I Went to a NY Times Panel On Same-Sex Marriage And This is What Happened

photo by SARA KRULWICH for The New York Times

Following New York’s Marriage Equality victory this past July, there’s been a lot of excitement and reflection. On October 18th, The New York Times took up this topic in a panel discussion about the road leading up to the legalization of same-sex marriage. I was there, and I took sporadic, auto-corrected notes on my iPad which I will now attempt to interpret and share with you.

The Place: Conference room at the New York Times building. Filled with gays in suits, lesbians in boots, journalists and political players.

The Food: They had these delicious warm chocolate chip cookies! Totally unexpected but greatly appreciated.

Panelists: Governor Andrew Cuomo (Hilarious and charismatic), Christine Quinn (Well-Spoken Speaker of the NYC Council, power lesbian), James Alesi (lovable Republican State Senator — one of the four senators to change their vote to allow for the passage of the law, a risky career move for a Republican but also one he proudly called “the best vote he ever cast.”) and Bruce Gyory (professor, political consultant and statsitcs guy)

Moderators: Michael Barbaroo and Carolyn Ryan of The New York Times.

The Details: Governor Cuomo began the discussion by congratulating The Times on their impactful and comprehensive coverage of the issue. He pointed out that although he’s generally been very critical of The Times in the past, he also speaks frequently on the basic importance of journalism and keeping people educated on the issues. When asked how the tide shifted leading up to the law’s passing, he answered that it was “the people” who brought about the shift in the Senate. “Move the people, move the politicians.”

When asked what was the most compelling argument against same-sex marriage he’d heard, Cuomo said there weren’t any — in his opinion, there’s no argument against same-sex marriage that holds any weight or makes any sense. He added that for many of the senators against same-sex marriage, they began to see that it was simply an issue of equality and if they were against it, they were against equal rights for all people. Cuomo now feels that the passage of the law in New York will lead to the increasingly valid question of a politician’s stance on same-sex marriage in any campaign race. He said on a personal level that he was really excited just to see New Yorkers reacting to the law’s passing.

Christine Quinn is a lesbian and therefore holds the most personal position when it came to the bill. Quinn said she grew up never expecting gay marriage to become legal. While championing the bill, Quinn recalls speaking to senate members about her own personal experience of wanting to be married — she and her partner both lost their mothers and have aging fathers who they want to attend their wedding. She spoke to “on-the-fence” politicians about the idea of having to wait to obtain rights to which all citizens should be entitled.

She attributes much of the success of the campaign for marriage equality with the involvement of the business community and hopes to help other localities replicate what they did in New York. For Quinn, the main issues currently on the forefront of the New York GLBT agenda are gender identity discrimination, bullying and hate crimes.

Alesi’s first time voting against same-sex marriage was a very hard thing for him to do. Some say his dramatic answer proves that he was conflicted about his decision.

Alesi joked that maybe he could get a SAG membership and then followed up by admitting to the audience that he’d always known voting against marriage equality was wrong, but he’d always been a part of the political game, too, which prevented him from seeing clearly. After he voted no in 2009, he promised himself never to vote no again. Since Alesi’s “yes” vote was crucial in passing marriage equality, he’s lost a lot of support from the Republicans. NOM has even put up billboards shouting, “James Alesi, You’re Next” implying his career in the New York Senate is doomed.

But for Alesi, doing what was right was worth the risk. In that video above he says that although he lost a lot of political allies and friends, he gained a lot of new friends, too. Alesi is Catholic and says that although personally he doesn’t support abortion, he’s always been pro-choice because abortion is a “civil right, not a religious issue.” He feels marriage is also a legal issue and should be treated as such. Religious, but far from narrow-minded, the Senator belongs to Spiritus Christi Church which was excommunicated for ordaining a female priest.

Gyory, a professor and pollster, spoke about the dramatic rise in acceptance of gay marriage around the country.  He also touched on the fact that money for effective advertisements has helped the shift in thought, specifically for white Catholic women in the suburbs.

All in All: A successful event!

Autostraddle Live!: Come to My NYU Panel “Queer My Blog”

an example of me on a panel

Hi! What does it mean to be on a panel called “Queer My Blog“? I’m going to find out, and you should come find out with me!

Where: NYU Kimmel Student Center (Room 906), 60 Washington Square South

When: October 7th at 7pm (should run for about two hours, they will be the best two hours of your life)

Who: Me of Autostraddle.com, Morgan W. and Ryann Holmes from BklynBoihood.com (we interviewed them a while back), and Danielle Owens-Reid and Kristin Russo of EveryoneIsGay.com.

Who Can Come: It’s FREE, OPEN to the public and wheelchair accessible.

What: NYU Pride Month is proud to host the Queer My Blog panel event, featuring panelist who represent the most popular independent queer blogs on the internet. Moderated by student blogger Sophia House, Queer My Blog is an interactive panel that takes a look at the role online blogs have in shaping 21st century queer identities and how digital space can serve as a site of cultural production. Panelists will take us through a tour of their online community, engage in a dialogue on the intricacies of the online world and what it takes to run a successful queer website with a pertinent presence in the online and offline LGBTQ communities. Our guests for the evening include Riese Bernard of Autostraddle.com, Morgan W. and Ryann Holmes from BklynBoihood.com, and Danielle Owens-Reid and Kristin Russo of EveryoneIsGay.com.

We’re looking for blog-nerds and digital enthusiasts as well as anyone who just enjoys intelligent, funny, and engaging panelists. The audience will be able to ask questions all night long, so don’t be shy!

 Will there be Jell-O wrestling? I don’t know. You will have to RSVP on the Facebook Page to make me feel really positive and popular about the whole thing and then we’ll go from there.

Win Tickets to DeAnne Smith’s Girl-on-Girl-on-Girl Comedy Show!

Remember when DeAnne Smith promised to come to your North American town and make you laugh? She wasn’t kidding. In fact, she’ll be in Boston this Sunday! And she won’t be alone. Jess Solman will be there too! Who is jess Solman you may be asking yourself. Well, the website describes Jess as a “war crimes lawyer-turned-comic.” Who wouldn’t pay money just to hear how that happened.

But here is the thing. Not ALL of you will have to pay said money. Because you, yes YOU, are super special unicorns and DeAnne loves your avatars so much she wants to give away FREE tickets to some crazy lucky Autostraddlers.

But before we get to all that here’s the info for the show:

Girl on Girl on Girl Comedy Show
Sunday, October 2nd @ 8:30pm
$10 in advance, $15 at the door
OBERON
(The Second Stage of the American Repertory Theater)
2 Arrow Street
Cambridge, MA

Some of you won’t be paying $15 or $10 or even $1. You will be paying $0 for a night of unparalleled hilarity! Here is where I tell you how to get free tickets. Are you paying attention? Good.

TO WIN FREE DOUBLE PASSES TO THE GIRL-ON-GIRL ON GIRL COMEDY SHOW

1. E-mail DeAnne at comideanne [at] gmail [dot] com

IT’S THAT SIMPLE.

The first five people to e-mail her will win a double pass! That means you can take your girlfriend or the girl you want to be your girlfriend or really anybody who likes to laugh. And if you are a straggler who is reading this on Sunday morning and thinking “damn, I bet five people have already e-mailed her,” you should probs e-mail her anyway. People like getting mail.

Even if you aren’t one of the lucky few, you can get more info and buy tickets at the OBERON website or call 866-811-4111. Then comeback here on Monday and gloat about how great the show was.

‘110 Stories’ to Benefit the New York Says Thank You Foundation

Intern Bren’s Team Pick:

This weekend marks 10 years since September 11, 2001. To commemorate that date and benefit the New York Says Thank You Foundation, a star-studded performance of 110 Stories by playwrite Sarah Tuft is taking place tonight and if you’re in the NYU area, you should go.

The New York Says Thank You Foundation is a non-profit organization that sends hundreds of volunteers from New York along with disaster survivors from around the country to help rebuild communities around the United States recovering from disaster. They’re all about turning a negative into a positive. From their website:

It’s our way of saying “Thank You” for all the love and support Americans from across the country extended to New Yorkers in the days, weeks, and months following September 11.

Sarah Tuft gathered stories of people in healing, who were dealing with the tragedy through storytelling, and created 110 Stories. The play will be performed by celebrities you probably enjoy, like Samuel L. Jackson and Kathleen Turner, to name a few. Stephen Baldwin’s in it too, but if you squint really hard and cover your ears you can pretend like its Alec.

So we know the Who and the What, let’s get to the When and the Where. This thing is going down at the NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts at 8 pm sharp. You can get your tickets online or call the box office at (212) 352-3101.

For more info on the play, the stories and the cause check out their website or follow them on the twitter. Or you can support the Foundation directly if you are so inclined.

First Lesbian Take-Over of Las Vegas for Gay Pride: Join Autostraddle at Shedonism

It’s not often that we Autostraddlers put our computers and books aside to venture out into the big bad world of nightlife culture, but there are certainly a few occasions a year that warrant such an indulgence.

Hey! Speaking of INDULGENCE! We’re heading to Shedonism in Las Vegas! It’s a new and very highly-anticipated gay women’s event happening in Sin City for one weekend this September.

I’m going to give you the details for this awesome event and if you like what you see, head over to the Shedonism website for all the information and most importantly: tickets.

Everything at Shedonism over the weekend of September 15th-19th happens at one place: Rumor Hotel, which makes things exponentially more convenient. (Which is great ’cause I’m lazy.) Additionally, the hotel’s popular Addiction restaurant, under the creative direction of Food Network Star finalist Vic “Vegas” Moea, hosts the Gluttony Brunch. Rooms start at $99. (Which is great ’cause I’m poor.)

So Who’s Going?

Cast of Autostraddle characters going to Shedonism, Las Vegas: Alex, a waffle fry, Sarah (licking) Jessica, and Sara.

Let’s meet the Autostraddle respresentatives — and hopefully, some of you will grab your tickets and decide to join us there for what will be a fantastic weekend to be a big gaymo:

Alex Vega (me!): Design Director and co-founder of this website. Originally from New York, I now live in Los Angeles (for 10 months now) with my two roommates and I have had a healthy (or ‘unhealthy’ depending on who you ask) dose of gay nightlife here. I like this town. Like, a lot.

Plan of attack? Dance. And hit up the “Gluttony Brunch” on Sunday. Duh.

Sarah Croce: My roommate. You might recognize her as Autostraddle’s Miss April 2011. Sarah co-wrote and edited this amazing webseries that we stream right here on Autostraddle called Unicorn Plan-It and I love it and she’s talented as hell.

Plan of attack? Croce’s a jack of all trades. And by “all trades” I mean “women”. You may find that a good strategy when going out on the town with one Sarah Croce is to hang around and catch any women that fall off her like one of those scavenger fish that swim under sharks.

Sara Medd: My roommate again. Fashion Stylist to the Stars. Sara, in collaboration with Robin Roemer, produced and styled the Autostraddle Calendar Girls photo shoots for 2011 and 2012.

Plan of attack? She knows the gay night scene in Los Angeles like the back of her hand, so she’ll be our Captain to navigate Shedonism in Las Vegas. She always wears heels that defy gravity they’re so fucking high, and sometimes-slash-often gets some sort of drunken injury while partying. So. That should make this interesting.

Jessica S.: My girlfriend! The sweetest of sweethearts, and I’m not just saying that because I sleep with her at night. She helps me out with a lot of things w/r/t this website, like filling out orders and reminding me to email people back. She’s also an upcoming 2012 Calendar Girl, and she’s from Virginia and like the rest of us: really gay.

Plan of attack? To stay out of the sun. Homegirl is white as hell. Otherwise, she’ll keep up with the rest of us. As long as someone doesn’t spill a drink on her. #notafan

Check it:

“Shedonism is slated to be Vegas’ largest and longest lesbian party. It’s a sure bet the desert doesn’t get any hotter! Scheduled in conjunction with the annual Las Vegas Pride parade and festival, this inaugural sin-fest heralds a new Vegas lesbian tradition. As thousands of women are expected to indulge, Shedonism vows to put the “wild” back in the West.”

