Queer Lala Times

~ the obit ~

Queer Lala Times never had a domain name. It was a magazine that existed entirely inside other companies' accounts: a page on Douban, a public account on WeChat, a feed on Weibo, and a Facebook page for the readers who were outside the mainland and could reach it. That was a sensible way to publish in China in 2013 and it decided in advance how the thing would end. There was nothing to seize and no host to pressure. There were only accounts, and accounts can stop existing.

The publisher was the Chinese Lala Alliance, formed in 2008 out of a run of annual gatherings that had started the year before, linking activists across the mainland and Taiwan and Hong Kong along with Chinese communities further out. Lala is a word lesbians use about themselves in Chinese-speaking places, and the alliance took it as a name on purpose. The magazine started in 2013 under an editor known as Diandia.

What it published was argument rather than lifestyle. Academic theory sat next to first-person essays and translations from other languages, and the standing columns went at the parts of the subject that the better-funded gay male organizations in China were not covering: transgender lives, bisexual and pansexual experience, cooperative marriage, disability, class. Its own statement of purpose was blunt about that. "We are Lala; we are not dissoluble under the umbrellas of women, gay, homosexuality."

I had no way into this and I want to be exact about why. It is not only the language. It is that this magazine lived on four platforms I have never held an account on, and reaching it would have meant being inside a Chinese social graph rather than merely being able to read Chinese. I found it in 2026, in translation, through an archive. Everything below is reconstruction.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the two volumes ~

Two volumes were assembled and put out as files, one in 2014 and one in 2015. The first one runs to 182 pages. Its cover is a masthead of four outlined characters, 酷拉時報, laid over colored circles, with Queer Lala Times set underneath in a heavy blackletter face, and at the foot of the page the alliance's own mark: small figures holding hands under a row of colored balloons.

The contributor list is the part that is hard to reproduce now. Writers inside the mainland worked on the same issue as writers in Taiwan and in North America, at a moment between roughly 2008 and 2016 when people moved and argued freely enough across those places for a shared publication to make sense. Researchers who study the period mark the Taiwanese election of 2016 as the point where that traffic started to slow.

~ the deletion ~

It was publicly active until 2016. In 2017 most of the accounts were removed by censorship, and there is no order to quote, no dated notice, no closing statement from the editors. That is what this kind of death looks like: a Weibo feed that returns nothing, a WeChat account that no longer opens. The alliance behind it wound up in 2018.

The years after made the pattern unmistakable. WeChat deleted a batch of Chinese university LGBT accounts in July 2021, the Beijing LGBT Center closed in May 2023, and more social accounts went in August 2023. Queer Lala Times was early in that sequence rather than a special case, which is why it is worth having a marker for it.

~ where the copies are ~

Two archives outside China hold what is left. Stanford's collection of Chinese NGO material keeps screenshots of the Weibo account, captured while it was still up, and the cnLGBTdata project holds the PDFs of both volumes. Neither is a mirror of a website, because there was no website. They are copies of a magazine and pictures of a feed.

This grave has a logo only because of that. The mark at the top of this page was cut out of the cover of volume one, rendered from a PDF sitting on a research server, nine years after the accounts it was published through were deleted. A file in a folder turned out to be more durable than four platforms.

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