This paper challenges common representations of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans* and Queer) music fans, broadening the scope by considering a variety of LGBTQ individuals and fandoms. With this aim, we discuss the narratives on "being a fan" in six life stories of self-identified LGBTQ individuals, who have participated in an oral history project on the role of music in LGBTQ lives. The analysis discloses a great diversity of what being a fan means, covering various intensities of fandom, how narrators conceptualize the topic in their own words, within their daily lives, and in relation to their sexual and gender identifications. These accounts further explore and move beyond established stereotypes of LGBTQ fandom, often focusing on extreme fans and specific fan objects, 1 and instead indicate diversity on a number of continuums: from active to more passive fandom, from diva worship to participating in DIY cultures, from listening to making music, and from theoretical to emotional involvement.

The importance of music and music tastes in lesbian and gay cultures is widely documented, but empirical research on individual lesbian and gay musical preferences is rare and even fully absent in Flanders (Belgium). To explore this field, we used an online quantitative survey (N= 761) followed up by 60 in-depth interviews, asking questions about musical preferences. Both the survey and the interviews disclose strongly gender-specific patterns of musical preference, the women preferring rock and alternative genres while the men tend to prefer pop and more commercial genres. While the sexual orientation of the musician is not very relevant to most participants, they do identify certain kinds of music that are strongly associated with lesbian and/or gay culture, often based on the play with codes of masculinity and femininity. Our findings confirm the popularity of certain types of music among Flemish lesbians and gay men, for whom it constitutes a shared source of identification, as it does across many Western countries. The qualitative data, in particular, allow us to better understand how such music plays a role in constituting and supporting lesbian and gay cultures and communities.

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Women's magazines and the gender representations in them have been subject to much investigation. Less attention has been paid to alternative media aimed at women, while these have the potential to create and distribute new, empowered approaches to gender representations and business models. This contribution to mapping the alternative feminist media landscape in Belgium focuses on the case of Charlie Magazine, an independent print and online medium in Belgium that existed from 2014 to 2019. Inspired by feminist theory and cultural studies, we discuss norms and conventions in women's magazines and investigate how dominant gender and gendered norms are subverted in an alternative women's magazine. Through a discourse analysis of five bookzines of Charlie and four interviews with its editors, we explore different strategies to subvert these norms and conventions. The findings indicate that Charlie challenged these norms in traditional women's magazines using irony, humour, and intertextuality [1], subversive gender representations [2], and framing the personal as political [3]. Furthermore, interviews with editors and employees of Charlie provide insights into their business model that contributed to the subversion of dominant magazine norms. By investigating the combination of text and production, this article provides unique insights into the production of alternative media targeted at women.

Urban space is a productive force reflecting and affecting human interaction both with other humans and with their environment (Lefebvre). Traditionally the urban scheme is envisioned to control and order ‘nature’ and social interaction, and to sustain the power of a dominant group (Foucault). Yet due to the complexity of the post-capitalist city, this urban realm is not a smooth surface. Sometimes temporary cracks form, where space is opened up for creating alternative orderings (Hetherington 40). Because of their ambivalence, these spaces do not clearly belong to anyone, and can easily be claimed. It is this type of place that queers and other minority groups have often repurposed and appropriated to their needs. With our photographs we hope to visualize these fragments in the urban environment, where the imposed order suddenly stops, and where organic (over-) growth takes over. Here nature reclaims temporarily unused urban space and thus disrupts the idea of a human-constructed and human-controlled landscape and the idea of ‘city’ in a dualistic relation with ‘nature.’ In this sense, our photographs represent a queer version of urban typologies like ‘park’ or ‘garden’.