Medium Is the Message for Gay NYC Bloggers
by Ambrose Aban
EDGE News Contributor
Friday Mar 30, 2007
MIND BLOGGERING
The way they throw stuff up ont he Net these days, shaping who we are, breaking news even primetime superstars, Anderson Cooper and Diane Sawyer, are missing or not aware of so quickly, killing journalism and democratizing the mainstream media.
It is mindblowing the way bloggers blog these days. Screaming for our attention, they demand to be heard. At least some of the time, they succeed in feeding our appetite for juicy bits and pieces of the truth, or even real breaking news that rivals what all-news TV channels are giving us.
Notable New York-based gay bloggers include Andrew Belonsky, David Hauslaib, Andy Towle, Seth Abramovitch, Ethan Gray, Joe Jervis, Sascha, Pauline Park, Big Mouth and John Aravosis. These increasingly well known figures have become more and more influential as a new breed of journalist, creating greater awareness of gay culture in general. And they aren’t just playing around, either.
Some of them have scooped USA Today, the Washington Post, CNN and other mainstream media outlets. They have not only immersed themselves in communications technology, but have also helped change attitude and mindsets as they propel controversial stories into public consciousness.
Call them bloggers and you are missing the point. Call them journalists, and you’ll also sell them short; however, if they are more than that, it is hard to categorize them.
Sometimes, in fact, they are just your neighbors who happen to be more vocal and opinionated. As one of them readily and happily admitted in an interview, he relishes the notion of having creative freedom and blogging is a great way for him to create a public discussion.
"I am motivated by a number of things these days--other than my bank account--as I try to entertain and inform," says the editor-in-chief of Queerty, Andrew Belonsky, only half-jokingly. "We don’t aspire to be news readers. We put a spin on things for our readers’ amusement. But we’re still trying to make sure they know what’s happening where, when, how and why."
Belonsky, who is not one to let his brain run idle, says the diversity of the community is what is keeping him thinking very hard these days. It’s an issue that’s weighed on him since the beginning of his activitism. At one point, in his more optimistic younger days, he thought that a queer utopia--a place where all gayboys could come together and be pals--would someday come to fruition.
"I don’t anymore," he now says. "I realized there could be no one type of community--regardless of sexuality, race, religion. You know, people are shaped by too many factors to relate to everyone else, especially for such an arbitrary reason as one’s sexuality."
What really burns him up is when people refer to "the gay community" as a monolith. "It’s ridiculous," he says. "I think that we need to celebrate the fact that there are different types of gay people--and, of course, all people--and realize that the only thing some groups have in common is that they lack basic civil rights and, of course, sleep with people of the same sex."
Belonsky says he’s also motivated because he believes in what he calls "our mission." "Homosexuality is by far the most divisive issue in America," he notes. "As I wrote in one of my posts, ’gay’ may count as one of the most common words in the English language. And that’s saying something. It’s important to me that our readers understand the homo happenings, but also that the gays--ourselves included--are kept in check."
Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God blog, agrees. "We might see a bit of the power of the blogosphere in this country--the power to make business listen to customers," he says. "To right wrongs is very inspiring. This is the kind of thing that makes us tick." Jervis further happily confesses that blogging has made him more friends than thousands of nights spent hanging out in gay bars. On a selfish level, he says it has immeasurably improved his social life.
"Over the last year and a half my focus had turned to gay activism and general gay culture, with only the occasional short story, running features such as HomoQuotable in which I provide quotes from current gay newsmakers," he says.
Jervis is finally adding advertisers, something he swore he’d never do. "I’ve never dreamed that my readership would explode to the level it is today, making advertising much more lucrative," he explains.
Jervis says he lets the news of the day inspire him to blog. "I am continually torn between my distaste for the rise in PC culture and my desire to see those that bad-mouth gay people get punished," he says. "For example, the silly punishments meted out on students who say, ’That’s so gay’, versus Ann Coulter’s usage of ’faggot’."
