Bretonne by birth, Parisian by adoption, Lauriane Nicol founded the online media outlet Lesbien Raisonnable in 2017. First in the form of a newsletter and an internet site, which she enhanced in 2018 with an Instagram account where she now counts 32,000 subscribers. The 34-year-old sees these tools as both a cultural medium and a relay for feminist struggles. "I can't help being an activist, it's in my DNA. Lesbians have always been involved in feminist struggles."
A supporter of Adèle Haenel since the actress revealed to Mediapart in November 2019 that she had been sexually assaulted as a child, marking the start of cinema's #MeToo, Nicol was present, along with several feminist associations, on December 9 and 10 outside the Paris Correctional Court, where director Christophe Ruggia was on trial for these facts.
With the release of Céline Sciamma's Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), an ode to lesbian love starring Haenel and Noémie Merlant, Lesbien Raisonnable acquired a strong following in late 2019. Nicol became the leader of Portrait Nation, an online community of fans built around the film and its references. She tattooed herself "Page 28" in homage to one of the final scenes.
The craze around the film, which received 10 nominations at the César awards, took a political turn in February 2020. As the Best Director award went to Roman Polanski's J'accuse (An Officer and a Spy), rewarding a film director convicted by American courts of having sex with a minor, Haenel left the Salle Pleyel shouting "Shame! Bravo pedophilia!" Lesbien Raisonnable shared the scene on social media.
Calling herself a "born this way" – in other words, a "born lesbian" – Nicol has long felt the "tragedy of building herself without a role model." Hurt by the invisibilization of lesbians and caricatured representations – such as that of French tennis player Amélie Mauresmo in the early 2000s – she thought about what she was missing: a light-hearted medium, like the women's press, with which she could identify. First thought of as a people magazine of sorts, Lesbien Raisonnable is now closer to a classic cultural review. "A question of age surely," Nicol joked.
When she's not at La Mutinerie, a lesbian bar in Paris's Marais district, this "proud Sagittarius" is busy with her projects. In 2025, she intends to create an online platform dedicated to lesbian films and launch a prize for authors of contemporary lesbian literature. She also hopes to publish a sequel to her print magazine, whose first issue, with Sciamma on the cover, had a print run of 1,500 copies in September 2023, following a crowdfunding campaign. A member of the LGBT Journalists Association, this obsessive fan of The L Word series or director Rebecca Zlotowski is proud to present herself today as a journalist, specializing in lesbian news.