Reflections Ten Years Later on The First LGBTQ Bloggers & Citizen Journalists National Summit

Yours truly at the LGBT Blogger Summit in 2008.

I first began blogging at the suggestion of my therapist who suggested I write a book for those coming out in "mid-life" since so many of the existing materials at the time were aimed at teens and young adults.  There was little available for those in their 40's or 50's.  Once I started the endeavor of gathering materials through blog posts something happened.  This blog became a needed form of therapy and slowly took on a life of its own.  A major transformation took place in December, 2008, when I was privileged to be selected to participate n the LGBTQ Bloggers & Citizen Journalists National Summit in December 2008.  I won a spot among those invited to the all expense paid gathering in no small part due to my role in helping Mike Rogers "out" then Virginia 2nd District Congressman, Ed Schrock, a closeted Republican with the second most anti-gay voting record in Congress.  I had also assisted activist Wayne Besen expose "ex-gay" fraud Michel Johnston, a former poster boy for so-called conversion therapy. Despite these efforts, this blog still had a small readership back in 2008 yet was a labor of love. At the blogger Summit, I was in the big league and eventually when on to also be a contributor to The Bilerico Project which the Washington Post once referred to as a "must read" blog (it later became a part of LGBTQ Nation). 

Ten years later I am still in contact with many of the summit attendees via Facebook, following each other's blogs and writings, and a listserv through which we can quickly spread stories and information to hundreds of activists and journalists across the country. Fellow attendee Sue Kerr has a post on her blog that pulls together great memories of the experience. Like Sue, I'd love to see another summit! My husband also has found memories of the experience.  Here are highlights from Sue's post (go to Sue's post for the links to participating blogs - many of which are still ongoing -  and a video where I can be seen standing near Sue):

[T]he first LGBTQ Bloggers and Citizens Journalists National Summit. It was December 5-7, 2008. I met a lot of folx there and my mind was awhirl with new possibilities for blogging.

More than 60 organizations and blogs were represented. I’m trying to remember how I was invited – I think I had been interacting with Mike Rogers (formerly of BlogActive, now know with Raw Story) online after he wrote about Rick Santorum. This gathering was a prelude to the Netroots Connection preconferences that began in 2009 (in Pittsburgh)

Rather than wax eloquently about my memories, let me share a few links.

Here are my original blog posts summaries My Preview  Day One Summary Post

Pam Spaulding’s write up of the weekend (Pam’s House Blend)

More from PamThere was great coverage of the framing used by the right wing to demonize and restrict expanding LGBT rights and how the LGBT movement can counter that framing going forward with different political strategies.

Tony from Perge Modo has a post

Today, in the revolution that has now begun for ownership of individual rights, bloggers are the new Paul Revere, but there are hundreds of thousands of them and they are not all shouting the same thing about the British coming. They are shouting huge heaps of overlapping static. Sometimes they pull together suddenly like a school of fish responding to the force of the current. There is no skill to this. There is only speed. You almost need to be out of the water to see, let alone control this. Nevertheless, the political bloggers feel that coalescence is within their grasp.

Read the takeaway of a filmmaker at Working Films

Let’s get meta – a post about a media article about the gathering with links to other bloggers reactions (whew!)  What LGBT bloggers do when they write about blogging conventions

From Blabbeando, a list of blogs in attendance in alphabetical order (probably not a complete list):

• Bilerico Project

• Blabbeando

• BlogActive

• Boi From Troy

• Buffawhat

• Burnt Orange Report

• Calitics

• Michael-in-Norfolk Coming Out in Mid-Life

• (en)gender

• Existential Punk

• Farmboiz

• Gay Agenda

• Gay Persons of Color

• Get Busy, Get Equal (ACLU LGBT Project Blog)

• Good as You

• Greta Cristina’s Blog

• hunter of justice

• InterstateQ

• Jimbo

• Joe.My.God

• Knucklecrack

• The Mad Professah Lectures

• Mombian

• The New Gay

• Ninjatron

• PageOneQ

• Pam’s House Blend

• Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents

• Project Q Atlanta

• Rod2.0

• That Gay Girl Tamara

• UK Gay News

• Working Films

Back to the present  – are you reading any of the above blogs or their spin-offs? When you have some time, I urge you to dive back into this glorious archive of LGBTQ activism and politics during the latter half of the 2000’s and reacquaint yourself. I hope someone, somewhere, takes the time to create an actual archive.

I interact with some of these folks via email and all sorts of social media. I’ve been to two follow up events associated with Netroots Nation since then. And I’ve continued to blog. During that first year, Laura and I met with media expert Cathy Renna for advice on my blog. She told us we were doing a good job and basically to keep on with what we had accomplished. Thanks to the wonders of a former webhost, you can see the original blog format from that very day.

