Meg Ten Eyck

I attribute my success to all the women that came before me. I stand on the shoulders of mountains and legends in this industry, as well as in queer entrepreneurship in general. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the women who fought for equality and fought for our rights in a time where they were getting spit on - in the 1920s advocating for suffrage, and the 1960s advocating for the ERA, all of those kind of things. There have been so many incredible queer women, as well as straight women, who have really offered me a hand, guided me and mentored me along the way. I absolutely would not be able to be a female entrepreneur, let alone a queer female entrepreneur, in such a public, global way without the women who did the hard work and made it easy for me to do that.

At this point, the world changes every 5 years, and what is possible right now, and what is encouraged right now, may not be what is possible and encouraged in 5 years, or 10 years, or 20 years, so dream big and create the opportunity that you want to see.

We're losing micro-niche media as traditional media faces its downfall. The last magazine in North America, the amazing Curve magazine, closed its doors 3 years ago, and now it's limited to digital media - there's only two platforms left in North America, us and Autostraddle, and only one traditional magazine left, which is Diva Magazine in the UK. We're losing information and those rigorous editorial standards of ensuring that information is accurate. Understanding the scope of this phenomenon is incredibly important, especially when you're a marginalized community and the conversations are built around things like safety and legality and policy and social acceptance. Those conversations have to come from our community, for our community. When there's a lack of funding and a lack of opportunities but there's a demand from the audience, it's creating a really unique context where our community is screaming for these things, but funders aren't meeting the community where they're at. There's also a large hole in the lesbian travel industry that stems from issues with women entrepreneurship in general - women couldn't even get a business loan without a male co-signer until recently. The root of homophobia is misogyny, and that vacuum has been created despite there being a need for it, because funding often comes from older, straight, white men who can't possibly picture what the needs of a dual-woman household would be.