DJ Lisa Pittman has been one of the main organizers of Shedonism. She says: “We’re giving a voice and platform to women for the first time in Las Vegas. … It’s gonna be pretty historic.”

What’s Happening?

The roster includes: a welcome bash, three dance parties, two all-afternoon pool parties, the first Official Las Vegas Pride Dyke March, a lesbian celebrity charity poker tournament to benefit the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and a sumptuous brunch. A $99 pass grants access to all events. Guests can also purchase a la carte.

We’re pretty excited to be going.
Get your tickets. We really hope to see many of you there! #lesbianhoteltakeover

Celebrate Labor Day and Homosexuality at DYKEadence in New Orleans

INTERN BREN’S TEAM PICK:

For the past 40 years, something super special has been happening in New Orleans on Labor Day weekend: Southern Decadence, a ‘round the clock street party that lasts for days. Southern Decadence has been described as “Gay Mardi Gras,” which is saying a lot ’cause regular Mardi Gras seems pretty freakin’ gay. I mean, sparkly jewelry, parades, glitter. All that stuff is in our wheelhouse. And THIS is gonna be even gayer than THAT.

via southerndecadence.net

As you can probs gather from the picture above, Southern Decadence has historically focused on the “G” in LGBTQ. Maybe the “Q” has gotten a little love, but it’s mostly all about the “G” with a majority of the events and parties geared toward gay men. This is where Dkyeadence comes in — 2011 marks the 3rd annual Dykeadence celebration. Don’t let the name fool you. These events aren’t just for, well, dykes. The goal of Dykeadence is to entertain all people no matter where they fall along the Kinsey Scale, what gender they identify as or the color of their skin.

via facebook.com/dykeadence

I’m Going to Manchester Gay Pride!

by kev_bite on flickr

Did you know that Manchester is the most fabulous place to travel with all your friends and family, forever and ever and for always? Well, consider yourself informed because because on the 25th of August Marketing Manchester will send me flying across the fantastic sky with American Airlines, the best airline in the universe, all the way from San Francisco to the United Kingdom for a Manchester Pride Press Trip.

Once ashore, I’ll be staying at the Ramada Manchester Piccadilly, which I believe is the greatest hotel of all time.

But most of all I’m thrilled to be attending the Absolute Bestest Pride celebration in the entire galaxy, Manchester Pride!  I’m so excited I’m in danger of falling off this chair and dying with my head in a bowl of macaroni & cheese! I wore my bike helmet to the laundromat! I haven’t thought about the riots all day! But if I had thought about the riots today, I would’ve thought about how the day after the festival, Festival Director Jackie Crozier said: “Manchester Pride will be going ahead”  because “we have a job to do: we owe it to our ticket buyers, friends, supporters and receivers of our funding to both put on a fantastic festival and raise money for deserving causes… I look forward to seeing you all at this year’s Manchester Pride 2011 to celebrate all of the wonderful things about our beautiful city. Manchester is as strong as we are because we are strong together.”

My hyperbolic itinerary is just packed to the brim with things that will probably bring me to a higher level of consciousness. Activities are described using words like enthralling, glamorous, outrageously fabulous, fabulously outrageous, vibrant, lively, incredible and fascinating! That’s like, every feeling in the world.

Here are some of the Manchester Pride Events you’re probably excited about! –

+ Thursday 9:oo PM – It’s a Gay Knock Out Competition – Eight teams, composed entirely of members of the World-Famous LGBT Community, will be throwing sausages and rope at each other across a great divide of love and longing. No really sausages (and stilettos?) will be thrown, I expect to be comatose with jet lag at this point so the more sausages the better!

+ Saturday 12:15 PM – Pride Parade!

+ Saturday 9:oo PM –  Pixie Lott performance – I’ve never heard of her, but her name sounds like “cotton candy” so I bet it’s really good.

+ Sunday 1:30 PM – Bolton Food & Drink Festival – Who doesn’t like some food and a drink? Vegans, that’s who! No really though, at some point this excursion involves a chef from the cast of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here.

+ Sunday 9:00 PM: Alexandra Burke and Sugababes will be performing at the Gaydar Main Stage Arena. Rumor has it that it will be the best musical performance since Sinead O’Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. 

+ Can we get real for a second about how nothing makes me happier than a fucking history museum and/or exhibit? So yes, Out in the Past and Queer to Stay.

Are you going to Manchester Pride or planning to be in that area maybe running errands or getting a suntan? We should hang out! (My schedule is kinda jam-packed but we’ll make it work)

I’ve only been to The UK once before, at which time my itinerary was focused on family friends, The English Countryside, Historical Sites, The Beatles Museum, Castles, and me talking about The Beatles Museum.

So basically this trip will be my first trip to the UK since this:

my brother and i with a knight on my last trip to the UK

Will I be wearing shortalls this time? Stay tuned to find out!

SIGNIFIED: Where Queer Solidarity Takes Root, Throws a Party

In case you’ve been feeling like you could use a little inspiration in these confusing times, Brooklyn-based queer artist/activists Anna Barsan and Jessie Levandov have collaborated to create SIGNIFIED, a new, multi-platform webseries highlighting the work of queer-identified individuals “who are fostering, enriching and sustaining vibrant and diverse communities.” This project will undoubtedly fill you with positive emotions like compassion, hope, and curiosity.

According to Barsan and Levandov, the inspiration for the series came from “a desire to provide a common platform and literally common space for these communities to come together to witness their overlapping work, voices, lives and struggles”:

We hope this series will serve as a catalyst to begin the long but necessary journey in holding one another accountable, in joining forces, in exercising our social responsibility to queer communities, of color communities, immigrant communities, trans communities, and many more. The urban space is where our journeys collide and hopefully where our solidarity can take root.

 You’ll probably recognize Brooklyn Boihood in this video:

SIGNIFIED from anna barsan on Vimeo.

If you’re in the New York City area, SIGNIFIED is celebrating its official launch on August 28th at the very cool new BMW Guggenheim Lab, from 2-5pm. The lab, a travelling community think tank and gathering space, will invite the public to “participate in experiments, learn about and explore relevant issues within the city and to collectively participate in solutions.”

You should go! Here are the details:

Location: BMW Guggenheim Lab

First Street entrance: 33 East 1st street (btwn 1st and 2nd Ave)
Second Ave entrance: Second Ave at Houston
Date: August 28th, 2011 2pm‐5pm

For more info, contact Jessie Levandov – Jessie[dot]levandov[at]gmail.com, or Anna Barsan – anna[dot]barsan[at]gmail.com.

Fun fact: Our editor Riese has known Anna Barsan since Anna was like in 3rd grade and they both lived in Michigan. See how everything comes back around? It’s like the circle of life!

BlogHer 2011: Transcript From That Panel About How You’ve Driven Me Crazy

Hello chipmunks! I’m presently in Sunny San Diego, California for BlogHer 2011, a really important conference for lady bloggers featuring tiny sandwiches, Ricki Lake, lots of panels, ten billion corporate sponsors and about seven lesbians.

our lesbian contingency

I’m 85% sure that I’ll post at (moderate) length about the weekend in general when I return to Sunny Oakland, California. But right now I’m just gonna talk about MY PANEL!

my panel

So! On Saturday I was on a panel called “How Do You Sustain an Online Community and Keep Your Own Sanity?” and it was pretty awesome. I really liked the other women on my panel and we had a really good moderator and on a scale of 1 to 10, my hair looked okay.

Statistically, chances are good you weren’t there and didn’t see it. But, luckily it was liveblogged and therefore I have included a great deal of that transcription here (wherein I am able to correct the things the transcriber got wrong because live transcribing is really fucking hard/impossible and also skip some parts).

HOW ON EARTH DO YOU SUSTAIN AN ONLINE COMMUNITY AND KEEP YOUR OWN SANITY?

Maria: Welcome everyone!… So this is “Change Yourself: How Do You Sustain an Online Community and keep your own sanity.” We have a fabulous panel here today.

I would like to welcome Eden Kennedy who blogs at Fussy.org and Yoga Beans who is also the brains and heart behind the community keynote last night, and built NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month before she sold it to us at BlogHer. So we are now keepers of the flame, and hoping to sustain her legacy.

Next to her we have Julia Roberts who is from SupportForSpecialNeeds.com. And Julia is a mom, wife, ad agency owner, advocate and a volunteer. She helps clients with marketing efforts in traditional and innovative marketing avenues and she advocates for kids with special needs. Her kids have survived dialysis, kidney transplants and age 8, developmental delays and the effects of trauma living lives filled with medical intervention and never wanting another parent to feel alone in what can be an isolating world of special needs.

Next to her we have Elisa Batista who is clearly well known in the room, and cofounder and moderator of the progressive parenting web site, Mother Talkers who is named was named by Ms. Magazine, a favorite mom blogger and she also blogs and is an advocate for moms rising and is a member of the Environmental Defense Funds Mom’s Clean Air Force Team you may have seen some of those great ladies walking around in their T shirts and I see some of them in the audience today.

And next to her we have Marie Lyn Bernard known as Riese who is editor of Autostraddle, the most popular independently owned lesbian web site.

“Audience”/Marni, Vikki & Deborah: Yeahhh!

Maria: If you are not familiar with the BlogHer way, we like to make sure we are having an engaging dialogue with our community, so I like to start right away by opening up to your questions and helping that get us started here. So anyone have any burning questions for our esteemed panel?

[…]

Audience: Hi, I’m Rochelle from blog MagPieGirl.com, a community for women. One of the things I noticed is when the women are interacting with each other within the community, it takes some of the burden off of me to nurture that community. So I was wondering if you could share maybe one or two things that you’ve done in your communities is that helped the members engage with each other or maybe if there was something that you put a lot of time into that you thought was going to help them engage and it didn’t — what would you recommend and what would you avoid?

Riese: One of the things we did when we first launched Autostraddle is everyone who wrote for us had to respond back to every single comment on the web site. We started a conversation really easily that way and people knew that we were accessible and people knew that we were open to hearing what they had to say to us, and that sort of set the tone for participation. And then eventually, it did cultivate. Comment awards is also a thing you can do, to encourage people to be funny.

Elisa: We have a policy of people introducing themselves, I have a diary function on my web site so anybody can post anything they want, and we always ask people, you know, do an intro diary, let us know how many kids do you have, what do you do for a living, where do you live, so we can somewhat put a face to a name, and that’s helped immensely. One of our community members had a horrible accident out in Oakland. It was her brother that fell three flights of stairs, was paralyzed. This made all of the local news. And we actually raised money for her on line because we felt like we knew her because she commented regularly, and, again, she did that first intro diary. So I would actually encourage people to introduce each other and no anonymous comments.

Julia Roberts: For us, we also have different groups for different special needs or different situations relating to special needs, and when there is somebody who can post something, if it takes a little bit of time for somebody else to comments on it. I will go in and find another community member that I know has dealt with that and I will get them to kind of connect that way because we are a new community. We have only been active for about a year, and because it is so niche and because special needs parents have limited time on line, I really am a go between. I’m a facilitator a lot of times, and that’s actually one of the points that I wanted to make because I didn’t expect to be that person. I didn’t expect that I would need to. I thought if I gave people the place to talk, they would find a way to do it, and that has not always happened and I have had to facilitate that, but when I ask people to go and support somebody else, I have not had any problem finding support for that person.

Eden: I had to do a couple of things with the National Blog Posting Month, and one of them was since for us, the basic function of the site was as a blog roll so that people could find each other and find each other with the same interests. So just dividing the blog roll up by here are the people writing about crafting, and then like all of the crafters can find each other, all of the faith and religion bloggers can find each other. We had a section called I don’t know, anonymous foaming, kind of a comedy section, just like people who were just being funny on line and so they could find each other, and then I also enabled this thing, which was kind of dorky, our whole network was set up on Ning, like show everybody’s birthdays and you can send everybody presents, people like that. It’s so and so’s birthday, I will send them a heart. It’s kind of Facebooky, but it worked.

Maria: Now, Elisa, you mentioned you don’t take anonymous comments, and, Riese, your site doesn’t require registration, correct?

Riese: Right, it doesn’t.