A lot has happened in ten years. Netroots Nation will be in Philadelphia in July 2019 so I hope we’ll attend. One thing that has not changed is the lack of revenue in blogging – to get this lesbian voice and others to these events, there has to be scholarships and fellowships and other supports. It might interesting if someone crunched the numbers about the state of the blogosphere in 2008 versus now, including revenue data.

I miss having a chance for blogger connection. I’d like to see events that bring people together, old and new. I’d like to harness the power of experience to the energy and new ideas of today’s leaders.

Here’s a snip of video via Tony Adams survering the crowd. You can see me in the right hand margin wearing a black sweater and having very short hair.

I will always treasure the experience and the brilliant and interesting friends I made (the now husband was there for the weekend too and enjoyed the experience).  I'd love to do a reunion summit where we could work on strategies for the coming 10 years.  Kudos to Sue for putting together her excellent post.  Thanks also to Progressive Insurance and Microsoft for their underwriting of the 2008 event. 

Sounding Dissent Over Salvation Army Bigotry

I've written a number of times on this blog (and in my most recent VEER magazine column) about the anti-gay bigotry of the Salvation Army and suggested that those looking to make charitable contributions avoid the Salvation Army like the plague. Like the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army preaches that gays must live a life of celibacy devoid of intimate loving relationships. For students of accurate history, all of this condemnation is based on a few passages written in the Bible by ignorant nomads whose main purpose was to differentiate the Jewish tribes from other societies where homosexuality was accepted as a norm. As a result, per the Salvation Army, gays are doomed to a life of loneliness. It's ignorance and bigotry taken to the highest levels. Why give funds to an organization that embraces ignorance and engages in the same sort of self-congratulatory hypocrisy as the Pharisees whom Christ so frequently condemned and lambasted in the Gospels. Yet unfortunately, too many donors still do not know the real story of the Salvation Army. Fortunately, my friend and Bilerico Project editor in chief, Bil Browning has worked consistently to get the word out. Now, the New York Times has picked up on Bil's efforts and in the future people will hopefully know to direct that contributions elsewhere. Here are highlights from the Times story:

Bil Browning and his boyfriend were homeless. To protect the identity of the boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend), Mr. Browning will not say specifically where, just that it was in “southern Indiana,” about 20 years ago. But he is very explicit about who refused to give them shelter.

“The Salvation Army refused to help us,” Mr. Browning recalls, “unless we broke up and then left the ‘sinful homosexual lifestyle’ behind. We slept on the street, and they didn’t help when we declined to break up at their insistence.”

Mr. Browning’s boyfriend was wearing a “Silence = Death” AIDS pin on his jacket, which must have tipped off the Salvation Army worker. “He told us we needed to be saved,” Mr. Browning says. “If we were willing to attend church services, he could help. We would have to break up, only one of us could stay in the shelter, and if there was room for the other, he would have to be on the opposite side of the room, and we wouldn’t even look at each other.”

Now Mr. Browning, a writer and gay rights advocate, is using his blog to publicize a decade-old boycott of the Salvation Army. The boycott’s proponents say those who drop money into the Salvation Army’s ubiquitous red kettles at Christmastime, or shop in its thrift stores, often know little about the organization’s evangelical Christianity, its opposition to homosexuality, and its occasional attempts to influence public policy on gay rights.

On his Web site, Mr. Browning, whom the Christian magazine World recently called “the Red Kettle Menace,” encourages people to donate instead to other organizations, like the Red Cross or Doctors without Borders.

The Salvation Army’s “Position Statement” on homosexuality, found on its Web site, reads in part: “The Salvation Army does not consider same-sex orientation blameworthy in itself. Homosexual conduct, like heterosexual conduct, requires individual responsibility and must be guided by the light of scriptural teaching. Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. The Salvation Army believes, therefore, that Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life.”

In 2001, The Washington Post obtained a Salvation Army document that said the administration of President George W. Bush had promised to honor a Salvation Army request: that religious charities receiving federal money be exempt from local gay anti-discrimination laws. The day the request became public, the Bush administration said it was being denied.

And in 2004, in response to a City Council ordinance requiring that organizations with city contracts offer benefits to gay employees’ partners, the Salvation Army threatened to stop operating in New York City. In 2006, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did not have to enforce the ordinance, which had been enacted over his veto; the Salvation Army never left New York City.

[A] dollar dropped into a red kettle in New York City, a quarter of a penny ends up at national headquarters, where conversations with the government — not lobbying, Mr. Hood says — may take place.

