ON Magazine

OutNow Newsmagazine, also known as ON and ON Magazine is a monthly lifestyle magazine that targets lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members of the gay community in the San Francisco Bay Area. OutNow has been published since 1992 from its headquarters in San Jose, California in the Silicon Valley.

Every month the magazine has a different content focus such as health, relationships, home improvements, weekend getaways, Pride, sports, arts and entertainment, business and more. OutNow also features interviews with politicians, business leaders and actors. OutNow has a high non-gay readership for a gay publication since it also reports on culture, business, politics and housing topics that are ignored by other local press. The publisher estimated that two-thirds of the publication's events were not LGBT-specific so anyone could find the listings useful.

Since the magazine has stories about local theater, events, politics, housing and culture, it also attracts non-LGBT readers. In online surveys conducted by the magazine, 23 percent of the readers identify as heterosexual. An electronic version of the magazine is offered on its website, along with daily news updates, blogs, feature stories on health, travel, sports and more. The calendar is the most popular section on the website, along with a business directory. As of 2004 over 5,000 copies of the online version were downloaded each month.

OutNow sponsors many community events, such as singles night at a downtown restaurant and bar, receptions at local theater performances and after work professional networking events at Silicon Valley companies. And the magazine partners with organizations such as the Silicon Valley Gay Men’s Chorus and San Jose Pride to help promote the event and magazine. The annual San Jose Pride guide is printed as part of the June edition. In 2006 they made news by refusing to print a letter from then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for his vetoing a progay marriage bill in 2005. Many LGBT publications dropped the letter.

With more than 300 distribution sites, thousands of subscriptions and the online magazine there are an estimated 30,000 or more readers in the region that includes Silicon Valley/San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Cruz areas.

In 2009 OutNow's subscription list was incorporated into a plotline of an LGBT thriller novel Gaph 2: The Reader by author B. Alan Bourgeois.