What happens when after dinner you are driving your friend home and she suddenly starts to draw up an idea, a future project that has been on her mind for a while - and you immediately feel that ‘click’, that certainty that this is gonna be huge! Especially because it’s about your life. Below you can read the next step of qLit.hu (first was Dorka’s Let’s start post), where I tell you how we started to realize the project, how we helped our lesbian magazine come to life.
So, back then, that autumn night in the car, I got enthusiastic in a second. I tend to be attracted to innovations and novelties, various colors of threads start twisting in my head way before I start thinking about the plan being reasonable or not. However, this idea was more than organizing a whole new holiday or trying and getting addicted to a whole new hobby.
So, we gathered together with Dorka to set our goals and to figure out which road we shall turn to achieve them.
Our goals
The first and maybe the longest phase was to set and prioritize our goals. It took a great deal of long hour talks, scribbling, thinking and re-thinking to come to the following points:
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Let’s establish a new platform for those lesbians* who don’t really feel part of Budapest’s gay scene or they want more - whether they are aware of that feeling or not.
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Let’s explore everyday and not so everyday topics in terms of lesbian life / from a lesbian point of view
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Let’s attract the attention of others, let’s invite more and more people to the conversation who haven’t yet felt the need for a broader exchange of views
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Thus, creating a place for a new community to build up
Easy as a pie, ain’t it?
We took a deep breath and started off.
The name
We couldn’t move forward without creating the first pillar of the brand: finding the perfect name was a huge challenge. We wanted something that specifies the identity. That contains the word/letter lesbian (L) and/or queer (Q) or a hint to these at least. That sounds cool. That is somehow international. And yeah, whose domain is free.
Have a look at the above picture - there you can see how many name-ideas were thrown into the hub. Many of them were cast off for countless reasons, but still, the biggest problem was finding a free domain. We checked and tried to take over some with no success.
Then, after the umpteenth rejection - clit.hu - it took a twist for qLit.hu to be born - a domain that miraculously has only been waiting for us.
The rest
After the name-issue was checked, we could submerge into the actual idea-flow. What shall we write about? How often should we write? How to write? What topics and how to unfold, who to include, whose help and opinion to ask, what to read, what to watch, who to interview?
The structure of the website shall be planned and the appearance designed. The Facebook page is to be built up, the scope and frequency of posts to be figured out, the actual posts to be written, pictures to be found or created... More and more concrete tasks that someone at some point should do. Well, yeah, someone at some point...
Whole meetings were elapsed with such minor issues as, for instance, what to set as our Facebook cover photo. It was important that we found something that reflects the essence of qLit.hu. Picture-searching mode for looooong hours. There was an idea that an L word pic would do it: cult series about lesbians, about an alive lesbian community. Or isn’t it a bit controversial? The quality of the series was not as high as much it meant for us and probably for many other lesbians, and to be honest it doesn’t really reflect our reality. Furthermore, it’s a bit old. (Someday I will write about why it still can be actual in spite of the many legitimate critical voices). Eventually we overcame this problem, too: Dorka created a collage out of the cover pics of the most influential lesbian magazines - well, it expresses what we’d like to express: a lesbian magazine, doesn’t it?
As for the launch I was thinking - a bit naively - this March. I got laughed at indeed. However, sooner or later we had to set a date to which we can assign the tasks. This date was then chosen to be June 1st so that we would be able to cover live from Tel Aviv Pride.
Little by little did we get to this point, where - maybe being unknown yet to each other - it is our pleasure to greet you here. However, unwrapping the concept, establishing the web interface paralelly with broadening our own queer literacy - creating qLit.hu - meant only the start of a truly exciting process. Now, we are ready for the even greater adventure: to realize our vision, to start conversations by means of interesting posts and thoughts.
If you feel your interest aroused by the project and you would be happy to be part of the team, please feel free to write us here.