Maria: Maybe you could each kind of say the benefits you find from each approach.

Riese: I think obviously a big reason we don’t require registration and we allow anonymous posters is because a lot of our readers aren’t out yet, or they’re just not at a place where they feel comfortable talking if they have to give their name. We wanted to set up a more uncensored dialogue and there are definitely problems with it. We definitely have ass — am I allowed to swear?

Maria: Yes.

Riese: We definitely have assholes that come to the site and comment anonymously, but I think in a way the community is so grateful that we allow the anonymous option that they self-police. They will police the assholes themselves. And it’s difficult, but I felt like that was part of what gave us a lot of comments to begin with. People hesitate. If you have to register for something, people might not do it, I guess.

Elisa: We have found I think there is pros and cons. Well, no, what I found was that we go as anonymous as some people might have handles and might never, for example, give their children’s names, which is totally cool or give, let people know where exactly they live. They might say I live in New Jersey but not the town. That’s cool too. So we have some anonymity in terms of handles, but one thing we won’t allow is what we call bird droppings, people to just come by, be assholes not really be interested in engaging the community. We want a community that cares about one another and engaged and if it means a smaller community, then so be it, but that is a decision that my partners and myself have made that from the beginning we go to Mother Talkers to have a good time, to be around women that we can engage with and respect and be friends with in real life. We don’t want to go there and feel bad and disgruntled and have to take heart medication because some of the comments are rude. That said, we have had our trolls, even with registration, there is people that I just, I don’t know what it is, but we have had some men masquerading as moms to tell us what to think politically, and their IP addresses have been banned. They are not allowed to come back to Mother Talkers.

Julia Roberts: We have it both ways. You have to register to be in a group and have discussions, but you can comment anonymously, and you don’t have to log in or register to comment on blog posts. So we have two functions. So we expect that the people who register have a profile or even just they can still have, you know, they can still hide themselves a little bit, but we do require registration because in a community like ours, we do want people to feel safe, and like they can figure out who they are talking to. But on posts that we put on we are fine with anonymous comments, and so we kind of have, we have both situations.

Audience: Hi, I’m Ronny, I actually have five blogs and a Ning based community with 5,000 members so I’m very interested in the sanity part of this discussion. I know one of the strategies I haven’t been implementing is hiring moderators and finding community members who are willing to lead, so I was wondering if you guys can share tips or approaches. I’m not sure how to solicit them and make it official. Do you pay them or not? What are your approaches to having more formal leaders within those online communities instead of kind of expecting it just to happen.

Maria: Eden, you want to kick us off on the sanity part.

Eden: You are totally on the right track because that’s what burned me beyond recognition was the fact that I was doing it myself, day in and day out looking trying to get rid of the spammers and the jerks and just the fake profiles and the nonsense. So I would also like to hear if anybody could discuss how to get help.

Julia Roberts: I mean, I can. I think what we do, we look for the active community members, and we kind of make them ambassadors, really, they are the people I go to when somebody needs some support because they are active in the community.
 So we don’t really have an agreement. It’s an unspoken thing. I basically will ask them if they could watch that group. I can make them moderator of that group. I can make them in charge of that group. So I handle it that way.

We don’t pay. I don’t make anything from Support for Special Needs at this time. Like I said, we have been open about a year. We only have a little over 600 members, and it is, it is a lot of work, like Eden, to be the only person. I have one technical person that works behind the scenes, but really it’s me. I’m not only the content generator or solicitor, I also manage the community.

And my tips for that are I only can do what I can do.
 And I don’t beat myself up when I can’t do it. When I see a spammer has been on the site for, you know, a day, I delete it when I find it. So I do what I can do. And as a special needs parent with special need that’s can be consuming sometimes, luckily I’m in a safe place where other certainly needs parents understand that.
 So it’s a circle of trust among our community members. I have had to gently guide people on community guidelines on how to talk to each other in a nice way because there are certain special needs issues that really separate us, but the idea of our community is to look at what we have in common, so I really strongly do that. But in finding community members that can act as ambassadors, it really is just looking for the people who are a little bit active and trying to nurture them, reading their blog, you know, having Twitter conversations with them, really trying to establish friendships because I connect with them on either special needs level or I enjoy their writing. I try to let those relationships happen organically because that’s really the only way our community works is if there is a mutual respect and organic friendships kind of develop out of that.

Elisa: I admire anyone who can maintain a site by themselves because I first of all, I am insane even with help, and when I started out, I was a journalist, so I knew off the bat that there was no way I could maintain a blog by myself and have two small kids. So I started out and enlisted three friends. One did burn out, and she did drop out. I will disclose that, but the other two have stayed with me the last six years now, and if it weren’t for them two taking over while I’m on maternity leave, while I’m on vacation, helping me patrol the sites, keeping it a safe place to be, right now I’m going to be taking them out to dinner after this.

This is it’s very important to do things like that as a thank you, because otherwise and there has been days where I have had my moments. I have posted where, you know, I am just having a bad day and thinking why am I doing all of this work at Mother Talkers because maybe it brings enough money for groceries, and I don’t know if it’s worth it, and I have had glory and Erika talk me down and say Elisa, we have an active community that depends on us for support, for everything, they would not be happy if Mother Talkers were shut down, like don’t you think that way.

And I think they also like me enjoy the fact that we do have active commenters, and we know that when we put something up within ten minutes there will be comments and people there is kind of an addictive nature to that. It’s a really nice thing.
But I would say if you are going to start a blog, that’s why we are Mother Talkers, not mother talker, get help. Make sure that it’s someone as passionate as you are about the issue and you guys can take turns, create a blog schedule.

When we first started out, this was an issue where I felt like I was blogging more than the others and I said, you know, I would finally send the pissy email and say, you know what guys, I don’t think this is fair. I think we need to start creating schedules of when we are going to post and they are like fine. We post three times a day, Monday through Friday and a post Saturday and a post Sunday, and Erika and Gloria and I, we are fortunate and sometimes people post diaries and we are able to post that to the front page and that saves a post. We have enlisted contributing writers, people that were very active in the diaries, asking them to post on the front page.

From as far as I can see, one of the things that to encourage that I have told people is that it’s good exposure if they wanted to get practice in writing and in social media skills.
We have a Facebook page. I said, look, you know, even getting work as a social media director, I mean, I do consulting work, and I sometimes also pass on that work to other members on the site. So we help each other, we are a community, but I just can’t imagine doing this on my own. It’s just too much work for one person. That’s my opinion.

Julia Roberts: That’s true.

Elisa: Hats off to Julia and anybody doing that on their own.

Riese: Yes, I’m not doing that on my own. First of all, I don’t know if you can really sustain an online community and at least not go a little bit crazy, so it’s about how to handle being crazy, but I have, there is always someone watching the site, always. Even when I’m asleep, because we have writers in Australia. So there is me and there is one other editor, and we are almost always on. We have a meeting every single morning at 9:00 a.m. and then we are on g-chat and on the site all day. If I have to go out, she stays.

And I think in a way the audience’s awareness that we were sort of full-time and we were always there maybe is why we never had that big of an issue with having to police unruly commenters or unruly community members or stuff like that. I guess I just have to echo like it’s really hard to do it by yourself. And a lot of times if something upsets me it’s a lot easier for me and the other editor to bounce it off each other and vent at each other and then decide if we want to vent at everybody.

Julia Roberts: I agree, find other people.

Eden: This is your full time job, or do you have another job as well?

Riese: Yes, this is what I do full time.

Julia Roberts: I have a full time job outside of Support for Special Needs.

Eden: If you are trying to run five blogs and do this at the same time, I think you are in trouble.

muppet faces

Audience: Hi, I’m Elena and I blog for Food Network in Canada. I’m wondering how you can reinvigorate a stagnated community, how you can get in there, roll up your sleeves and get people talking again.

Eden: I guess it depends on what kind of community it is. I had great ideas, but because I had no help, I couldn’t implement them, but my great ideas were to get people involved I don’t know maybe it sounds dorky, but like contests or challenges, like let’s all whoever wants to participate in this challenge for 30 days of blogging at a certain time like we will all meet here at a certain time, or we will all blog about what you had for lunch, which is stupid, but for the kind of site it was, the challenge was to make it into a writing exercise and see if you can take something mundane and make it interesting. So that was sometimes that would work. Some people really respond to that, other people are like, no. What is your focus of your community?

Audience: Home and garden television network.

Eden: They want you to tell them what to do.

Audience: They join, but they are not well educated in what a community is. They’ve joined and part of the onus is on us to get in there and we need to have dedicated people, specific community producers in there all the time kind of engaging and educating our community members and possibly creating incentive, like badges and all that stuff, but it’s really a science. If we don’t know what we’re doing, we should pay a company that specializes in that to kickstart that for us — is there something we can do? As a corporation we have to show numbers before we can get any extra heads. So is there anything you could suggest for us on the ground to do to engage people? They love our content, are happy to visit the site, but don’t know how to engage. And when we do ask them to upload photos or share crafts, they are kind of timid and most of them are lurkers even though we do our best to make them feel at ease and welcomed in the community.

Riese: Have you ever tried open threads? I would definitely try that. We have open threads every single holiday, every single awards show on TV. Every time we think there’s something going on where our readers would want to talk to people that think like them. One day we were low on stats and I did a thread on whether your beer has a gender identity, and it was one of our top posts of all time. People love to talk about themselves and if you are asking a community like that for an open thread and how do you deal with this situation, everybody wants to be like I do this, I do this, you know. Everyone likes to talk about themselves.

Elisa: I was going to piggyback off of what she said. We do our open thread, our Oscar open threads, we are live chatting with each other about what people are wearing. It’s important to treat your on line community like your friends off line. They are coming and they are reading you. Think about that. There is tons and tons of blogs on the internet, but yet every day or, however often they come, they are coming specifically to read and learn from you.
 And what we have done on Mother Talkers is nurture those friendships on Facebook and what not, and also one of my favorite diaries on, and these are very popular, talk about building community, is whenever one of our members is having a baby, somebody else will post a diary saying no peeking, Lisa in Austin, no peeking this person, and then says, as you know, she is having a baby. I think we should do something for her and what I normally do is reach out to that person and just say I need your mailing address, don’t ask any questions, and we collect money and we will somebody near her will hand deliver the gift that the Mother Talkers community I will mail the swag to that person and they will hand deliver the mother talker swag and usually it’s a communal gift, a grocery card, gift certificate or we got Edica a meal delivery service in Southern California when she just had her baby. It puts it’s like real friendships that have extended from the internet off line.

Audience: May I ask how big your community is, how many members you have?

Elisa: 10,000 unique visits a week.

Riese: We have about 1.7 million views a month, and about 330,000 unique visitors a month.

Julia Roberts: We are small, we only have between depending on the issue, 600 and a thousand hits per day.

Eden: I think we had about 16,000 members but they certainly weren’t all active at once.

[…]

Maria: Riese, one of the ways you sustain your blog is through the community donations. So how does that work for you?

Riese: Most of our income is through donations. We have advertising sales and merchandise sales but 75% of our operating budget is reader donations. So a few months back when we were stressed out and had all these problems, the community raised about $22,000 in ten days for us to stay open. And in a way, it was it’s been really awesome, the few months since then. We have gotten a lot more help, like a marketing consultant, management consultant, people volunteered to come help us — but what’s great is that now the readers are our bosses. What we want to do is write for them and do what they want.  And I know that might be special within the lesbian community because people often need that online community moreso than other demographics do, but that’s what worked for us.

Julia Roberts: If I can just add to the revenue thing, we don’t have we won’t ask money from special needs parents, because I am one, but how we are starting to my other social media activity I feed into pay for the site, so it’s paid by me. In addition, there are the beginning of companies that are coming to us because we do have a circle of community members and Support for Special Needs is gaining some influence so we are just in the early stages of developing some ways that we can have the site sponsored and picked up by different companies. So we are investigating that now.

Maria: We have a question in the audience.

