Influence of Gay Bloggers Highlighted in Washington Post

The Washington Post has an article up today entitled "Gay Bloggers' Voices Rise in Chorus of Growing Political Influence" that among other things profiles Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend. Having met Pam at the LGBT Blogger Summit last December, I can vouch for her intelligence, quick wit and great sense of humor. Ditto for Mike Rogers also mentioned in the article. The article also notes several other "must read" blogs that include the Bilerico Project for which I am now a contributor through Bilerico-DC (that blog's formal launch will be on March 2, 2009). The article likewise notes how the gay political presence online is helping to re-energize and strengthen the gay rights movement in a bottom-up manner, with bloggers from off the beaten track having the ability to be involved. I congratulate Pam, Mike and other gay bloggers - a number of whom I met at the Summit - for their efforts to make a difference. Here are some story highlights:

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Only the blogosphere, perhaps, has room for Pam Spaulding -- a black lesbian who lives in North Carolina, the only state in the South that has not banned same-sex marriage. "California, Arizona and Florida all passed marriage amendments in November," says Spaulding, 44, an IT manager by day and a round-the-clock blogger. "All eyes are on North Carolina now." . . . What she doesn't write is that, so long as she's blogging, what happens in North Carolina won't stay in the Tar Heel State.

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Pam's House Blend is an influential voice in the gay political blogosphere, must-reads that include the Bilerico Project, Towleroad and AMERICAblog, each attracting a few hundred to a few thousand hits a day. Just as the liberal Net-roots and the conservative "rightroots" movements have affected traditional party structures, the still relatively small gay political presence online is rebooting the gay rights movement in a decentralized, spontaneous, bottom-up way. It's spreading news via blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Online, a story about two 16-year-old girls in a Lutheran private school in California being expelled for "conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians" -- as the school's lawyer describes it -- goes viral. And hits nerves.

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In the past, someone like Spaulding would have been relegated to the sidelines. She doesn't work for national gay rights organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign or the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. She lives with her partner, Kate, an audiologist, in Durham, far from San Francisco, New York or Washington, where gay activism has been historically based. But now she's helping shape the agenda, one voice in a chorus of sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious, often in-your-face voices that is pushing established gay groups and redefining the meaning of grass-roots action in this new media age.

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"What happened after Proposition 8 caught the national gay groups completely off guard. I think it surprised them. I think it really showed them that when it comes to harnessing grass-roots energy, they need to get online," says Kevin Naff, editor of the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper. "What happened online came together overnight for little or no money, and the protests were covered by the mainstream press. If national groups wanted to coordinate the kind of mass protests we saw, they would spend $1 million and take six months to do it."

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Though Andrew Sullivan, the openly gay Washington media veteran, has been blogging since 2000, for many, the gay political presence online began nearly five years ago. That's when blogger Mike Rogers, a longtime activist, began outing gay staffers on Capitol Hill who worked for Republicans supporting what he called "anti-gay" policies. It was controversial, it was provocative, it got everyone's attention. But the gay political blogosphere wasn't just about outing. From the outset, it highlighted issues that bloggers felt were misunderstood, back-burnered or not fully covered by the mainstream media.

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For instance, when it was announced that the Rev. Rick Warren, whose megachurch in Orange County, Calif., endorsed Prop. 8, would deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration, gay bloggers pounced. . . . On inauguration weekend, when the opening prayer by Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay priest to be ordained as a bishop in a major Christian church, was excluded from the live HBO broadcast of the concert at Lincoln Memorial, bloggers pounced again. HBO ended up re-airing the broadcast with Robinson, and pressure from the gay blogosphere was one of the reasons why.

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And the sheer diversity of blogs written by gays, lesbians and transgenders proves that, like all minority groups, the gay community is not monolithic. Though they may blog about the same topic -- say, Prop. 8 -- it doesn't mean they'll arrive at the same conclusion.

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Spaulding started blogging in 2004, the year 11 states passed laws banning same-sex marriage. She blogged because she wanted to express her frustration, not because she thought people would actually read her postings. But slowly, through online word of mouth, people did. Her influence is not due to the total number of people who read her -- she averages about 8,000 unique visitors a day -- but the kind of people who do, many of whom are movers and shakers in the gay community.

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"Obama has said over and over again that his will be an inclusive presidency," Spaulding says. "So we'll see. Words are just words. They must become actions. Everyone will be closely watching." Including this blogging black lesbian from the South.