As to the complaint of discrimination based on sexual orientation, he says it is against Salvation Army policy. “If they were legitimate clients looking for food, they should have been helped,” he says of Mr. Browning and his ex-boyfriend.

While the Salvation Army tries to dance around and deny that it's a nasty, bigoted organization, I side with Bil Browning and others I know who have been discriminated against first hand. As a result, I'd frankly rather light my money on fire before I'd ever place it in a Salvation Army kettle. Like many other far right Christian organizations, the Salvation Army makes me long for the day when Christianity - or at least the version propounded by the Salvation Army - is a dead religion. There is no place for hate and bigotry in the world and organizations that foment it need to be thrown on the trash heap of history.

Why You Shouldn't Donate to the Salvation Army Bell Ringers

I've written about this topic before, but as we head into the holiday season it's worth stressing that some charities such as the Salvation Army are NOT worthy of our donations. Yes, the organization's web site pretends to be accepting regardless of one's sexual orientation, but as my friend, Bilerico Project editor Bil Browning, notes in a recent blog post, actions speak far louder than words. With many, many worthy charities that do not engage in religious based anti-LGBT discrimination, there is no excuse for donating funds to the Salvation Army. I have absolutely no problem walking right on by the donation kettles. The bigger challenge is to not say what I really think. Here are highlights from Bil's post:

As the holidays approach, the Salvation Army bell ringers are out in front of stores dunning shoppers for donations. If you care about gay rights, you'll skip their bucket in favor of a charity that doesn't actively discriminate against the LGBT community.

The Salvation Army has a history of active discrimination against gays and lesbians. While you might think you're helping the hungry and homeless by dropping a few dollars in the bright red buckets, not everyone can share in the donations. Many LGBT people are rejected by the evangelical church charity because they're "sexually impure."

The church claims it holds "a positive view of human sexuality," but then clarifies that "sexual intimacy is understood as a gift of God to be enjoyed within the context of heterosexual marriage." The Salvation Army doesn't believe that gays and lesbians should ever know the intimacy of any loving relationship, instead teaching that "Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life."

On its webpage, the group claims that "the services of The Salvation Army are available to all who qualify, without regard to sexual orientation." While the words are nice, their actions speak volumes. They blatantly ignore the position statement and deny LGBT people services unless they renounce their sexuality, end same-sex relationships, or, in some cases, attend services "open to all who confess Christ as Savior and who accept and abide by The Salvation Army's doctrine and discipline." In other words, if you're gay or lesbian, you don't qualify.

The organization also has a record of actively lobbying governments worldwide for anti-gay policies - including an attempt to make consensual gay sex illegal. (Yes, you're paying lobbyists with those donations.)

Since 1986 the Salvation Army has engaged in five major assaults on the LGBT community's civil rights and attempted to carve out exemptions that would allow them to deny gays and lesbians needed services as well as employment.

***When New Zealand considered passage of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986, the Salvation Army collected signatures in an attempt to get the legislation killed. The act decriminalized consensual sex between gay men. The measure passed over the charity's objections.

***In the United Kingdom, the Salvation Army actively pushed passage of an amendment to the Local Government Act. The amendment stated that local authorities "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." The law has since been repealed, but it led many schools and colleges to close LGBT student organizations out of fear they'd lose their government funding.

***In 2001, the organization tried to extract a resolution from the White House that they could ignore local non-discrimination laws that protected LGBT people. While the commitment would have applied to all employees, the group claimed that it needed the resolution so it "did not have to ordain sexually active gay ministers and did not have to provide medical benefits to the same-sex partners of employees." After lawmakers and civil rights activists revealed the Salvation Army's active resistance to non-discrimination laws, the White House admitted the charity was seeking the exemptions.

***Also in 2001, the evangelical charity actively lobbied to change how the Bush administration would distribute over $24 billion in grants and tax deductions by urging the White House deny funding to any cities or states that included LGBT non-discrimination laws. Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary, issued a statement saying the administration was denying a "regulation sought by the church to protect the right of taxpayer-funded religious organizations to discriminate against homosexuals."

In 2004, the Salvation Army threatened to close all their soup kitchens in New York City to protest the city's decision to require all vendors and charities doing business with the city to adhere to all civil rights laws. The organization balked at having to treat gay employees equal to straight employees.

I've seen the discrimination the Salvation Army preaches first hand. When a former boyfriend and I were homeless, the Salvation Army insisted we break up before they'd offer assistance. We slept on the street instead and declined to break up as they demanded.

Instead of donating to the Salvation Army, choose a different charity that will help everyone without prejudice. Find a local secular charity - or here are some national organizations that provide help to anyone who needs it.