Audience: I work for the Make-a-Wish foundation and I used to handle social media for Autism Speaks so I have had two unique, two large vocal communities and I’m hearing, tell people when you are burned out which I have no option to do that because I would be unemployed if I told them I was burned out. On a general basis, how do you handle things when you are working towards something, like for me, for example, you are doing everything you can do to help somebody and they are angry? We are dealing with parents who are dealing with challenges and I take it personally. I will be like I have been trying for hours to get this person to understand why they can’t do this and they keep fighting back and fighting back. And because of the nature of it, I take it so hard. How do you turn that so that at the end of the day, you can look at something and not have that kind of a feeling if you are dealing with, you know, the one person that just can’t see what you are doing.

Riese: I take it really personally still every time. I mean, you can drink, I guess. Take a bike ride, go to the gym. I guess, I don’t know, vent. I’m not sure if there is a way to fix that besides just fixing the way that you think or about positive thinking or being like that. If it’s one person and it’s fine, you know, we can’t make everybody happy.

Maria: Yoga.

Riese: Yes, yoga.

Elisa: I run at 5:00 in the morning. I can get 20 comments and it will be the two comments that just rattle me. It’s still like that.

Julia Roberts: I think probably I deal with it the best I can, and then I remember that our community might not just be serving them and maybe it’s not the right place for them and that’s not really my problem, that’s their problem. And I as gently as I can say maybe this aren’t the right place for you, but I have done these three things and I am obviously not meeting a need you have, and then I let it good.

Eden: You sort of have to decide that you can’t solve, it gets to a point you can’t solve their problem and you just, I’m sorry, I have reached my limit of what I can do for you. And if you can also, if you have a friend with like a really black sense of humor who you can say mean things about them and just have say really good laugh, my is just vicious and it’s really helpful.

Riese: I would say a good thing to remember is that there’s a ton of people who are happy with what you are doing, there are so many people who are grateful to you and know that you are doing good for them. So to spend all day worrying about one asshole isn’t fair to those people. So don’t forget those people.

Julia Roberts: Very good point, what she said.

[…]

Audience: Hi, I’m Jen. I write for Anybody Want a Free Nut. It’s a personal blog, special needs parenting blog — what are some creative ways you have seen for people to, right now my personal blog is my community, but it’s small and I want to get more involved in these larger communities, but my time is limited. So what are some creative ways that you have seen that people sort of leverage one into the other. I’m not using it to drive traffic back to my blog, but maybe carry on the conversation back over in both directions?

Julia Roberts: I think once you start a conversation in any other community that is related to what your interests are, people find an interest it’s organic. People find that they are in line in thinking, in a position, in parenting style, in a special need, whatever it is, I think if you start a conversation on their blog or their community, I think what happens is it’s a two-way street. So I think the way to engage more, not I don’t even want to I know this isn’t what you are asking to get your blog more popular, but to start a dialogue in both places is to step out of your own blog into other communities that you feel comfortable in, whether that’s a Facebook page or any kind of other site, disability site or not, photography site, whatever it is, whatever interests you. And I think you will naturally organically build friendships that have that two-way street.

Riese: I started a personal blog in 2006 so it was almost three years between that and starting the bigger site, and most of the original team and even a lot of the team we have now that it’s way bigger are people I met when I was still having my personal blog. So I had a following through that and that’s where I formed my team. I think everyone on my team initially was somebody I knew through reading their blogs, they were reading mine.

Maria: And, Riese, when you moved to a community blog, your blog is a blog for lesbians but it has a very particular focus.

Riese: Right.

Maria: How did you develop that kind of focus on younger college age lesbians in that community within the community?

Riese: I don’t know. I think maybe I’m really immature, and so kids that age felt they could relate to me. I don’t know. We did start out with 15 interns who were all almost like little campus ambassadors at their own schools. I guess — it kind of just happened. I think we sort of were tapping into a certain, I guess, ideology that was reflective of a new generation, but I don’t think it’s age specific. I’m a little bit older [than college kids] but you have real years and dyke years. So somebody could be at a certain stage of even dating or meeting people or being out, and one of those people can be 15 and one can be 35 and still be at the same place in their life. And I think that’s sort of what it’s like.

Audience Member: [to me] That’s why it works that is exactly why your site works.

Riese: Thanks!

Julia Roberts: What all of us have said is it’s organic and we let it be. I had one thought, your husband had one thought, you had one thought and it’s come from an organic nature, even Eden was telling me yesterday she was like, oh, let’s just write for a month, a little writers thing and we have all been to her site and done it.

Audience: I’m Sarah Gilbert and I have run a site with three other wonderful supportive women in Portland, a site for Portland Moms for six years and it’s been really, really tough and rewarding. I’m wondering if we could maybe make an online support community for online community support.
(Applause).

Julia Roberts: If you run it and moderate it, yes, I’m there.

Eden: That’s great.

Audience: I just want to share how endlessly frustrating it is for, you know, for you to have a regular reader who decides that she is there to keep you honest even when you think you are already honest, and every time you post something she feels like it’s important for her to point out how judgmental you are being. I hope that you guys all have that experience.

Julia Roberts: Block. Block.

Audience: Have you guys ever dealt with the situation where you want somebody to be a part of your community and you don’t want to be known for, you know, stomping on contrary opinions, but at the same time they are making you cry every time you write a post about X, Y, Z, they make you cry. What do you do?

Riese: I think that one of the things we do, whenever there is a sign of someone saying I think you are missing this, we listen — like they said “you are missing a transgender woman on your site” which is a good idea, totally reasonable. We say, all right, we hear you and we’ll do it. Any time anyone gives us a suggestion or disagrees with us in a way we feel is relevant, we take action on it. That way when someone comes on and disagrees in a way that’s irrelevant and annoying, everyone else is sort of on our side — they know we’re totally open to dissent, open to conversation, totally open to changing everything we do if it makes sense, and I think if you sort of establish that — that becomes your reputation and then the people making unreasonable requests will stand out more as undesirables.

Julia Roberts: I agree.

Eden: She is right.

Maria: So as we were talking and preparing for the panel, each of you mentioned different ways in which you kind of build some structure behind the scenes to help keep your own sanity and keep the communities growing and sustaining. Maybe each of you could talk about maybe what some of your tips and tricks are, you know, is it an editorial calendar, is it preposting? Is it building forums? Is it letting people blog on your site directly? What are some of the structures you have put in to help sustain and keep your sanity?

Eden: Boundaries, and a schedule so that I don’t have to be so that I could cut off I don’t have to I about it for X amount of hours I will be on the site at 8:00, 9:00, noon, at 5:00 and at 10:00. And I make sure everything is okay and then I’m out. That’s what I needed to do to stay sane.

Julia Roberts: Editorial calendars, boundaries and also when I’m not there, I don’t worry about it. It’s important that when I’m away, I’m away, and if it blows up I will have to deal with it later, and, really, I don’t stress about that them. I used to, but I don’t anymore. Another thing I also do is I really try to write all of it at once and get three posts, my Monday, Wednesday, Friday posts up at the same time, but I’m committed to going on the site about four times a day just through the groups for me to just look through the groups, answer, try to see if I need to go find a community member, but I do that at specific times so it doesn’t interfere with my paying job. My boss would I’m my own boss, my boss likes for me to work and earn money. And so my boundaries are not unlike Eden’s, I do it in the morning when I get to the office. I do it at lunch usually when I’m eating my lunch and then in the afternoon before I go home and then I’m on at night. And I Tweet probably more than I am in the community because I want to stay connected to the people in my community.

Elisa: I would say start out with friends to blog or blog at an existing site, and in some ways you will have kind of an ownership in that if you are a regular contributor. Have a schedule ahead of time of when you and your partners post. We have an automatic scheduler so, for example, our first post goes up 5:00 a.m. Pacific time, and very early for us, but the posts are automatically, it automatically posts. So I just put that in the can. I also, in terms of consulting work, I take on issues I care about, that I know my readers care about so I’m able to cross post from other blogs and that saves me a lot of writing stories. The other thing is a combination of quick, like isn’t this cool or an open thread about the Oscars, and an actual well thought out stories, not all of the posts, that’s the thing that people need to understand. Not all of the posts need to be long. They can be short and quick and just mix things up. And finally, no, I would say that that is about it oh, yes, don’t take people’s comments, unless they are trolls, get rid of them, don’t take people’s comments personally.
Take care of yourself, have those boundaries. I check the site maybe a few times a day like Julia, and I don’t I allow Twitter and Facebook to let me know if anybody has any complaints. That will get to me right away on my cell phone. And I yes, I try not to take any comments personally.

Riese: I guess we post probably between like six and ten times a day, and in terms of how that works, it’s having a lot of other writers. The executive editor handles most of the communication with our other writers. We have weekly editorial meetings and we have daily meetings with me and just the one other editor, our management consultant in the morning, and I guess there is just a lot of people working behind the scenes to get that done. But it has taken a really long time to find writers I can trust. The fact that I can be here right now and not have to write posts while I’m here is great. I’m lucky because I have two writers I can trust who can run it while I’m gone. They will be tired when I get back. And also, I think I am crazy, so I don’t know.

[…]

Maria: I will ask each of the panelists to leave you with their one last bit of best advice.

Riese: Ummm… Lean Pockets, soda. I love my community, like I really do love them, so I really genuinely care, I don’t have to just act like a care. And I think that’s why it works. The other editors love them too, and we tell them that we love them. And we let them ask us stupid questions about their girlfriends. So if you love them, it helps.

Maria: I’m going to change the question. What is the one thing that you wish somebody had told you before you started all of this?

Elisa: I actually have an answer to that. I would say be open minded. I came from the journalism world. I really thought I was going to have this on line magazine and sell tons of ads, and sort of build it and they will come, and, wow, was it so not like that. I never thought I would care as much as I did for the personal lives of the people that come and read my site, moreso than I ever did as a journalist. The other thing is in terms of monetizing the site, again, keeping it open minded. Now, I just, I honestly don’t care about the numbers. I don’t care if there are ads on the site or not. It’s just, you know, the fact is having a blog in itself and showing my writing out there has brought jobs so that in and of itself has brought jobs and brought in money. So it’s sort of like it became its own entity, and you just have to be open minded and respect the community that you have.

Julia Roberts: I think I wish someone had told me that I would be, like, my name would be Julia Roberts, Support for Special Needs. I didn’t realize that I am the voice. I thought I would build it and the voice would just be from the people, but if I died tomorrow, the community would go away probably. And I didn’t realize that I was the community. Nobody told me that. And also authentic building relationships, I think, is my one tip is just to be yourself, and let the I don’t get too stressed out with how much traffic and that kind of thing, if real conversations are happening, and the revenue stream be open minded because what I thought was one thing has not turned out what it has been.

Eden: I guess mine would be get a partner. Get a partner with technical knowhow because eventually I just burned out and I had to go, and I had to fortunately, so fortunately, I was able to sell it to BlogHer and they are going to do amazing things, I’m sure, but all I had was friends going oh, I know what you should do, I know what you should do and they filled my head with all kinds of ideas that I could never implement and that just increased my burnout, so if I had had somebody who would actually help me implement that stuff, it would have made a world of difference.

Riese: Sometimes your writing is better if you take two hours to go outside and interact with other human beings and then one hour writing it than it is if you take three hours writing it. That’s it.

Maria: Great tip. All right. Thanks, everyone. And if you didn’t notice, all the way over on that side of the room there are everyone’s name and their web site address and their Twitter handle. Thanks everyone!

Julie Goldman LIVE At The Renberg Theater July 30th

Intern Bren’s Team Pick

Julie Goldman is No. 1 on my list of Top 3 Comedy Crushes, which is why I’m super jealous of anybody within driving distance of the Renberg Theater in LA on Saturday, July 30th. Julie Goldman is doing a thing! For one night and one night only you can experience the wonder that is Julie Goldman live. Sure you’ve seen her on the TV box and the internet machine, but nothing compares to the energy she brings live and in person. She has perfected the artform of stand-up. I speak from experience on this one.

So here’s the info:

Julie Goldman: Lady Gentleman
Saturday, July 30th @ 8pm
$20 General Admission, $30 Preferred Seating AND VIP Post-Show Reception
The Renberg Theater
1125 N McCadden PL
Los Angeles, CA

If you are like me and not even in the appropriate time zone to attend, keep your eyeballs on Julie’s website for upcoming shows, events and general mayhem. In the meantime look how pretty she is.

