Winq and Mate Magazines Pair Up

As the above announcement on the web site of Mate magazine notes, two of the nicest gay lifestyle magazines you can imagine have paired up, and it just might be that the only downside is that instead of two separate good non-adult gay magazines, we now will have only one. Apparently with the current issues, Germany's Mate magazine and the Dutch Winq magazine have merged, with the unified publication to be called Mate but carrying the Winq design (see above).

In the United States, we get only a quarterly version of Winq, which is published monthly or bi-monthly (I wasn't certain which) in Holland. We also have received the English-language edition of the German Mate, which has also been quarterly. Now, presumably, we will be the happy recipients of an English-language edition of the combined Mate.

I  would like to make this pitch to the publishers of the new Mate: First, please improve your distribution in the United States. Both magazines could be hard to find here. Trust me. I live in San Francisco, so if a gay magazine should be easy to find, this is the city for it. But I know of only a few places that carried the former version of Mate, and maybe six places that carried Winq. And if you subscribed to the old Winq, you would pay about twice the price that you would have paid if you purchased it at the newsstand. This is a market that the new Mate could conquer, but it has to be better represented in the States.

Second, please make it monthly.

I'm a fan of both magazines. They have produced high-quality, beautifully designed magazines that, I think, put to shame American gay magazines. Let us hope that together they continue the best traditions of both publications and don't become a muddle.