TL;DR

• Elska Magazine celebrates its 10-year anniversary with a special retrospective book.
• The project features real, ordinary LGBTQ men from around the world—no celebrities, no edits.
• Stories range from coming out in a Mormon town to falling in love on a Ukrainian road trip.
• Over 827 men across 50 cities have been photographed and profiled.
• The retrospective underscores the beauty of authenticity and the fight against conventional beauty standards.

A Decade of Realness: Elska Turns 10

Elska Magazine, the globe-trotting queer publication that refuses to polish, filter, or airbrush its subjects, just turned ten. To celebrate, the indie project dropped a retrospective collection—Ten Years of Elska—packed with the raw, intimate stories and portraits that made it a cult favorite. Forget supermodels and six-packs: Elska’s gift to the world has always been men as they are. And in a decade where Instagram-perfect filters often rule queer culture, that choice feels revolutionary.

Born out of editor and photographer Liam Campbell’s love for travel, photography, and men, Elska started humbly in Ukraine with what he thought would be a small zine. “I hoped to meet three or four local guys,” Campbell recalls. “But everything exploded—I met 12, shot them in their homes, in the streets, and added their personal stories.” That scrappy first issue morphed into a full-blown global magazine, spanning more than 50 cities, from Buenos Aires to Dhaka, and featuring 827 ordinary-yet-extraordinary men along the way.

Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Stories

The retrospective doesn’t just feature pretty pictures—it digs into the messy, beautiful guts of queer life. Readers will find tales of coming out in deeply religious communities, navigating gender transition, railing against systemic homophobia, and even lust-filled poetry about foreskins. Each page is proof that LGBTQ life isn’t just glitter and parades—it’s lived in small apartments, under repressive regimes, and in everyday struggles to love openly.

Campbell insists the goal was never to glamorize but to humanize. “I wanted to show real people, not beauty standards,” he says. That authenticity resonates loudly in a queer media landscape that often chases aesthetics over truth. It’s not just photography—it’s activism in print. By spotlighting men from “gay-friendly and not-so-gay-friendly” societies alike, Elska has become a defiant counterpoint to sanitized queer representation.

Why It Matters for LGBTQ Communities

For the LGBTQ community, Elska’s success is a reminder that representation doesn’t always mean red carpets and drag runways. Sometimes it means seeing yourself—your body type, your city, your unfiltered story—reflected on a page. That validation can be life-saving for queer people living in silence, repression, or invisibility.

In queer culture, where “perfection” is often idolized, Elska’s men are a revelation: beautifully ordinary, yet deeply magnetic. Their imperfections tell a bigger story—the story of a global community that is diverse, complex, and resilient. Elska’s retrospective proves that queer visibility doesn’t need to be glossy to be powerful. It just needs to be real.

And as Elska enters its second decade, it leaves us with a bold message: ordinary men are extraordinary. And their stories matter.