NYC: Allison Weiss, Mrs Danvers, Mitten & Mal Blum Are Ready To Rock Your Socks

Crystal’s Team Pick:

Hello New York readers. A whole line up of Autostraddle’s favorite female musicians – Allison Weiss, Mrs Danvers, Mal Blum and Mitten – are playing a show near you on July 22, which is this Friday night. It’s going to be amazing, I can tell just from the poster.

Tickets are only $10 which is a very reasonable price to pay for an entire evening of watching talented girls play great music. Also I bet a lot of cute queer girls are going.

Want to know more? Get to the Facebook page.

How to Queer Mainstream Media and Progressively Start a Revolution Online

Remember when you were in grade school/high school/college, and you used to go on field trips? And while you were out, it was all about how cool it was that you weren’t sitting at a desk all day, and instead you were looking at dinosaurs or art or learning how caramel is made. Maybe getting stoned behind the museum. Whatever. You were out there. You were doing it, and you were having fun. But at the end of the day, your teacher sat you down and made you write the same essay again and again: What did you learn?

And I’ve done it. I’ve gone on the ultimate field trip. I put in my ~30 hours of travel time, attended (and spoke at, what the fuck?) my first national conference, talked to a million and one different kinds of activists, watched a naked man dance to what I swear was a 12-minute Britney Spears remix at a gay club in Minneapolis, stood on a picket line, heard a lot of really strange Katy Perry stories, and got drunk on the roof of Chicago’s last squat. And now here I am, back home in DC eating hummus in my kitchen at 3 in the morning. And so, the test: what have I learned?

It’s hard to say. The things I’ve learned seem impossible to list. Everything I try to name sounds inaccurate or irrelevant, and it’s probably because I’m shooting to articulate the way-more-intangible concept of ‘What I’ve Experienced.’ Because this conference – as well as the time directly surrounding it – has been more than politics and TweetDeck and open bars.

When this conference was first pitched to me, it was summarized as something along the lines of ‘a conference for progressive organizations that use blogging/social networking sites as a primary means of outreach.’ For some reason I heard this and understood it as ‘people who Google ‘lesbian sex’ and end up on Autostraddle.com.’

I mean, okay, maybe I didn’t get on that train of thought and ride it all the way to the end, but I did assume (or hope) that this conference was going to be something of an experience neatly tailored ‘for me.’

And in a way, it was.

Look at this fucking photo.

But no, really, look at this fucking photo. I mean, I feel like I’m showing you vacation slides, but this photo was taken at the first workshop I attended, an LGBT strategy session for individuals involved in policy and the bloggers who covered them. At this table were writers and editors from Bilerico, Feministing, The New Gay, Death and Taxes, and a mainstream newspaper from Minneapolis all participating in a discussion moderated by Pam Spaulding.

But this conference wasn’t ‘for’ us. Nor was it obligated to be. I ran into individuals I met at this session at almost every workshop I attended (and basically all of them at the gay bar on Saturday night). We regarded each other as peers, as co-workers in the big, intangible company that is the Internet. But in most sessions I found myself out of place – the blogger among organizers, the lesbian writer among political analysts. It’s not to say that I felt disregarded or disrespected. It may have been all the open bars, but I didn’t meet anyone this past weekend who wasn’t interested in trading issues, discussing tactics, or at least figuring out what there was to do at night.

But a larger question exists. In a conference that centered largely around taking back America by empowering the working and middle classes, where do LGBT issues fit in, and how do we contribute?

Drowning in a sea of mainstream media

The Little Mermaid’s got it right, you guys. Subverting the mainstream isn’t just for hipsters anymore. Our media is here, it’s queer (sometimes), and we’re trying to get it to move beyond being ‘just’ a niche subject. In meeting progressives outside the LGBT community, I was constantly challenged with how to present Autostraddle as more than ‘a lesbian blog,’ how to make it feel relevant to the people I was talking to. Because, dammit, it is. We’re part of the conversation, we deserve that.

As queer bloggers (and readers of queer blogs) we come from a small/large/continually expanding universe in which everybody knows everybody, but not everybody outside knows us. We are bloggers and journalists, yes. But we are also immigrants and are people of color, we are workers (and we’re also the unemployed). We’re the little guy/girl/persyn whose rights are determined every day by the people in power, people who are not us.

For those of us who want to see ourselves represented and included in the media, for those of us who want to affirm that we have a voice and that, yes, we exist, the time has come for us to take matters into our own hands and demand representation for ourselves. And we do this differently. As I mentioned in my last post, there were a lot of homos at this conference. But, seemingly, only a small percentage of us were actively and primarily involved in what is regarded as alternative queer media.

There is an argument that can be made that all queer media is, by nature, alternative. And in a way, that’s true. Because, yes, it’s an ‘alternative’ to heterosexual culture, a difference that’s inherent in all of us, in the way we grew up and exist. But to truly capture the nature of alternative culture, we also have to focus on the lives and experiences and voices of marginalized groups and people within our community who find themselves underrepresented, and therefore silenced.

To me, alternative means recognizing the diversity that exists within our community while recognizing that we are still part of a larger community (and calling for that larger community to recognize us). It’s understanding that race, class, and privilege deeply impact all of our experiences. It is not drawing a dichotomy of alternative vs. mainstream media or regarding ‘their’ media and ‘our’ media as mutually exclusive.

It’s true: it’s hard to feel included in mainstream media. ‘Alternative’ is not an unprompted movement, its a reaction to exclusion. As Heidi Barton Stink, panelist on Queer Media and the Alternative Revolution, pointed out, organizations and media outlets will inevitably fail to be entirely inclusive, and when communities exist that don’t speak to you, there is sometimes no way to make yourself feel included. Sometimes you can ‘t build on communities and spaces that were not built to include you. Sometimes you have to create a space for your own voice.

So how to reconcile these things?

Left to right: David Castillo, coffee, Katrina Casino Danger, coffee, Heidi Barton Stink, coffee, Zack Rosen, coffee and cigarettes

In our panel, we discussed a cultural phenomenon known as the ‘post-gay’ identity, an identity that assumes that the ‘gay community’ has moved ‘beyond the closet,’ therefore making race, class, and gender equity that much more accessible. Post-gay sort of assumes that because we’re living in a society that’s becoming slowly but steadily more tolerant toward gays and lesbians, we have no more obstacles to overcome. Post-gay expects that women feel safe and welcome in spaces that have traditionally belonged to men. It believes that ‘mixed’ atmospheres can occur organically just because we’ve eliminated the necessity of the closet. ‘Post-gay’ is insistent on moving past struggle.

But the struggle continues. Because we’re not post-gay. We’re not post-anything, except maybe post-WWII or post-90s boy-band phenomena, both of which are fine. The LGBT community has the power to become a huge moving force in the progressive community. Why? Because we’re fucking everywhere (I mean that in every sense).

If there’s anything I’ve ‘learned’ from my experience at Netroots, it’s that the LGBT community’s got something down that everyone is finally catching on to: the fact that you can create real, meaningful community online. We have proven time and time again that we are people armed: not just with knowledge, but with community. We’ve got backup. We’re here for each other in the closets, in the streets, and online. And we can use these tools that we have to build our community and to integrate (not assimilate, there’s a difference!) into other communities who also experience a systematic deprivation of rights and liberties. Communities that are silent and separated. We know the power that the Internet has. It lets us know we’re not alone in our struggle, no matter how alienated we feel in our physical communities. Physical meeting spots were always important, they still are. But now we can reach a wider audience and create many centers of physical force. We can empower far more people and ultimately build a more intricate web of activists, artists, and thinkers. This power is ours to keep, but it’s also ours to share.

And what can the progressive community do for us?

They can recognize our passion and our power and regard us as more than tokens, as individuals, and as a cause. And we can do each other the mutual favor of learning to regard each other as allies. Last Friday, keynote speaker Van Jones discussed the baseless power of the Tea Party. Is the Tea Party a huge, scary coalition of right-wing conservatives and a snake that doesn’t want to get tread upon? Yes. But Jones pointed out something important: the Tea Party doesn’t exist. There’s no headquarters, there’s no president, there’s no physical space. But us? The queers? The progressives? We got it. We’re real. We’re online, we’re in the streets, we’re everywhere. And, goddammit, we’re on our way.

Autostraddle Live! Come See Me at BlogHer 2011 Talking About How You’ve Driven Me Insane

What is BlogHer 2011?

BlogHer ’11 will bring over three thousand attendees together from all over the world to share hands-on learning, rich discussions, opportunities to meet with the brands that support them and plentiful networking opportunities.

Last year Alex Vega, our design director, was a panelist at BlogHer 2010, which was held in New York City. She schooled a room that was probably 75% Moms on how to enhance your content with graphics and pictures and so forth and I snuck into the gay cocktail party and everyone had A Time. See:

having a gay old time at blogher 2010: VIKKI OF UP POPPED A FOX, POLLY OF LESBIAN DAD, RIESE AND ALEX, AND GRACE YIP OF GRACE THE SPOT.

This year, BlogHer is taking over San Diego from August 5th-6th and apparently it’s my turn to wow the crowd of people who’ve never heard of Autostraddle with my incredible expertise in the following topic:

How Do You Sustain an Online Community and Keep Your Own Sanity?!

This is a funny panel for me to be on, because I have definitely gone completely insane and I’m 75% sure it’s your fault. If I wasn’t on this panel, I would go to this panel:

Among the top reasons that bloggers blog, according to every social media study BlogHer has ever conducted, is to create and be a part of a community. But make no mistake: building, nurturing, and sustaining community can be as draining as it is bolstering. It can pump you up anddrag you down. Your community can be there for you when you need them… and sometimes they can be the last thing you want to deal with! If you’re in it for the long haul, if the long-term gains far outweigh the occasional unwanted drama, how do you take care of your community and yourself? How do you enlist deputies? How do you recognize when there are elements, topics, or members that need to go? Some community-builders, such asEden Kennedy, Elisa Batista, Julia Roberts, Marie “Riese” Lyn Bernard, and moderator Maria Niles, share their insights and concrete tactics.

Will there be other gays there?

YES DUH. Our friend Vikki from Up Popped a Fox will be on a panel called Peer Networking: Working Together To Help All Boats Rise, which is probably about boating and our friend Polly of Lesbian Dad is on a panel called The Write Brain: Essential Writing and Editing Skills, which I believe is about brain surgery. Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend will be lending her expertise to Old-School Bloggers: Beginner to Big-Time to Burnout and Everywhere in Between.

Autumn Sandeen, a transgender woman who blogs at Pam’s House Blend, will be speaking on “Cyberbullying Isn’t Just for Teens: What to Do if You’re the Victim of Trolls, Haters… and Worse.” Barb Dybwad, who got a free t-shirt from Taylor at Dinah Shore 2010 and now runs Tecca (which Taylor now writes for), will offer expertise on “How to Pitch Freelance Editorial Work from Some Busy Editorial People.” And also Mombian will teach you why diversity is “good business” and also probably all these lezzers will be at Deb on the Rocks’ Queerosphere Party.

You can buy tickets at the BlogHer website.

If any of you, members of my online community, have any insight to how I’ve apparently been keeping my sanity while managing you people, please do share in the comments!

Netroots Nation 2011 Day Two: Things All Progressives Love, Actually

[feature photo via yksin on flickr]

Hello all you little tweetdecks. Netroots Nation is over, and I am hung-over and traveling on a bus through the great sprawling flatlands of the Midwest. The bus driver keeps yelling, but not at me, so I guess it’s okay. ANYWAY. Yesterday was a long, long day that began with my panel, Queer Media and the Alternative Revolution (which was not videoed but instead live-tweeted, also here) and ended with the Daily Kos official Netroots afterparty, which featured an open bar and lots and lots of older people getting drunk and dancing in business casual. Needless to say, I fit right in, and now I have this phone number on my arm in what appears to be permanent marker, and it says “ANDREW BLOG” under it, so I guess that means my networking attempts were a success.

