check out our writer's guidelines.
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You will see the following rules applied to all our content and discourse:
1. Never criticize or make fun of a woman's physical appearance.
2. Always source, unless the source is like a Neo-Nazi website or Westboro.
3. Everything must have a point.
4. Quality over quantity.
5. Aim to be as diverse and inclusive as possible in imagery and written content.
6. We do not ever and will not publish paparazzi photographs of anybody. We occasionally will make an exception for photographs that suggest Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson are getting back together as long as nobody appears intoxicated in said photographs.
