Afterellen.com is a swish and swanky site that brings you ‘news, reviews and commentary on lesbian and bisexual women in entertainment and the media’. Although the site is not affiliated with comedienne Ellen DeGeneres it does refer to the milestone for lesbians when DeGeneres publicly came out. This site and its partner site afterelton.com were bought by Logo (Viacom/MTV Networks) in 2006.  The site was originally started by Sarah Warn who is the editor-in-chief.

So that’s the background, what is the site like and what does it offer you? Well, taking a quick tour around it you’ll find that it’s neatly laid out and easy to navigate. You have ten major areas to investigate, from a blog to articles and every page contains something interesting or useful for lesbians and bisexual women.

On the day that I was looking at the site the blog had several interesting entries; there was a comment about the South Park episode D-Yikes, a video of Jodi Foster singing a French love song and news about ER and the Grey’s Anatomy spin off ‘Private Practice’ among other interesting things. The news stories and blog stay in the genre of the site in that the news is about TV and movies but everything has a lesbian or bisexual slant. The movies page has reviews of the latest releases as well as behind the scenes and associated articles and I found all of them well written, easy to read and informative. Sometimes it’s hard to stay reading on line for any length of time but not here, the texts kept me interested and were easy on the eye.

Everything is arranged neatly too and you will find some things on more than one page. For example, the interviews with celebrities and stars can be found on the People page as well as on the Movies page so, if an article or interview is relevant to more than one place, it will appear in both places; this ensures you don’t miss anything. The same goes for the books and music page, news about authors, publications and music are all here but you may also find the same article on the people or blog pages. This doesn’t mean the site is short on content and trying to fill out the pages though, it just means everything is well linked and easily available.

You will notice on the right of the pages that there is a log-in facility. You don’t have to, but you can, create a username and password and become and active member of afterellen.com. When you have registered, for free, you can create a small profile so other users will know something about you. Then you can post replies and comments on articles and interviews and really get involved. There is also a forum on the community page with topics covering all manners of interesting things; from creative writing to sex. Taking a quick look at the forum it appears well used with thousands of replies and posts and, if you want to know more about the other folk in there you can click their name and read their profile. It’s something you can really get involved in and, when you register, you will feel like you are part of an on-line community.

Which is basically what afterellen.com is, it’s a place where anyone who is lesbian, bisexual, straight or just interested can go and find out all the latest news from cinema to soaps but particularly news that concerns lesbian stars or characters. What’s more you can then join in and leave your own mark by making comments, posting in the forums and generally making yourself heard. There’s so much to see and do hear it’s hard to cover it all in a short space but go and take a look and you’ll see how fun and fab this site is.