It's Our Birthday! Ask Us Anything At Our All-Day A+ Birthday Party!

Hello and welcome to our sixth birthday party! We are so pleased to be here with you!

Here’s how it works:

Below we’ve listed today’s question-answerers, in order of appearance. Rachel, Heather, Laneia and Riese will be around for most of the day, and everybody else is working in 2-3 hour chunks.
You can ask us anything — anything at all! The primary focus, we anticipate, will be advice questions. You can ask a specific person (by @-ing that person at the start of your question) or you can just ask something and see who we decide would be the best answer-er(s) of your question.
If you’d like to drop in a question for a specific person who won’t be around ’til later in the day, you can do that, and they’ll answer when they arrive.
We hope that you’ll ask us as yourself (Activity Streams have been disabled and you can also go to edit profile > settings > privacy to turn off activity streams on your profile) but if you need to ask anonymously, you can send a private message to @aplus-anon, who will then ask your question for you in the comments. But the team member running that account won’t be here ’til 1:30 PM EST / 10:30 AM EST, so if you ask a question before that, it might take a little longer.
If you’d like to embed a picture (like for fashion advice), please do! The HTML for that is very specific: <img src=”http://www.imageurl.jpg”> Mistakes people often make include: using curly quotes instead of smart quotes around the url, adding an unnecessary backlash after the URL, not including the http://.
As always, feel free to offer your own advice to anybody who asks us for advice! Often our readers are even better resources than we are. Talk to each other! Share your lives and loves. <3

By the way, all A+ members can get 20% off merch in the Autostraddle Store all day today, so get on it! The code is aplusbday6.

Here’s our running tally of how many A+ Members we have:

As of March 9th 9PM PST we have 1,124 Paid Members!

Rachel Kincaid, Managing Editor, Autostraddle.com

@internrachel

7 AM – 8 PM PST / 10 AM – 11 PM EST (with a lunch break)

Expertise: Basic budgeting and financial literacy, intense skincare regimens, pursuing a career in creative writing, teaching at the college level, bisexuality and dating/general wellbeing as a bisexual, legumes of all kinds, The X-Files, getting married/having a wedding

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor, Autostraddle.com

@heatherannehogan

7 AM – 7 PM PST / 10 AM – 10 PM EST (with a lunch break)

Expertise: Books, pop culture, depression, ad(h)d, christianity (general theology, reconciling faith with religious upbringing, super religious family), long-distance relationships (turned living-together relationship), women’s college basketball (I will fill out your march madness brackets), bicycle maintenance and repair, volunteering questions, animal questions (rescuing, training, etc.), and social media.

Yvonne Marquez, Senior Editor, Autostraddle.com

@yvonne

7 AM – 10 AM PST / 10 AM – 1PM EST

Expertise: Being gay and Latina, growing up and being gay in a border town / returning to that border town and still being gay, being in a long-term relationship, going through an extremely unpleasant break-up, working from home, taking care of a big dog, navigating white, radical spaces as a queer brown woman, being a chunky brown girl and giving no fucks about it (especially in yoga), talking about Texas forever!

Gabby Rivera, QPOC Speakeasy, Autostraddle.com

@ogfunkbandit

7 AM – 8 AM PST / 10 AM – 9 AM EST

Expertise: Interracial dating, boundaries, being muy romantic, dealing with a partner that has an addiction(s), sex w different body types

KaeLyn Rich, Contributing Editor, Autostraddle.com

@kaelynrich

7 AM – 10 AM PST / 10 AM – 1 PM EST

Expertise: Sex & sexuality, small animal care, grown up life shit (buying a house, finding a financial planner, leasing v. buying a car), “Should I go to law school?”, relationships, bisexual/pansexual/queer stuff, nonprofit career advice, IPV and sexual assault support, community organizing as hobby or career (coalition building, legislative advocacy, government relations, etc), leggings as pants affirmation, monolid makeup, veg food, clothes, and lifestyle, leadership & management, feminist careers, body positive / fat positive stuff including fatshion

Ali Osworth, Geekery Editor, Autostraddle.com

@alioh

8 AM – 10 AM PST / 11AM – 1PM EST

Expertise: Relationships, sex, technology and existing in an MFA program. Oh, and liquor!

