by Chris Azzopardi
(Chris Azzopardi is the executive editor of Pride Source, publisher of Between The Lines. The following Letter From The Editor first appeared in the magazine’s October 2026 issue and appears here with permission.)

I remember where I first found Between The Lines.

I was a kid from Canton, pretty freshly out, when I first got my hands on a copy. I don’t remember what was on the cover. I don’t remember the headline, What I remember is smaller than that, and bigger than that: photos from Pride with people holding flags like it was nothing and gay-owned businesses listed plainly, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

I remember feeling something shift.

Other people like me existed. I hadn’t known that, not really — not in a way I could point to. And here it was, printed mostly in black and white, free for the taking.

This was before you could find a whole community with a few taps on a phone. A stack of newspapers on a coffee shop counter could feel like stumbling onto something almost secret — a door you didn’t know was there, cracked open just enough to see through to a life that might someday be yours.

I didn’t walk through that door myself until years later. I was 23 when I took a job at that same newspaper and, without fully realizing it, became part of the thing that made me feel more at home with myself.

I have now spent 20 years inside Between The Lines, which means I have spent nearly half my life with a publication that was already part of my life before I ever worked here. I’ve watched it evolve, watched the community change and have had the extraordinary privilege of helping tell some of its stories along the way.

I’ve interviewed pop stars I once considered heroes, sat across from politicians and activists, and talked with countless Michiganders whose names you may never have heard but whose stories mattered just as much. Through all of it, the question underneath the work has remained remarkably simple: Can we make someone feel seen? Can we make someone feel a little less alone?

For 33 years, Between The Lines has arrived on newsprint. You’ve folded us. Stacked us. Carried us home. Left us on coffee tables and picked us up at coffee shops, community centers, bars, bookstores and wherever else queer Michigan gathers. You’ve read us for the news, but you’ve also used us to find people, places, ideas and, sometimes, a little bit of yourself.

Our first glossy issue isn’t really a leap. It’s an arrival. Because independent queer news isn’t confined to just a newspaper you pick up anymore. It’s everywhere, all the time, on every screen, gone as fast as you can scroll past it. We wanted to make something different. Something that sits on your coffee table long enough that a friend picks it up while they’re waiting for you to find your keys, flips it open and sees somebody who looks like them.

And yet, in some of the most important ways, it hasn’t changed at all.

There is still a kid somewhere looking for that secret door. Still someone who needs to know they’re not the only one. Still an ever-evolving community whose stories deserve to be told — carefully, boldly, beautifully and through our own voices.

So this isn’t goodbye to the newspaper I found all those years ago. It’s a thank-you for the door it opened.

Now we’re building a bigger one. Welcome to what comes next.

GUEST COMMENTARY
Volume 28
Issue 9