gal-dem‘s online edition is simple and striking in appearance. A brightly coloured menu bar stands in high contrast to a white background, and all text is rendered in an unfussy sans serif font. Each article or feature is listed in a tile format, and categorised by section (Culture, Life, Politics etc). The tiles are made up of photographs, cartoons or graphics related to each piece’s content, and form the online magazine’s main source of visual interest.

The print editions of gal-dem are glossy and colourful, and each issue features a photoshoot of people of colour, taken by an artist of colour. The cover of gal-dem‘s first print edition (the ‘gal-hood issue’, 2015) was a portrait of R&B singer Joyce Wrice by photographer Dana Washington-Queen. The second print issue, on the theme of ‘Home’ (2017), showed a photograph of South London musician Ray BLK taken by photographer Nadine Ijiwere. In 2017, Ijiwere became the first woman of colour to shoot a cover for Vogue. In 2018, the ‘Secrets’ print issue featured a dual cover, with a photograph by Kiran Gidda of Grammy-award winning musician NAO, and a photograph of R&B and pop singer Raveena by Mahaneela Choudhury-Reid.

The ‘un/rest’ 2019 issue featured literary stars Candice Carty-Williams, Mariam Khan, Naomi Shimada, Yasmin Rahman, Victoria Princewill, and Jay Bernard, shot for the cover by visual artist Nwaka Okparaeke. In 2020 they were not able to print a full magazine but shot four ‘community covers’ which were released as posters with accompanying interviews online, including Rina Sawayama by Nwaka Okparaeke. For one of these, Yossy Akinsanya photographed Nottingham East Labour MP Nadia Whittome. Further community covers were shot by Joanna Legid of rollerblader Oumi Janta; by Furmann Ahmed of Tobi Kyeremateng; and by Nicole Ngai of The Black Curriculum founder Lavinya Stennett.

The 2021 print issue, ‘The Roaring Twenties’, was shot by Mia Sakai, a photographer and editor-in-chief of the art and fashion magazine Aether. The 2022 print issue, ‘Utopia/Dystopia’, marked the first time gal-dem published an illustrated cover, by artist intranetgirl feat. singer-songwriter ABRA. The ‘Dystopia’ cover shows ABRA raising her arm up through ribbons of green code into a swirl of blue-white light or water, suggesting the figure of a cyborg-goddess. ‘Utopia’ layers bubbled molten orange across a rosy backdrop above a vivid pastoral scene centred around an old-fashioned phone box bearing the words ‘call-dem’, as if harking back to a time before smart phones.

[details derived from Precious Adesina, ‘What are all the gal-dem cover photographers up to now?’, gal-dem (21 October 2021) https://gal-dem.com/gal-dem-photographers/ ]

The general election of 2015 resulted in the formation of the first majority Conservative government since 1992, signalling a change in Britain’s political mood. Three years previously, Theresa May (then Conservative Home Secretary) had stated her party’s intention to create ‘a really hostile environment for illegal migration’, otherwise known as the hostile environment policy which introduced immigration controls into all walks of life and contributed to the Windrush scandal which came to light in 2018. In 2016, Britain voted to withdraw from the European Union (‘Brexit’), a result that divided the nation. gal-dem devoted much coverage to the debates that swirled around Brexit, especially the xenophobic rhetoric around immigration and ‘taking back our borders’. In 2017, Donald Trump was elected in the US, precipitating worldwide Women’s Marches to protest Trump’s misogynistic and racist policies and rhetoric. At the same time, a new youth movement gathered around Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow cabinet’s progressive, left-wing policies. This hopeful moment however ended in resounding defeat in 2019, with the election of the biggest Conservative majority since the 1980s. The following year saw the outbreak of a global pandemic and successive UK lockdowns which had a dramatic and adverse effect on independent media (as well as many other small businesses). A few months later, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests catalysed by the murder of George Floyd in the US spread across the Atlantic to the UK. gal-dem Culture Editor Kemi Alemoru has spoken of the dramatic effect the BLM protests had on gal-dem‘s visibility and sales (see episode 3 of the Liberating Histories podcast). But the effects of ‘black square summer’ (in reference to the black squares posted by mostly white social media users to indicate their allyship with BLM) were shortlived (see Ocran, 2023). In 2022, Rishi Sunak became the first person of colour to become prime minister in the UK. One of Sunak’s government’s flagship policies is the controversial Rwanda deportation bill which was finally passed by the UK parliament in April 2024. By the time gal-dem closed down in 2023, the media landscape was still 87% white and 54% male.