Meanwhile, Sascha, the founder of BigQueer, which houses arguably the most active group of gay bloggers, says one of the things that is keeping her thinking hard these days is the horrific injustices that queer immigrants and their partners are forced to deal with every day, "from not being able to sponsor their non-U.S. citizen partners for green cards to the HIV ban that can be waived for straights because they can marry but not for queers. I’ve been very involved personally and professionally with Immigration Equality (www.immigrationequality.org) and it’s shocking how little the queer community, let alone the straight community, knows about these injustices that are fundamentally human rights violations," she says.
Big Mouth, (a.k.a Rey Patmamat) is a playwright by day and a regular contributor on BigQueer. "Unfortunately, writing plays often involves being entertaining and not alienating people too much so the audience hangs around till the end to get whatever message you’ve built into the piece, while still feeling like the play was worth the ticket price," he says. Online, he does not feel the need to entertain so much as he can skip straight to the message.
"They’re paying what they pay every month and can read me or not, and I can pretty much say whatever the hell I want however I want," he says. "I mostly write about the issues of gay America--voting, marriage equality, gay identity in relations to language, ethnicity, and perception, mostly beyond the closet."
Big Mouth says his most recent posts on BigQueer were about the increasing use of the word "faggot" and its derivations ("fag," "faggotry"). Another post considered what it means to be a gay man who wants to get pegged by Jenny Shimizu, which was a cross-post from his personal blog Play Rey Play (http://playreyplay.blogspot.com).
Big Mouth says he thinks a lot about what changed in the world that made gay people stop being queer. "We used to fight for such strange and diverse things as sex positivity, medical reform, cultural representation, and anti-hate legislation; listen to L7 and Pansy Division, and watch Sally Porter, Gregg Araki and Derek Jarman films. Now we fight to have traditional families, rally around self-loathing boy-band members and crooked politicians who exploit their sexuality for personal gain--and pop in DVDs of Will Truman never, ever having sex!"
Call them bloggers and you are missing the point. Call them journalists, and you’ll also sell them short.Sascha truly believes that blogs have a direct impact on society by connecting people around the world and enabling us to develop communities and sub-cultures based on ideology, not geography. She believes that the greatest benefit of a blog is how quickly and easily it spreads information how and anyone with Internet access can start publishing immediately.
Sascha is quick to point out that BigQueer is not a news publication and not looking to break news. "Our little group of queers at BigQueer represents a diverse cross-section of the queer community," she adds. "We don’t always agree on issues like marriage, sexual racism, outing, Mary Cheney, or politics; but neither does the global queer community."
BigQueer, she adds, was created to explore the different ideas percolating in the community and dig deeper into topics. Instead of breaking the story, the BigQueer bloggers hope, after a few days or weeks or months pass, to explore a topic critically. But that’s not to say that they don’t appreciate humor and the occasional fluff pieces.
"We’re not doing this for profit or as a business so we have a little more flexibility than many publications in the length and timeliness of our posts," adds Sascha.
Trans-activist Pauline Park, of www.paulinepark.com (also an active blogger on BigQueer), believes they are all fans of their "rivals" and competitors who consistently do the same heavy lifting and provide a sort of gay news clearinghouse for folks to easily learn of issues critical to their lives.
The bloggers at BigQueer all say they like Towleroad because Andy Towle and his team of bloggers are a well-rounded source of cultural information. Park says blogging enables her to communicate directly with an audience unmediated through the media, including the gay media. Most of her contributions to BigQueer have been about transgender issues. Her latest piece concerns the termination of Steve Stanton as city manager of Largo, Fla., following the public announcement of his decision to transform from male to female. She is also working hard on the violent arrest of Nadine Smith, the black lesbian executive director of Equality Florida, for advocating on his behalf.