Amen to Bil's recommendations. Give your hard earned money to non-discrimiatory charities and hopefully in time the Salvation Army will "see the light" or wither away and cease being a cesspool of bigotry.

30 Years of Far Right Christians Who Incite Murder

As even a casual reader of this blog will quickly figure out, I am no fan of the poisonous form of Christianity marketed by the professional Christian set, intolerant and hate motivated conservative churches, and of course, the falsely name "family values" organizations. As Anne Rice noted in her interview with her son, Christopher Rice recently, if these people represent the true face of Christianity, then I don;t want to be a Christian. Fellow Bilerico contributor Patricia Nell Warren has a post that takes a good look at the horrid handiwork of these merchants of hate - and indeed the incitement to murder. Unfortunately, the main stream media all too often utterly refuses to show the larger public the real face of these people. Here are highlights from Patricia's lengthy post:

Here in the U.S., we have our own home-grown Bahatis who incite violence against gays and other groups as well. For 30 years now, they've been brazenly building their nationwide falling-domino machine, inciting murder of certain U.S. citizens. And they've been exporting their hate speech to other countries through missionary work. So far, the American people have let them get away with it.

By "hate speech," I mean that brand of rhetoric that goes beyond mere disagreement, to advocating injury and death for certain groups of people. Any religion is capable of hate speech, no matter what they believe in. But in the U.S. we have a specific problem with extremist Bible-based religion, because of the powerful missionary spirit that drives it.

Righters who incite murder usually deny their guilt to the face of the God in whom they say they believe. After all -- they have no blood on to their personal hands! The purpose of their maneuver is to incite others -- nobody believers who are expendable, and passionate enough t do the dirty work for them. While the nobodies go to prison, or even death row, the inciters go free, so they can continue preaching their poison in freedom, power and wealth. It's one of the oldest political tricks on the planet.

FBI hate-crime statistics for 1995-2008 tell us that, during those 13 years alone, over 20,000 Americans were victims of crimes against sexual orientation, including numerous community leaders besides Harvey Milk. Side by side with religious issues polarizing the country more and more, the stats show these crimes happening more and more in recent years. And those 20,000+ are just the crimes that got counted

America has exported this violence against gays into African countries, along with the more virulent missionaries that went there. Today there are the ultra-conservative African Catholics and Episcopalians (like Episcopal Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria) who have all fueled the explosive anti-gay climate that is building across central Africa, not only in Uganda, but other countries as well. But it is the American NAR [New Apostolic Reformation, aka Joel's Army], with their goal of setting up puppet "governments for Jesus" everywhere in Africa, who have done the most to unleash all that inciting against LGBT activists.

Why this stark contrast between the way our justice system treated the radical Left and the way it treated the radical right? Why have the American people done so little to stop this deadly trend? [Because] It is politically difficult to attack the Bible as the source of radical-right incitings for violent death, when so many moderate Americans have warm fuzzies about the Bible. Since childhood they've felt a naive Sunday School reverence for what they call "the Good Book."

But most Americans have never actually bothered to read the Bible cover to cover. If they did, they might see the passages where all the hate speech is coming from, and their warm fuzzies for the Good Book might vanish overnight. Today, any efforts to prohibit Americans from advocating gory religious massacre, or to punish them if their words have provably led to someone's death, raises a daunting issue of free speech. Our country has yet to deal with this speech issue in a courageous and clear-minded manner.

The American people had better wake up to what's happening right in their front yards. Americans who are more moderate than conservative, and who fondly believe that the "Good Book" is a good model for American society, need to start asking themselves if they what that book to be used as a murder weapon. As long as there is a public policy that God "wants His people to violently destroy His
enemies," some of us will pay the ultimate price for somebody else's perceived
"right" to demand that all of us should be shot.

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.

Blog Launch - Bilerico-DC

I suspect that many readers have read the blog Bilerico Project from time to time. I was lucky enough to meet a number of the contributors to that blog as well as its editor-in-chief at the LGBT Blogger Summit in early December, 2008. Now, a new sister blog, Bilerico-DC, will soon be launching and I've been invited to be one of the contributing writers. A soft launch will take place over the next two weeks with a full launch on March 2, 2009.

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The plan is that Bilerico-DC will cover politics and culture inside the Washington, DC, Beltway from a LGBT perspective. However, because DC is the federal city and local politics in Virginia and Maryland are at times somewhat national politics as well, in addition to covering what happens on Capitol Hill and at the White House, etc, Bilerico-DC will also have strong coverage about what's happening in Virginia and Maryland. As you might suspect, I will be writing about both Virginia and national issues.

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I encourage readers to check out the new blog as well as the parent blog. Some of my articles will be cross posted at this blog, but some will not. I am looking forward to this new blogging experience.