Erotic Review ‘moving away from the male gaze’ with 80% female contributors | Books

Literary magazine the Erotic Review has relaunched “with the explicit aim of moving away from the male gaze” and a view to showcase “more diverse and inclusive explorations of desire”.

The magazine, which publishes essays, short stories, poetry, art and reviews that take a literary approach to desire, was established in 1995 as a monthly newsletter for the publisher Erotic Print Society. It has previously featured prominent contributors including Sarah Waters, Damien Hirst and Boris Johnson.

After 14 years of being online-only, the Erotic Review relaunched as a print magazine in March, with editor Lucy Roeber at its helm. The new version of the magazine is published biannually, and Issue 2 is predominantly about female desire. Women will make up 80% of the contributors to the issue, out in October, while 35% come from the LGBTQ+ community. The magazine has a global focus, too, with contributors’ nationalities ranging from Dominican to Chinese to Swedish, and three of the pieces being translated works.

“We want each issue of the Erotic Review to live on the shelf a little differently, each one reflecting and responding to the writing and art within its pages,” said Roeber. “This second issue has opened my eyes to how very individual each one will be; there are infinite paths to explore when it comes to our desires.”

The October issue will also feature one of the last written works by the author John Burnside, who died in May. His essay about the eroticism of transit tells the story of a journey the writer took with a lover in the 1970s as remembered during a visit to Finland in the summer of 2023. “Over the last few decades I have become heavy, inelegant, occasionally cumbersome, but being here, for this few days, has reminded me there is another side to me, a side that is more graceful, less plodding, even if, at the same time, it is so elusive as to be almost fictional,” he wrote.

The relaunched Erotic Review is pitching itself as “a high-end printed product”, created for “an intelligent contemporary audience, to reflect a society that is now much more curious, experimental and open about the desires that drive us.” The magazine is available in more 50 independent shops and galleries around the world.