Happy New Year! We sincerely hope your 2019 is filled with good health, positive community building, and the continued fight for justice and equality.

Here at Our Lives, we had a bumpy end to the year: Our website suffered what was determined to be a targeted malware attack that took us out of commission for two days. By the time the dust cleared and we were able to work with our web tech support, site host, and security to get us back on solid ground, we’d lost a significant amount of time (as well as access to needed resources). It means the new issue release will be somewhat delayed.

We sincerely apologize for this, and greatly appreciate your patience – we promise it’ll be worth it! The January/February issue is chalk-full of engaging, informative, and fun content – including our annual LOVE LIST that features hundreds of your LGBTQ love stories from all across the state.

The final PDF version of the new issue will be available to read and download by this weekend (Jan. 5). Keep an eye on our website and social media. We will also be moving up the timeline for adding individual articles to the website to early next week.

The print edition will be significantly more delayed, but we will give an update as soon as we have one.

Looking forward

2018 was a year filled with significant highs and lows for our publication – our office door was vandalized, we lost a few subscribers and supporters over our coverage of controversy over police at Pride in Madison (and gained others), and then ended with a nasty malware attack on the website.

In 2019, we’ll be working hard on new and better ways of sharing more timely news and stories with the community, as well as a variety of other efforts to help build bridges and connections. We’ll also be humbling ourselves to ask for different modes of support to keep us up and running. That will include more robust security, too!

Through it all, we continue to learn and grow, and to be enormously grateful for everyone who has contributed to Our Lives over the years, in one form or another–whether that’s by sharing your stories with us, or just picking up a copy to read. We look forward to being even a small part of Wisconsin’s diverse, incredible LGBTQ+ community for years to come.

-Emily Mills (Editor) & Patrick Farabaugh (Publisher)