E-zine Expressway

City-based e-zine, The Queer Chronicle, is one of the longest-running monthly LGBT magazines in the country

On the first of every month, a link to this e-zine gets delivered to inboxes of a private distribution list. "We have never been late, except for one occasion when I was traveling out of the country," says Keith Athaide-D'Silva, editor of The Queer Chronicle (TQC). The e-zine presents ideas, articles and opinion columns "from an LGBT point of view". 'Slick' would be a a good word to describe its content- fashion, lifestyle and travel; personal stories; parties and events; recipes; even some great photo spreads. Launched in September 2009, TQC is one of the longest running monthly LGBT magazines in the country today in terms of the number of editions published.

TQC's survival is a remarkable at a time when most LGBT magazines fade away. D'Silva was inspired by Bombay Dost , the first official LGBT magazine of India launched in 1990. It still gets published. "It was pretty much ahead of its times when it came out," he says. By the end of 2010, the trend of queer magazines caught momentum and seven LGBT magazines were launched. But most just fell off, leaving the Pune-run TQC, the quarterly Pink Pages of Bengaluru and Delhi and, the once-in-two-months, Gaylaxy from Kolkata.

Many factors have ensured TQC's success, the most important being its conscious blurring of the line between queer and straight readers' preferences. Targeted predominantly at male readers, the content covers a wide range of topics, be it an obit piece on Amy Winehouse or a movie report. "The content is always so interesting and it never dumbs down matter. TQC works with no pre-conceived notions," says Imran Ali Khan, who works at Open Space, Pune, and is a regular reader.

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