So let’s get on with it, shall we? Yesterday after my queer media panel, I attended lunch with Keynote speaker/bad-ass Van Jones, a Speak Out for Good Jobs rally led by Rep. Keith Ellison, and a session on sustainable blogging, which can more or less be summarized by hashtag #getadayjob. Seriously you guys I am so broke that I’m about to take the dollar sign from Ke$ha’s name and try to cash it in at my bank.

Aside from that, I learned a lot. As someone who admittedly, though not necessarily proudly, shies away from most things political, it was generally healthy and stimulating and informative to be surrounded by people who know what they’re talking about and who, more importantly, are excited about what they’re talking about. I feel like it woke up a lot of things in me (but not my legs because they are forever asleep on this Greyhound), but my newly rediscovered feelings about politics are for another post. The point is that this conference brought together a great many number of people and organizations (this year’s conference was the most highly-attended Netroots to date) representing a huge diversity of opinions, causes, and peoples. Here are some things that I learned we have in common:

This picture of me exists

#Hashtags

Oh my god you guys, this conference was so fucking #meta. Being on Twitter at this conference was like watching a video of puppies watching a video of themselves. At one point I watched a group of bloggers engaged in fierce battle over the correct usage of the official hashtag of the Speak Out event I attended (it was #spkout, by the way. It said so on the banner on stage). It was like #hashtag-a-palooza up in here, let me tell you. With all hands on TweetDeck, it was almost startlingly easy to find news, opinions, and highlights  from any session at the conference. Does being amazed by this make me an old lady? Because if it does, hand me the prune juice and get the hell off my lawn, because I am floored. Other Twitter highlightsincluded the fact that I substituted tweeting at new acquaintances for my lack of business cards and also the opportunity to get immediate feedback from the panel audience by checking my @ mentions while on stage. I also live-tweeted throughout most of the conference.

Also, once when I was napping unabashedly in the hallway, a huge commotion broke out on the other side of the Convention Center. Instead of removing myself from the floor, I searched the official Netroots hashtag, #nn11 and got a report on what was happening, running commentary, and even pictures. It’s like going online to check the weather instead of getting up and going across the room to open the window. Embarrassingly lazy, but so, so easy.

Being gay…maybe

I don’t actually have that much to say about this. It’s just like, you know when you’re out on the town scouting for ladies, and every girl who seems like a sure-fire lesbian is actually a hipster (though I still hold that these things are not mutually exclusive)? Well the same can be said for an older generation of progressive bloggers and political analysts. What is is about flowy skirts, sensible shoes, and power suits and conversations about someone’s six children that makes these things run abundant at a progressive conference? We’re just going to have to face it: we lesbians will forever be locked in a battle with business casual.

Other than that, it’s interesting to note the seemingly disproportionate numbers of homo-gays present at this conference. I suppose it’s a no-brainer to say that LGBT folk have a tendency to support progressive causes, but it’s nice to know that not only are we gays working toward supporting our own causes but are also infiltrating the ranks of prominent progressive organizations, ensuring that the LGBT community will not be left out of victories in politics, in the fight for jobs, in immigration, and of course, in the blogosphere.

Dorky celebrity photo ops

Netroots was a really beautiful thing for me personally because it brought together bloggers IRL and also put bloggers in touch (like real, live human touch) with the people we write about every day, whether it’s in politics or culture. I actually hate asking people for pictures, but after I reached a certain point of squealing and whispering, my girlfriend coerced me into taking these:

I look like a gay chipmunk

Okay, seriously, can we discuss how no one ever looks good in pictures like this? Even Van Jones, who looks very serious and very tough and very wise buttoned up his jacket in order to conceal what he referred to as his potbelly. This is not what I look like, I don’t look like this. In fact, I look kind of stoned, and this isn’t even what I look like when I’m stoned.

Girlfriend: “No one looks cool standing next to Van Jones, not even me. Also, it’s amazing that somewhere there was a source of light so small and so precise that it illuminated only my nose.”

Standing next to Hal Sparks automatically makes me Brian Kinney

I am a nerd and chicks dig it.

Beer!

There was so much free beer at this deal, you guys. The AFL-CIO taught me to raise a glass to the working class by supporting union beer breweries such as PBR, Leinenkugel, Miller, and Budweiser, as well as some considerably less-than-evil liquor distilleries (Jim Beam, Beefeater, Smirnoff). And while getting one’s drank on is a lovely social activity as well as an apparently effective social networking lubricant, it can also be an opportunity to honor the struggles of the workers and unions who fought for fair living wages, safe working conditions, and just treatment from the corporations who prospered off their work.

And it’s not just about workers not being able to trust corporations, as LGBT people, we see our beliefs and our being insulted, slammed, and sold back to us by retailers every day (Target, I am looking at you, you Born-This-Way-selling, Minneapolis-pride-sponsoring, hypocritical motherfuckers). It’s easy to feel betrayed, because we have been betrayed, but it’s hard to stop consuming. It’s hard not to feel guilty. It’s expensive to buy organic groceries farmed by Amish lesbians with multiracial children. IT’S HARD YOU GUYS. But here’s a reality: sustainable and progressive corporations exist. They are rare, but they are real. So take some advice from this sticker, y’all:

this picture captions itself. so meta.

Autostraddle Live! KC Danger is Going to Netroots Nation 2011 With Other Revolutionaries

Hello little hashbrowns. It’s time for Autostraddle to hit the road again! This time we’re not going to a lady-mecca to reflect on our past, we’re going out into the wide world to examine our big, bright future. This Thursday, June 16, I’m leaving on a jetplane (or like, maybe hitchhiking at this point, who knows) for Minneapolis, MN to attend Netroots Nation 2011.

I'm not sure if she's dressed properly for Minnesota

Netroots Nation is a yearly conference established with the intention of amplifying the already-present voices of the progressive community online. Founded in 2006 by liberal political blog DailyKos, Netroots recognizes the online community and the legitimacy of its influence on national politics.

Originally called YearlyKos, Netroots changed its name in 2008 to reflect the influence that grassroots organizations could harness through blogs, wikis, and social networks. Recognizing the power that leftist media sites wielded individually, it soon became clear that we could build a movement collectively, if only we could realize a common struggle – as well as a common means of communication. Keynote speakers have included Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Al Franken.

It’s hard to define what the common struggle of the American Left is. And this is a message that becomes clear when looking at the agenda for Netroots. While a good number of workshops have a tendency to either be reflections on liberal media or an examination of labor/union issues, there are also a number of panels on the LGBT movement, reproductive rights, religion, the Middle East, and baseball.

Relevant to our interests

And so I suppose what we have in common when it comes down to the very essentials is a fervent need for social justice. We want to believe that things can be fair and correct, that we can treat each other properly, and that these things can and should not be taken away or prohibited by any sort of legislation. And we’re recognizing this. We’re recognizing that, although our focuses may be different, we’re all a part of this community. We want to help each other help ourselves.We know that there’s nothing more powerful than information, discourse, and the exchanging of ideas and passions. And we know that it’s more powerful still because it’s free and available.

How this all plays out in a physical space is yet to be discovered. Maybe I’m too idealistic. Maybe I should just grow out my hair and start a food collective or go start a lesbian colony with Santana in Tribeca.

This year’s conference is being touted as ‘the most concentrated gathering of progressive bloggers to date.’ And we’re going to be a part of it. That’s us! As a generation of activists/generally open-minded people growing up online, we’re finding that it’s not just ideas that are accessible to us, it’s power and movement and community. We’re looking at ourselves as part of a larger progressive cause, because we’re worth that, you know? And we’re seeing that these causes are struggling right along with us.

LGBT rights are becoming part of a national dialogue. It becomes more apparent with each day, with each passing news story we post on here. We are politics. We’re activists, artists, and thinkers. We don’t just listen to lectures about our world, we have conversations about it, and often, we start those conversations online.

This thing that we’re doing? It’s a Real Thing, and we want to talk about it.

Look at all the Fucks 2008 Speaker Nancy Pelosi Gives

The workshop I’m participating in is called Queer Media and the Alternative Revolution, assembled by Zack Rosen of The New Gay and also featuring Heidi Barton Stink, a trans* rapper, and David Castillo of The Bilerico Project. And while my secret goal is to form a pop-sensational, ultra-queer, boi band supergroup, we’re mostly going to examine the media’s relationship with the queer community. We’ll be discussing what alternative means to us, the movement of queer culture online, and the relationship between culture and politics. Other prominent queer bloggers like Pam Spaulding will be on panels as well.

So it’s time to suit up/lace up/strap onand hit the road to revolution/adventure. I’ve got my firm, confident lesbian handshake ready (if you know what I’m saying), and I’m excited for what this can become. Perhaps hilarity will ensue. Perhaps we’ll shed a few tears. I don’t know exactly what to expect, but I know I’m ready to find out.

Gay Pride 2011: We Want Your Photos, We Have Your Info

Happy Pride Month, y’all! Some of you celebrated last weekend and some of you have more time to celebrate, but regardless — we’re very excited, and here’s why:

We are doing an ALL CALL FOR YOUR PRIDE PICTURES.

All you have to do is wear your Autostraddle gear and have your friend/girlfriend/favorite drag queen take a picture of you. You guys, everyone looks cute in AS. The world needs to see this phenomenon immortalized in a gallery. Fame and fortune but mostly fame await you!

Cut up your classic t-shirt just like we showed you. Wear your sticker on your bag/laptop/face. Make an entre outfit out of outdated pages from your AS calendar. Make Autostraddle signs and dress up as Riese and/or Tinkerbell. Do it.

If you want to be famous and have thousands of queer women fawning over you, send a HIGH-ish RESOLUTION picture of your Autostraddle-clad self to Grace [at] autostraddle [dot] com with the subject line “Pride Pictures.” Be sure to include the first names of the people in the photos as well as which pride you’re attending. As usual, bonus points for creative file names, and also, NO TIFFs, please.

Here Are Some Pride Festivals You Could Attend, Possibly!

This weekend was a big weekend for Pride for many of you from Boston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Iowa, Lansing, Los Angeles, San Antonio and Washington DC and so many more. But Pride remains a glorious prospect on the horizon in many other cities!

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Baltimore, Maryland: June 17th – June 19th.

Featuring Deborah Cox.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Washington D.C/Baltimore

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Chicago, Illinois: June 24th-26th

+ Dyke March: June 25.

+ There is a lot happening at this one — Fernanda Rocha will be the Grand Marshall of the Pride Parade and Pride Fest performers include Deborah Cox, Crystal Waters and MYA.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Chicagostraddlers

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Columbus, Ohio: June 17th-19th

+ Entertainment includes Chely Wright, Bitch, and Namoli Brennet. Also, Intern Grace will probably be there, so.

Meet up With Autostraddlers: Ohio is For Autostraddlers

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Denver, Colorado: June 18th-19th

+ With CAZWELL, Carmen Carerra from RuPaul’s Drag Race and Lori Michaels.

Meet up With Autostraddlers: Denver Area Autostraddlers

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Houston, Texas: June 18-25th

+ Pride Parade June 25.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Texastraddle

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Montreal, Canada: August 9th-14th

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Montrealers

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London, England: June 24-July 3

+ Featuring Guilty Pleasures with Dreambears and Hot Gusset, something about a flash mob, and more acts to be announced. Also, they use the word “fortnight” a lot.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: UK & Ireland

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Nashville, TN: June 18th

+ The Nashville Pride Festival will feature Jonny McGovern, Kimberly Caldwell, and God-Des and SHe.

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New York, New York: June 15th – 26th

+ June 15th – Kick off Pride with GO! Magazine’s shin dig with the cast of The Real L Word (Bring your AS gear to that one for a number of reasons).

+ June 25th – Dyke March!

+ June 25th (3pm-11pm) – Rapture on the River: A Woman’s Dance (buy tickets here) this year will include a Wet T-Shirt Contest.

+ June 26th (12 noon step-off) – Pride Parade with Grand Marshalls Dan Savage & Terry Miller and Reverand Pat Bumgardner

Meet up with Autostraddlers: NYC Straddlers

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New Orleans, Louisiana: June 24th-26th

+ Parade starts at noon on Sunday.

