A small editorial room where queer women tell the stories they've been holding — the first kisses, the quiet years, the marriages, the leaving, the late-blooming, the long love. No apology. No polish-for-your-comfort. Just the truth of us.
My Lesbian Secret began in 2019 as a private folder on my laptop — a place to write the love stories I couldn't say out loud in my family, at my old job, or in the bar on a Tuesday night. I had spent most of my twenties in relationships I described in careful, edited words, and the editing was killing the truth of them. One night I typed a four-paragraph thing about a woman I had loved in 2014, sent it to three friends, and within a week forty strangers had written back to say: mine, too.
This site is the grown-up version of that folder. We publish first-person essays, oral histories, and reported pieces about queer women's lives — the parts that are tender, the parts that are sharp, and the parts that don't fit cleanly into a coming-out narrative. We don't run on nostalgia, and we don't write for an audience that needs to be convinced we deserve a place. We write for us. If you've ever whispered something about your own life and then swallowed it back down, this is the room where you can say the whole sentence.
Every essay on My Lesbian Secret passes through the same set of questions. They are not rules so much as promises — to our writers, to our readers, and to the women whose stories we are lucky enough to hold for a little while.
We honor the messy, the contradictory, the in-progress. We edit for clarity and craft, never for decency. If a writer's truth is uncomfortable, the discomfort is the point — we don't sand it down to be palatable to people who weren't in the room.
Every essay is written by someone with lived experience of woman-loving-woman life — sapphic, bi, trans, questioning, late-blooming, celibate, partnered, single, parent, ex-religious, recovering, in love. We do not publish outsiders writing about us, no matter how well-intentioned.
We protect our writers with editorial-grade privacy: pseudonyms on request, no real names ever published without consent, source notes reviewed by legal, and a kill-switch for any piece that becomes unsafe to keep online. Honesty should never cost a woman her job, her family, or her safety.
We pay our writers. Every accepted essay receives a flat fee plus a bonus for pieces over 2,000 words. This is not a passion-project-for-exposure arrangement; it never has been. Your labor is real, your words are work, and work gets paid.
We don't chase a quota of identities for the sake of a homepage grid. We publish what is honest, well-written, and adds something we haven't heard. Race, class, body, ability, age, geography — they're not checkboxes; they're the texture of a real life.
We don't pivot to whatever queer story is having its moment on a network show or a viral tweet. We publish on a slow, editor-led schedule, because some stories deserve to be sat with, not shipped. We will not be your content calendar.
We are not a media conglomerate. We are a five-person editorial team and a few hundred contributors. Here's what that has added up to so far.
A founder, three editors, and a community lead. We work remotely across four time zones, meet on Sunday nights, and argue about the Oxford comma more than is probably reasonable.
Former magazine fact-checker, current keeper of the inbox. Lives in Brooklyn with her wife and a stubborn rescue mutt. Reads every submission within 72 hours, no exceptions.
Long-form essayist and former oral historian at a civil rights archive. She runs our reported pieces and our annual print zine. Based in Atlanta, perpetually reading three books at once.
She reads the 600+ emails we get each month, replies to every one, and curates our weekly letters column. Lives in Mexico City. The reason the comments section is actually kind.
Comma-savant, type nerd, and the one who makes the site look this good. Trained as an archivist; will fight you about widows and orphans in body copy. Lives in Berlin.
"The first time I read My Lesbian Secret I cried in a parking lot. The third time I read it I submitted something. The tenth time I read it I knew I was going to be okay."— from a reader letter, 2023