Over gal-dem‘s run, the editorial collective has included:

• Liv Little (founder)
• Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff (Editor-in-Chief)
• Moya Lothian-McClean (Politics Editor)
• Suyin Haynes (Head of Editorial)
• Kemi Alemoru (Culture Editor)
• Naomi Larsson Piñeda (Senior Editor, Politics)
• Charis McGowan (Music Editor-at-Large)
• Riann Phillip (Editorial Assistant)
• Shanice Dover (Head of social and Communications)
• Karis Pierre (Graphic Designer)
• Yasmin Rai (Memberships and Community Manager)
• Nadia Younes (Social Media Assistant)
• Bijal Shah (Head of Commercial)
• Eshter Hooper (Junior Commercial Producer)
• Rose Eskafi (Head of People and Operations)
• Antonia Odunlami (Music editor)
• Heather Barrett (Opinion editor)
• Varaidzo (Culture editor)
• Tara Joshi (Music editor)
• Micha Frazer-Carroll (First Person and Opinions editor)
• Leah Cowan (Politics editor)
• Diyora Shadijanova (First Person and Climate editor)
• Paula Akpan (Social media editor)
• Niellah Arboine (Lifestyle editor)

Stocked by the Tate gallery bookshops, Waterstones, Housmans’ Bookshop, the British Library, the ICA, Libreria, Mag Culture, South London Gallery, Biblioteka and ONCA. Initially gal-dem did the distribution themselves; later MMS became their distributor. 

gal-dem started out as a volunteer-led publication but became a professional business. In 2018, the magazine secured investment to hire a team of paid staff (six full-time and five part-time) with additional budget to pay freelance writers. gal-dem relied on revenue from brand partnerships, with over three-quarters of revenue coming from advertising (with brands including Glossier, Ace+Tate, and Penguin). When the global pandemic hit in 2020, gal-dem was significantly affected as advertising revenue fell dramatically, and branded events had to be cancelled. In response, gal-dem launched a monthly, tiered membership model which invited readers to support the magazine in exchange for free copies of print issues and invitations to exclusive events. The subscription model was intended to avoid the need for a paywall and to keep the magazine’s content accessible. In 2020, the BLM movement saw a surge of support for the magazine, with 1,700 new members joining over the space of three months, as well as a demographic shift in its readership with more white readers signing up. In addition to publishing print and digital editions, gal-dem hosted events and workshops with creative institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Boiler Room. In 2018, the gal-dem team guest-edited an issue of The Guardian‘s Weekend magazine; and in 2019 they released an anthology of writings by gal-dem contributors, ‘I Will Not Be Erased’: Our Stories About Growing Up As People of Colour (Walker Books). The gal-dem podcast, Growing up with gal-dem, was launched in 2020 and continued for 8 seasons (until March 2023). In its closing statement, the collective wrote that ‘the hard decision to close the business has come from difficulties we’ve faced in stabilising our position both financially and structurally. Keeping a small, independent media company that is reliant on partnerships afloat over the last three years has been increasingly challenging.’ [details derived from Bugel, 2023]

Inspired by gal-dem, Halima Jabril started her own zine Ashamed in 2019 (Jabril, 2023). gal-dem offered practical support and promoted the new zine. The publication Aurelia also received support and mentorship from gal-dem according to its founder Kya Buller (Jabril, 2023).

Sharan Dhaliwal, founder of Burnt Roti, and Amy Mae Baxter, founder of Bad Form, have also spoken about the support and inspiration offered by gal-dem (‘Feminist Print Revival!’, Liberating Histories podcast episode 6).

Continuing the magazine’s legacy of supporting the work of creatives of colour, one of gal-dem‘s parting gestures was to share the following list of fellow independent media and creative organisations based in the UK – you can find the list here: ’17 independent UK-based media organisations to support’.

‘Black British Feminism’ (2024) Liberating Histories podcast series, episode 3 <https://liberatinghistories.org/podcast-series/episode-3/>

Halima Jibril and Serena Smith (2023) “‘I owe them a hell of a lot”: the gal-dem community on its legacy’, Dazed (11 May) https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/59833/1/i-owe-them-a-hell-of-a-lot-the-gal-dem-community-on-its-legacy

Sofia Bugel (2023) ‘Gal-Dem, magazine for women and non-binary people of colour, to fold’, The Guardian (31 March) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/mar/31/gal-dem-magazine-for-women-and-non-binary-people-of-colour-to-fold

Nicole Ocran (2023) ‘Why Gal-Dem’s Closure Feels “Too Close To Home” For Black Creatives’, refinery29 (7 April) https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/gal-dem-closure-black-businesses

Vasta, Anisah and Luke Wolstenholme (2023) ‘Gal-dem closure: Magazine ‘was different to everything else we’d seen’, BBC Newsbeat (13 April) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-65239808

‘gal-dem magazine’ (2023) Early Day Motion, UK Parliament (17 April) https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/60788/galdem-magazine

Tara Kelly (2020), ‘gal-dem lost 75% of its revenue almost overnight. This is what it did to come back from it’, Medium (18 September) https://medium.com/we-are-the-european-journalism-centre/how-gal-dem-came-back-from-losing-75-of-its-revenue-due-to-the-pandemic-39980bfc71dd