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Portland, Oregon: June 17th – 19th

+With Deborah Cox and the two hot lesbians who make Kiss Kill happen.

+ Dyke March – June 18th, 5pm, North Park Blocks

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Pdx Autostraddlers

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San Diego, California: July 15-17th

+ Parade July 16. Featuring Margaret Cho, Salt-N-Pepa, God-des and She, among a bunch of others.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: San Diego Straddlers

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San Francisco, California: June 25th-26th

+ Pride Parade: June 26th — Grand marshall Chaz Bono. Also riding will be Yigit Pura, Olympia Dukakis and Armistead Maupin

+ Dyke March: June 25th, Rally in Dolores Park 3-7 pm.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Straddling by the Bay

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Seattle, Washington: June 25th-26th

+ “An Evening with Jennifer Knapp” on June 21st.

+ June 25th Pride Fest will feature Crystal Bowersox, Thelma Houston and YOUR FAVORITE BAND BETTY.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Seattlestraddle

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Minneapolis/St.Paul Pride: June 25th-26th

+ With DEBBIE FUCKING GIBSON.

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Twin Cities Straddlers

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Toronto, Canada: June 24th – July 3rd

+ Featuring “entertainment on eight stages” and performances of the play “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.”

+ Dyke March – July 2nd at 2pm

Meet up with Autostraddlers: Ohhh! Canada

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Vancouver, Canada: July 30th-31st

+ Parade July 31.

The 2011 Tony Awards Were Really Gay, Kinda Awesome

The Tonys are the perfect award show because there’s singing and dancing and it’s too gay to function. It’s a little bit about the awards, but it’s mostly about the performances.

Like any good non-New Yorker theater fan, I set aside a night to watch the Tony Awards every year, and I have to say, this was my favorite in recent memory. Yes, “Spider-man” was boring, “Memphis” was unnecessary, and Chris Rock needed to stop, but whatevs. There were a lot of great things that happened, too, especially if you like men’s choruses, which I do but for reasons which would not be appropriate to this situation.

Neil Patrick Harris was totally charming as the host. Everyone knew he was there to sing, and he did.

This year’s opening number was called “(Broadway Is) Not Just For Gays Anymore,” although a more appropriate titled might be “Not Just For Gay Men Anymore.” Not even Brooke Shields could ruin it.

This is one of those times when it’s important to separate the “G” from “LGBTetc.” Let’s be real: Out Lesbians, bisexuals, and trans* people haven’t been as visible both in scripts and behind-the-scenes, historically speaking, as the gay men. The Tonys were mostly for guys this year too, except for “Sister Act.” It’s not that the stories they’re telling are unimportant; they were just predominantly male-driven.

BUT I DIGRESS. Another topic for another day.

Neil Patrick Harris sang a duet with Hugh Jackman, who’s hosted the awards before and also was in “Oklahoma!” many moons ago in a far off place. In a night of gay things, this song may have been The Gayest of The Things. And “Priscilla Queen of the Desert” performed, so that’s saying something.

TV ACTORS IN OUR SHOW, WHAT COULD BE SWEETER?

Neil Patrick Harris was also a part of this random performance from “Company” that had a bunch of famous people in it, including Christina Hendricks. For like, half a second, it looks like there’s a lesbian couple! But there’s not, DON’T WORRY.

Eve Ensler was given the Isabelle Stevenson Award for “The Vagina Monologues” and for founding V-Day, which is kind of a big deal but they didn’t even mention it on TV.

In other news, Sutton Foster is the perfect human.

She won for Best Leading Actress in a musical for “Anything Goes” and for being awesome. Seriously, watch her tap dance (and then stand awkwardly at the front of the stage for a verse) and then mix/belt her face off. Woah.

This is how a dream comes true. Also, like she did in her first Tony acceptance speech, she gushed about her dresser. Guys, I teared up. It was great.

But the real star of the night was Frances McDormand, who won for Best Leading Actress in a Play for “Good People” and accepted the award looking like she just got off the subway. She’s my hero. She and Mark Rylance because who recites a poem instead of thanking people? Badasses, that’s who.

The other great speech of the night was Nikki M. James, who won Best Featured Actress in a Musical for “Book of Mormon” (over Patti LuPone!). She looked gorgeous and cried and refused to leave the stage when they told her to wrap it up.

Much to no one’s surprise, “Book of Mormon” cleaned up with nine awards, including Best Musical.

Like it’s closest relatives, “The Producers” and “Avenue Q,” it’s meant to be offensive, but here’s the thing: It’s really great that this won. The past decade or so of Broadway has become less and less original and more and more based on movies. People don’t want to invest in something they aren’t sure of, so if they have a choice between “Rocky” the musical and something unknown, “Rocky” will win every time.

“Mormon” has a lot going for it: catchy music, an irreverent story, and most importantly, a well-known creative team. Honestly, “South Park” is probably what gave the show the boost it needed to succeed. But the story is original and smart and funny, and that’s what American musical theater has traditionally been. It’s a nice change.

Daniel Radcliffe performed with “How To Succeed Without Really Trying” or “How To Succeed On Broadway Without Being a Broadway-Caliber Singer.” I know a lot of people liked it, but I was not one of those people. Harry Potter, I love you, but you’re not a good enough singer for that role. I’m not apologizing.

I don’t know very much about the plays this year, to be honest. “War Horse” won five awards, including Best Play and also has a giant puppet of a horse that looks like something from “Lion King.”

The other big winner among the plays was “Normal Heart,” which won Best Revival, Beat Leading Actor in a Play and Best Leading Actress. It’s about the AIDS pandemic’s effect on the gay community and is really heartbreaking. You should at least read it, I am thinking.

The show closed with Neil Patrick Harris doing a freestyle rap that made me miss “In The Heights” and Lin Manuel Miranda. It was a run-down of the awards, but the end was pretty relevant.

You can find a complete list of the winners here.

So what do you think? Were you OK with how everything went down? Were you following Gavin Creel‘s drunk tweets? I heard there was also basketball on last night, but that must’ve been on a different channel.

Kick Off NYC Pride With GO! and Real L Word’s Real Live Lesbians

Pride in New York City is so soon! And while it’s easy to get depressed thinking about the Rodeo Discos of yore (you guys, Mason-Dixon doesn’t even exist anymore!), there is a bright sunshine on the horizon because our friends at GO! Magazine are throwing a kickass Pride Kickoff Party that you should go to. It’s Pride! YAY!

What: GO! Magazine’s Pride Kickoff Party

Where: District 36 Nightclub, 9 West 36th Street
When: Wednesday, June 15, 7 p.m.

GO! Magazine is the epicenter of New York City lesbian nightlife and it divides its time between throwing the very best girl parties in the city and promoting the very best girl parties in the city and, of course, producing a kickass magazine which may or may not love the same people you do.

This year GO is bringing some Los Angeles residents cross-country to pollinate with all ye New Yorkers – you’ve seen them naked/half-naked, drunk, screaming, fighting, laughing and/or loving and now you’re gonna see them as the real human beings they actually are!! Did you know that Tracy seems even taller in person? You will!

Tracy, Francine, Romi, Whitney, Claire and Sara of The Real L Word will be in attendance along with 1,000 of your nearest dearest friends and exes. The event will also feature the announcement of all nominations for GO Magazine’s 5th Annual Readers’ Choice Nightlife Awards:

It’s time to nominate the ladies who keep your late-night calendar full–after all, just like the Academy, before we distribute the honors, we need to tally the votes. Join GO and celebrate Pride month at our Pride Kick-off and Awards Nominations Bash, where we officially unveil the list of nominees and categories and then roll out the red carpet and raise a glass like only GO Magazine can.They pour your shots, keep the bass turned up and probably know your ex-girlfriend. They are the reigning queens of New York City lesbian nightlife. And we are here to honor them, every year like clockwork, at GO’s Annual Nightlife Awards.

GO parties were the first girl parties I ever went to back in the heydey of my New York City youth because even though everyone from the scene showed up, it didn’t ever feel scene-y and was super diverse — like The L Word Season Four Premiere Party (with Jennifer Beals and Marlee Matlin!) (except we had to leave early because the episode was so terrible Haviland couldn’t stand it for one more minute), The 5th Anniversary Party (with Uh Huh Her, Julie Goldman,Dani Campbell, and a super-drunk Guinevere Turner!) and last year’s blowout at M2 Ultra Lounge featuring DJ Michelle Rodriguez , Kin-4-Life, Sarah Croce on the Red carpet, and, per ushe, lots of Go-Go Dancers and moderately famous women who like to go down on other women.

You can buy tickets at gomag.com. Go now, go.

2011 MTV Movie Awards Celebrate Twilight, Pseudo-Gayness and Also, Twilight

Sure, The MTV Movie Awards have never been known for bestowing great rewards upon spectacular works of cinematic genius. But with the advent of the Twilight franchise, it’s sort of become a really really long commercial for Twilight. There’s a limited number of Twilight movies, right? Like eventually this insanity will end?

“Seriously, Twilight won for best fight over Harry Potter? No. The results are so ridiculous, I don’t even know how to address them. They’re just… incorrect.”

– my intern

We wondered out loud if maybe we’re just too old for MTV now, but I think my 16-year-old self would have had a lot of snobby avant garde artist opinions about the exclusion of Blue Valentine and Robert Pattinson beating Jesse Eisenberg and Harry Potter for the Best Male Performance Crown.

Twilight: Eclipse won five awards, which is ridiculous because it was a terrible movie and there are only 12 awards total. Black Swan lost everything, which is probably because it’s rated R and none of the voters were old enough to get in the theater and it was either fantastic or awful. Harry Potter did not win enough things. The whole ceremony, actually, was not as gay as it was last year.

Here’s who won:

Best Jaw-Dropping Moment: Justin Bieber, Never Say Never

Best Jaw-Dropping Moment Nominees:
– Justin Bieber – Never Say Never (From the MTV website: “Who knew getting a Bieber lap dance would only cost as much as a movie ticket?”)
– James Franco – 127 Hours
– Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page – Inception
– Natalie Portman – Black Swan
– Steve-O – Jackass 3D

Have you ever noticed that Justin Bieber, who one “Best Jaw-Dropping Moment” for appearing on a screen in front of a bunch of 12-year-old girls with crushes on him,  looks like a lesbian?

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Best Female Performance: Kristen Stewart, Twilight

Best Female Performance Nominees:

– Kristen Stewart – Eclipse
– Emma Stone – Easy A
– Emma Watson – Harry Potter
– Jennifer Aniston – Just Go With It
– Natalie Portman – Black Swan

Have you ever noticed that Kristen Stewart sometimes looks like a lesbian?

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Best Kiss: Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart, Twilight

Best Kiss Nominees
– Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson – Eclipse
– Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt – Inception
– Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe – Harry Potter (“I can’t believe this one. It’s like they didn’t watch the movie. It’s not really a relevant plot point. Ugh. Dumb.”)
– Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner – Eclipse
– Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis – Black Swan

This year Robby & Kristy updated their traditional “should we kiss on stage, it’s so awkward” bit — but with a twist involving Rob Pattinson leaving our lovely tomboy all alone up there in her red mini-dress as he leapt over audience members to plant a giant kiss on Taylor Lautner. I believe this was the highlight of the evening.

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Generation Award: Reese Witherspoon

Reese Witherspoon told the audience that Robert Pattinson “underestimated her lesbianness.” We’re guessing this is actually a perpetual issue for Robert and the women he’s possibly attracted to. From the self-congratulatory MTV Movie Awards Website:

The actor [Robert Pattinson] went on to suggest that Witherspoon had trouble speaking while in a girdle, has a penchant for tequila and that she may or may not be “33 percent lesbian,” as an embarrassed Witherspoon hid her face and laughed from her seat. Pattinson concluded his remarks by saying, “It’s not always a bad thing to have sexual chemistry with your mother,” once again referencing his unseen part in “Vanity Fair.”