Laneia Jones, Executive Editor, Autostraddle.com

@green

9 AM – 11 PM PST / 12 PM – 2 AM EST (with a lunch break)

Expertise: Parenting, being older than 30, feelings, 60s/70s classic rock, teen pregnancy, divorce, hippie bullshit, death

Vikki Reich, Co-Founder of VillageQ

@vikki

9 AM – 11 AM PST / 11 AM – 1 PM EST

Expertise: Relationships, kids, coming out stuff, life

Riese Bernard, Editor-in-Chief / CEO, Autostraddle.com

@riese

11 AM – 11PM PST / 2 PM – 2 AM EST (with a lunch break)

Expertise: Relationships, sex & dating, DEATH, writing & reading, starting your own business, sex work, mental health (personal history as well as experiences as a partner and family member, whatever your little heart desires)

Beth Maiden, Tarot Columnist, Autostraddle.com

@littleredtarot

11 AM – 2 PM PST / 2 PM – 5 PM EST

Expertise: Tarot, living in a tiny space, starting/running a just-you business

Mey Rude, Trans Editor, Autostraddle.com

@meyrude

11 AM – 1 PM & 3 PM – 4 PM PST / 2 PM – 4 PM & 6 PM – 7 PM EST

Expertise: Being fat, femme stuff (“especially low-budget femme”), Trans issues, Geeky (“if anyone has questions about sci-fi movies or tv shows or comic books or superheroes or things of that nature, I can talk for days about that stuff”), being Queer & Christian (“specifically Catholic.”) Also: witch stuff (“but not wicca, I’m not wiccan. but I am more than just an aesthetic witch, like my witchcraft is tied into my Mexican La Virgen-based semi-Catholicism, sort of like what was in the Gloria background story of OITNB, but not nearly as hardcore.”)

Dannielle Owens-Reid, Co-Founder of Everyone is Gay

@dannielleor

12 PM – 3 PM PST / 3 PM – 6 PM EST

Expertise: Relationships, cat care, andro / genderqueer shopping, healthy living, being vegan, how to use social media like not a dumbass

Kristin Russo, Co-Founder of Everyone is Gay

@kristinnoeline

2 PM – 3 PM PST / 5 PM – 6 PM EST

Expertise: Relationships, cat care, healthy living, dealing with a vegan, planning a wedding, writing a book, hula hooping, lip syncing, how to use social media like not a dumbass

Aja, Femme Fashion Icon

@fit-for-a-femme

2 PM – 5 PM PST / 5 PM – 8 PM EST

Expertise: Style, beauty, parenting, relationships, boundaries

Ginger Hale, Sobriety Columnist, Autostraddle.com

@gingerhale

8 PM – 9 PM PST / 5 PM – 6 PM EST

Ana Bel (aka “La Loba Loca“), Community organizer, Artist, Researcher, Writer, Body-powered tattooist, Midwife student and Eco-feminista

@lalobaloca

3 PM – 5 PM PST / 6 PM – 8 PM EST

Expertise: Decolonial food, reclaiming abuelita knowledge, ‘cultural’ Spanish, reproductive justice, abortion support and companionship, re-wording body parts and situations to better support people through reproductive lives, conscious mooning, healthy and delicious food and drinks, herbs and their uses, eco-feminism, how to survive academic institutions as a Queer Brown person, how to not be a complete privileged asshole

Lizz Rubin, Med Student & Former Autostraddle Fashion/Style Editor

@lizz

4 PM – 6 PM PST / 7 PM – 9 PM EST

Expertise: Fashion, Sex and Health

Mari Brighe, Contributing Editor, Autostraddle.com

@maribrighe

4 PM – 6 PM PST / 7 PM – 9 PM EST

Expertise: Skincare, hair-care, makeup, and sex/dating for trans girls

Laura Mandanas, Contributing Editor, Autostraddle.com

@laura-m

4 PM – 7 PM PST / 7PM – 10 PM EST

Expertise: Women in STEM, TV pop culture, mixed-race issues, martial arts, bisexuality

Tinkerbell, Autostraddle Mascot

@tinkerbell

4 PM – 8 PM PST / 7 PM – 11 PM EST

Expertise: Having one eyeball bigger than the other, Uh Huh Her, pink outfits, being famous, Littlefoot, trysexuality

Djuan Trent, Motivational speaker, Activist and former Miss Kentucky

@djuantrent

5 PM – 7PM PST / 8 PM – 10 PM EST

Expertise: Relationships, being single, Self-Esteem, Religion, Coming Out, Goal Setting and Achieving, Self-Awareness, Race Relations, Self Discovery and Identity.

Dani Rodriguez Da Silva, Sexuality Educator

@doubleornothing

5PM – 8PM PST / 8 PM – 11 PM EST

Expertise: Queer sex(ual health), gender (de)construction, relationships, living queerly as a Latin@. I can also give some advice on how to have a healthy, happy dog while working full time and living alone.