Friends, homos, countrymen, it is my pleasure to announce that, as of 5:41 PM Eastern Standard Time, The Niche has garnered one million hits. What began as a website for five people has blossomed into something much grander. Friendships have been forged. Graduate degrees have been completed. Romances have bloomed. Hearts have been broken. Pants have been peed. Gay teenagers around the world have begun to class themselves as Absolute Nightmares and Sweaterboys.

And, perhaps most important of all, Robert Sean Leonard has become the Pope.

When we launched this website in late February of 2017, as a joke, we did not anticipate any of this. We could not have foreseen the wild hijinks that were to come, nor how these hijinks would permanently alter the course of our lives. For the winding stream of adventure that has transpired over the past twenty-ish months, we have you to thank, dear readers. You and your inexplicable love of gay American Girl dolls and gay mice and gay Gilmore Girls. You’re the greatest. We love you.

Finally, on just a slightly more serious note: in the not-even-four years since I first started publishing my work online, the entire ecosystem for entry-level freelance writers has utterly collapsed. I owe so much to the editors who took a chance on my dumb ass back when I was a 21-year-old with nary a clip and no professional experience. But if I were just starting out today, I don’t know where I’d go. I don’t know how I’d begin to build a career. In recent years, we’ve mourned the passing of many an iconic website — shout-out, especially, to The Toast, to Daniel Ortberg, and to Nicole Cliffe, to whom we are forever indebted — and we’ve seen online publishing skew, increasingly, toward older, more experienced writers, writers who possess stuff like “money” and “connections.” Here at The Niche, we think that sucks ass.

And so we are trying, in our own small way, five people or one million people at a time, to bring a smidge of that culture back. To give new writers a chance to flex. To shine a flashlight of love into the bleak caverns of tomorrow. To publish silly bullshit for the sake of publishing silly bullshit, because the world is on fire and the skies are turning grey and we all deserve some gay nonsense to get us through the murk.

To our readers, and our contributors, and all of our friends: we love you, and we’re so grateful you helped us turn this website for five people into a website for a million people. Thank you for believing in our nest. Have a wonderful day.

XOXO,

The Niche

P.S. If you’re new here, you may want to check out some of our all-time greatest hits:

1. American Girl Dolls Ranked in Order of Gayness
2. The 100 Most Popular Ships on AO3, Ranked
3. Sixteen Songs That Will Trigger Your Fight or Flight Response When You Hear Them in Public, Provided You’ve Read Homestuck
4. Seven Pictures of Judith Butler Ranked By How Inadequate They Make Me Feel
5. All 293 Sufjan Stevens Songs, Ranked
6. HTB (Helen “Troy” Bolton), or High School Lesbian Musical
7. I Went Ahead and Wrote A Spider-Man Movie Where Peter Parker is Bisexual Because Life is Short and God Knows Nobody Else Was Going to Do It
8. What is “The Dynamic,” Anyway?
9. Quiz: Which Half of The Dynamic Are You?
10. A Comprehensive List of All 160 Things Ira Madison III Has Said “Keep It” About
11. The Top Ten Most Iconic Lesbian TV Couples of All Time, and Keep in Mind We’re Working With A Pretty Loose Definition of “Iconic”
12. Ode to Emmy Hartman, the Girl Who Filmed Her Own Emotional Breakdown Over A Traffic Ticket
13. Let’s Scroll Through John Mulaney and Annamarie Tendler’s Instagrams While Listening to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys Until We All Have Emotional Breakdowns
14. Seven Mitski Lyrics That Will Make You Yearn for the Touch of Another Human Being, Literally Anyone, Oh My God I’m So Lonely
15. Hey Gays, Here’s Truman Capote’s Hardcore Gay Screenplay of The Great Gatsby (For Real This Time)
16. Hey Pee Head: A Niche Interview with the Two Fifteen-Year-Olds Behind the Max2019 Alternate Reality Game
17. Nine Plucky Tomboy Heroines Who Made You the Butch Lesbian or Transmasc Icon You Are Today
18. Six Homoerotic Promotional Photos for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia That Are Better Than All the Sex I’ve Ever Had
19. Top Ten Hate Crimes Committed By Gilmore Girls Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino
20. A Conservative High School Production of Angels in America Where They Can’t Say AIDS So All the Characters Have Diabetes Instead
21. Y’all Mind If I Drink A Whole Thing of Raspberry Lemonade Vodka and Yell About Twin Fantasy?