Reese Witherspoon’s response:

“It was good — except for Rob Pattinson. I mean, really: He called me 33 percent lesbian, which was a gross underestimation of my lesbian-ness.”

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Best Movie: Twilight

Best Movie Nominees
– Twilight: Eclipse
– Black Swan
– Harry Potter
– Inception
– Social Network

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Best Comedic Performance: Emma Stone, Easy A

I take it back about the gay kiss — the fact that a female won for Best Comedic Performance is the highlight of the evening, although she used her acceptance speech to mention: 1) everyone else in the category is funnier than her, 2) thank you fans, this is so nice.

Best Movie Nominees:

– Emma Stone – Easy A
– Adam Sandler – Just Go With It
– Ashton Kutcher – No Strings Attached
– Russell Brand – Get Him to the Greek
– Zach Galifianakis – Due Date

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Best Villan, Tom Felton – Harry Potter

Best Villan Nominees:

– Tom Felton – Harry Potter
– Christoph Waltz – The Green Hornet
– Leighton Meester – The Roommate
– Mickey Rourke – Iron Man 2
– Ned Beatty – Toy Story 3

Other winners include Ellen Page in Inception for “Best Scared-As-Shit Performance,” Chloë Grace Moretz in Kick-Ass for “Best Breakout Star,” and Robert Pattinson vs. Bryce Dallas Howard and Xavier Samuel in Eclipse for Best Fight.

Did you watch? Do you care? Was Twilight like the best movie of all time in the history of the whole world? Are the cast of Twilight the only people who still actually show up?

Bonnaroo 2011: Music Guide & Autostraddle’s Anticipatory Playlist

Autostraddle is going to Bonnaroo! Laneia has already talked about what we are/are not bringing this year, but we need to talk music. That’s what this is really about, right?

So let’s get down to it. Here are the bands we are super excited about, with the occasional interjectional feelings-based input from Laneia. Some artists are old, some are new, some we’ve never actually heard before. But we think they are all worth a listen, whether you’re actually going to Bonnaroo or not.

THE HEADLINERS

+ Eminem
11 p.m. Saturday, What Stage

Let’s start with the big names. Eminem is holding down the top spot on Saturday night this year. It’s a weird choice; rap just doesn’t seem like the type of thing that would suit most of the Bonnaroo crowd. Jay Z was the main headliner last year, though, and everyone seemed to love it. So maybe this will work, but idk, I love Jay Z and I hate Eminem.

+ Arcade Fire
11 p.m. Friday, What Stage

The Arcade Fire has the top spot on Friday, and unlike Eminem, they are an absolutely perfect choice. They’re an awesome band to hear outside, (espesh if you’re in an altered state like 3/4 of the Bonnaroo crowd), they fit the festival atmosphere, and they’re touring with The Suburbs, arguably their best album yet.

The Suburbs won best album of the year at the Grammy’s, spawning that lovely meme. I can’t decide how I feel about this. On one hand, I love the album so much that I want the entire world to hear it. But sometimes it feels like Win Butler let me in on some amazing secret, and I don’t want to share it. Alas, that is not how music works, so at least I get to see them perform it live. Laneia will have to hold me back from climbing on stage and tackling someone out of pure joy.

+ The Black Keys
8 p.m. Saturday, What Stage

These guys have been making the festival rounds for a while now. They were at Bonnaroo last year, then Lollapalooza, and now they’re back, with higher billing. I have loved them for a long time, and they rocked when I saw them a few years ago. But let’s be real, The Black Keys are just not a festival band. They belong in a small, intimate concert hall with wooden floors covered in beer, cigarette smoke hanging in the air. I’ve tried to give them a chance at festivals a few times, but for some reason, their music does not sound as good when they play outside. Give them a try if you want, and of course their albums, including Brothers, are always worth it, but I will be skipping them at Bonnaroo this year.

+ My Morning Jacket
8 p.m. Friday, What Stage

Does anyone have any feelings re: MMJ?

Laneia: “One time in 2002, I made a mix cd primarily focused on Mason Jennings and it included one song by My Morning Jacket. I think My Morning Jacket only exists at festivals. My Morning Jacket is a really good band name.”

SARAH IS EXCITED ABOUT THESE:

+ Lil Wayne
1:30 a.m. Saturday, Which Stage

All right, I’ll admit it, I’m such a hipster that my only real exposure to Lil Wayne is from 500 Days of Weezy. But I firmly believe that album has given me a genuine love for Lil Wayne. Plus, he is playing until 3 a.m. right after Arcade Fire, and I appreciate the epicness of that scheduling. If ever there was a rapper that belonged at Bonnaroo, it’s Lil’ Wayne.

Laneia: “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Lil’ Wayne song. Have I?”

+ Mumford & Sons
6:15 p.m. Saturday, Which Stage

Sigh No More was one of the best albums of 2010, and Mumford & Sons are still going strong with it. Like The Black Keys, they have been hitting the festivals hard. But these guys are actually good in an outdoor setting. I was lucky enough to see them play together with The Temper Trap at an after party at Lolla last year, and they fucking killed it.

+ Freelance Whales
5:30 p.m. Thursday, That Tent AND 4:45 p.m. Friday, Sonic Stage

Weathervanes is hands down my favorite album right now. I can’t believe it took me so long to finally download it. You really need to own the album so you can listen to “Location” on repeat for days, like me. Their talking-really-fast-how-has-he-not-taken-a-breath-yet style is really interesting, and I like the continuous ghost/death metaphors in their lyrics. Surprisingly, it remains a hopeful record.

These guys are playing twice: once on Thursday night and again Friday afternoon. Hopefully, this will be just like my special moments with Brandi Carlile last year, and I will fall even deeper in love with them.

+ Girl Talk
2:30 a.m. Sunday, This Tent

GIRL TALK! I thought I loved Gregg Gillis a lot, but then he released All Day, and the world became shinier and more awesome. It’s absolutely his best record yet; he took his mixes to a whole new level. Are you over I Want You Back + Lil Kim yet? I’m not. Also his concerts are amazing and make everyone feel super high on life. This can only be improved by being outside in a field in Tennessee, under the stars, surrounded by thousands of hippies.

Unfortch, he’s playing at 2:30 in the morning on Saturday night. I guess that means I will be bringing Red Bull and Five Hour Energy to Bonnaroo this year.

+ Florence and the Machine
6:45 p.m. Friday, This Tent

Is Florence and the Machine over, or still a thing? I can’t tell. But I think they are still enough of a thing to go see at Bonnaroo. “Kiss With A Fist” is still a jam, right?

+ Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears
12:30 p.m Saturday, This Tent

Oh hey, these guys are going to be so so great. I love their sound, and their live show is supposed to be excellent. They have a soulful, old Southern rock feeling (and by that I mean Chuck Berry/Little Richard, not Lynyrd Skynyrd). Listen to the song below, and also this amazing version of “Bitch, I Love You.”

LANEIA HAS FEELINGS ABOUT:

+ Sleigh Bells
10:15 p.m. Thursday, The Other Tent

They’re a Brooklyn duo, Derek Miller & Alexis Krauss. This stuff is noise pop at it’s finest, punchy and bright. They released their debut album, Treats, last summer. Intern Morgan says they are SO GOOD live, and definitely worth checking out.

Laneia: “When I need to work nonstop for hours, I play Treats on repeat and when I’m done, my thoughts have sort of flatlined and all I’m left with is a pile of sent emails, cleaned dishes and the lyrics of A/B Machines on an unrelenting loop in my brain. Bliss.”

+ Loretta Lynn
6:45 p.m. Saturday, That Tent

Loretta Lynn is basically a legend. She has more awards than any other woman in country music history. She was married at 13 and had four children before she turned 19, which makes songs like “The Pill” even more interesting and groundbreaking. She released an album produced by Jack White in 2004 — Van Lear Rose. This is gonna be live, uh-huh:

Laneia: “Oh my god you guys.”

+ The Strokes
6:45 p.m. Sunday, Which Stage

They released a new album this year, Angles, after a two-year break from the band.

Laneia: “I am filled with negative feelings about this new album! It’s totally uninspired and stale. Am I supposed to believe that after two years, none of these guys experienced a single thing that made them grow as artists? Under Cover of Darkness sounds like a songwritten by a Strokes cover band, from like five fucking years ago. I don’t know, I’m bitter. If you don’t have anything new to say, why not just wait until you do?”

+ Beirut
6:15 p.m. Sunday, The Other Tent

Musical Intern Morgan describes Beirut as “swelling vocals over Balkan folk and Eastern European-influenced melodies.”

+ Matt & Kim
3:15 p.m. Friday, This Tent

They’ve evolved over the years, getting more polished and more poppy with their latest albums, like Sidewalks. Fun fact: the police in the Lessons Learned video (see below) were real, and Matt & Kim only got out of being arrested by claiming they were filming a mayonnaise commercial.

+ Cold War Kids
5 p.m. Sunday, This Tent

Apparently, Cold War Kids are labeled as a Christian band, but you would never know it. They make fun, punk and soul-influenced rock. Check out their latest album, released this January, Mine Is Yours. Music Editor Crystal is a serious fan of Cold War Kids, and, slightly related, on May 7 they tweeted “Doc Martens have always been my favorite shoe, for guys & girls.” Instant love.

+ Best Coast
7:15 p.m. Thursday, The Other Tent

Best Coast includes former Vivian Girls drummer Ali Koehler. The album Crazy for You is summer in the form of music. Hipster Runoff describes Best Coast as a “fuzzy buzzy band that sings abt dank, California, boys, and kitty cats” SO THERE YOU GO.

ALSO WE LIKE THESE:

+ Justin Townes Earle (@justintearle)
2:30 p.m. Friday, The Other Tent

JTE has released an album every year since 2008, a pace that can probably only be surpassed by The Mountain Goats. His style is polished blues and folk-influenced country. His latest is Harlem River Blues and Laneia says you should buy that right now.

Laneia: “You should buy Harlem River Blues right now.”

+ Ray LaMontagne (@RayLaMontagne)
6:15 p.m. Friday, Which Stage

Ray quit his shoe factory job to become a singer-songwriter, and then won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album with God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise. His voice is soulful and amazing.

+ Hesta Prynn (@hestaprynnmusic)
9 p.m. Thursday, The Silent Disco

Hesta is an Autostraddle favorite! Former member of the all-girl hip-hop group Northern State, The New York Post called her “M.I.A. And Miike Snow’s lovechild,” which is a pretty damn awesome description. Check out her EP Can We Go Wrong.

+ Old Crow Medicine Show (@thelowcrow)
2 p.m. Saturday, Which Stage

These guys caught their break while busking outside a North Carolina pharmacy. Also, they were on the Transamerica soundtrack, which is sweet. Check out their 2008 album Tennessee Pusher.

Laneia: “If you’re gonna seriously listen to OCMS, you have to hear Greetings from Wawa. Everyone loves Wagon Wheel from the self-titled album, but there a couple of amazing tracks on Wawa, like Kitty Clyde and Oh My Love, that were seemingly recorded live at a radio station? Or possibly on a different planet? I don’t even know you guys, it’s so fascinating.”

+ Phosphorescent (@Phosphorescent)
1:45 p.m. Friday, This Tent

They release Here’s to Taking It Easy in 2010, and one of their songs includes the line “naked, swirling like otters (you know how they are).” Sold.

Laneia: “A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise is just the most beautiful, haunting song. I would try to explain how much I love it, but I can’t wave my arms around in this post and shout ‘DOESN’T THIS MAKE YOU WANT TO DIE BUT LIKE, IN A GOOD WAY??’ so you’ll have to pretend I did. To Willie is Phosphorescent’s tribute to Willie Nelson, in which they cover the lesser-known, sort of inherently sad tracks, mostly dealing with addiction and loss, like Too Sick to Pray and The Last Thing I Needed (First Thing This Morning). Fucking amazing tribute album END OF STORY.”

+ Deerheart

Intern Morgan wants to recommend Deerheart, who she is friends with, so of course we’re doing that here and now. They opened for Against Me!, the Dropkick Murphys and Bruce Springsteen a month or so ago. That sounds very exciting!

Next: A special Bonnaroo Playlist just for you!