Submission Window: July 1st – August 1st, 2022
Payment: Short Story-2,500 words or less. $0.01 USD per word/$25 USD max, Poems-less than 200 words $10, Flash Fiction-less than a 1,000 words $0.01 USD per word/$10 USD max
Theme: Dark Shadows: The Gay 90s; closeted, cast out, or converted.

The Last Girls Club Magazine is a quarterly feminist horror magazine that publishes international short stories and poems from the female gaze. It is an homage to the scary comics and zines of the late 20th century.

This season’s theme is Dark Shadows: The Gay 90s; closeted, cast out, or converted. This issue is dedicated to my dear friend Paul, who died of cirrhosis in ’00s. We worked the graveyard shift together at a Texas gas station in the 90s. The stories he shared with me of growing up gay in the South, with a deeply religious emotionally scarred mother broke my heart. The 80s Satanic Panic led to a religious fervor that cast a long shadow over society and personal freedoms.

If you lived it, you know exactly what I’m referring to: the friends on the streets in their early teens, the weird homophobic rants of priests and relatives, the amazing clubs and hangouts hidden in seedy alleys that were occasionally raided by truckloads of skinheads or rednecks, sometimes cops looking for “underage drinking”, the disgusting older repressed trolls who paid for oral in the dark, while in the daylight stood in government buildings and expounded on family values and morality, the overall perception that AIDS was a punishment for sin not a disease/pandemic that should be addressed. That is the backdrop for our stories in the Fall issue. Paul loved Rosemary’s Baby, the Wizard of Oz, and Dark Shadows. If you manage to insert a swanky older Euro trash cousin that pops in wearing a cape, I’m sure he’d love it wherever he is.

This is to preserve a moment in time, to memorialize the ones that fought to make things better, and celebrate the ones who survived and their continued existence.

• No more than two fiction stories per author per submission period.
• Fiction is limited to 2,500 words or less.
• Flash fiction must be under 1,000 words, no more than two from an author.
• No more than three poems per poet.
• Poems are limited to 200 words or less for each poem.
• I prefer to use PayPal to pay authors, but will work with authors where PayPal is not available.
• Nonfiction columns will must be pitched to editor in chief before submission. Email your idea to [email protected]

Via: Last Girls Club Duotrope.