Elska is an intriguing bi-monthly British based queer bookazine that focuses on Local Boys + Local Stories   Each issue is shot in a different city, and as we have said before what queerguru loves about Elska is the fact that the images of some real looking men of all shapes and sizes that fill their pages are local boys and not models, or celebrities. All of them are photographed in the streets and in their homes, in their own clothes and style, or nude, which in our book makes them hotter than hell.  

The ninth and latest edition has been dedicated to Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city.  Editor Liam Campbell writes that for the first time he had some difficultly finding men willing to participate as the city’s gay community are more conservative and closed up than most.  In the end, however, with lots of persistence and hard graft he did find enough local boys to participate, and the result is a fascinating range of men of varying ages, body types, races, and styles, and as  Yokohama is actually a very multicultural city, the local boys include expats from China, Vietnam, Brazil, and the USA.

As usual each of the men also wrote a story to accompany their photo-spread, and so the  issue includes a mix of coming out stories, tales of broken hearts, accounts of not fitting in, and an absolutely epic and almost uncomfortably explicit confessional essay about a student’s affair  with his much older professor.

Elska  was once described as “part intellectual queer pin-up mag and part sexy anthropology journal“, which we totally agree with.   You can buy a print or digital version at https://elska-magazine.myshopify.com/collections/elska-magazine-print  or at any of their worldwide stockists http://www.elskamagazine.com/stockists.  Meanwhile here is a few of ur favorites from the Yokohama issue.