They all agree on something important: That the current group of established gay organizations aren’t speaking for the gay man and lesbian on the street anymore, but kowtow to the powers-that-be. "I wish that it weren’t true," says Ray "Big Mouth" Patmamat, "but it is. We are overdue for a good, outspoken queer who will lead us to really shake things up and change the system. Love him or hate him, Larry Kramer did it in the ’80s and no one really has done the same since.
"As long as we depend on or believe in ridiculous institutions like the Human Rights Campaign to fight our battles," Patmamat continues, "we’re not going anywhere winning anything. I mean, they’re lobbyists--they’re not trying to change hearts or minds. They’re part of what’s wrong with our government, not a path toward what’s right about it. Rather than being the outsider voice that can finger wag and force on society the perspective it’s lacking, so much of queerness in the 2000s has been about in-fighting. Whenever we’ve done that before, we’ve gotten trampled, topped, bottomed. Pick your position."
Sascha has spent a lot of time reading pioneering gay activist Doug Ireland (direland.typepad.com/direland), who has become especially active in the situation in Arab countries, which are among the most anti-gay in the world. She says she appreciates the editorial focus of Jeremy Hooper as well. And she also doesn’t believe that we have a leader. But she differs from Patmamat in that she doesn’t think that’s necessarily bad.
On the contrary, Sascha says that a "thought leader" conjures up Orwellian images. "We’re developing a decentralized yet collective thought leadership that is made up of the ideas of many people from many backgrounds and cultures," she says. "It is constructed and deconstructed by and for the community repeatedly through our various media forms." Perhaps this change, she adds, has come about in part as we have moved from broadcast media, which encourages passive involvement, to interactive media, which encourages interaction with form and content more directly.
"We’re seeing is a generational and ideological split in gay activism," Belonsky adds. "We have older generation who stand behind some of the more established and press-ready leaders, such as Larry Kramer. And then we have a younger, seemingly quieter generation who use different tactics to make their politically-minded moves." He cites Lane Hudson as an example of the latter--although he hastens to add that direct action and street protests can get you only so far.
Belonsky believes that the very fact that there is no queer "community" means that there is no single gay leader or even cadre of leaders. "There are indeed many fronts in our fight," he says. "That’s the beauty of being queer: There’s no one type. We don’t all need to be homies. We do, however, need to fight for basic civil rights."
Ethan Gray of ShadeofGray, a gay blog which won The Verve Awards 2006 for Best Blog Writing, says that "one of the reasons I think the community is lagging is that so many organizations that are supposed to be looking after our interests are mired in red tape, incompetence and more importantly, politics. They could all use a nice kick in the groin."
Gray, currently working on a new story about an old theme, the proverbial ex, is taking stock of his personal life. He’s busy blogging about "that one ex even years later can drive us insane." I’ve met him!
For all these bloggers, after posting a fleeting thought, curious insight, personal theory or random rant on their blogs, they all seem to go off and attend their regular business for a few hours. Then they return to their e-mail boxes and sort through the messages.
"In this quiet, exhilarating, and scary moment, they realize that people are listening to them, and they care about what they have to say, discovering their voice is a liberating and revolutionary feeling, " says a fan of Andy Towle, Seth Abramovits and Andrew Sullivan.
Indeed, people are changed by this experience and become thoroughly immersed in the world of blogging. Certainly, the pursuit of new ideas, creative partners and reader contact consumes many hours of the day, especially with Web outlets churning out stories and videos that quickly gain traction across the Internet.
If nothing else, blogging gives us the chance to record events that are happening in the worlds of technology and science, silly jokes that occur to us, accomplishments and worries, and just random posts. "The more notable gay bloggers add color to our world. And no doubt are a force to be reckoned with," says Gray. "I think they force people to think twice or hard before messing with the gays."
Laugh if you want, but this, too, is a form of activism. The best of the bloggers anger us, inspire us and finally move us to action outside of the virtual world, in the very real world of physical action.
by Ambrose Aban
EDGE News Contributor
Friday Mar 30, 2007
MIND BLOGGERING
The way they throw stuff up ont he Net these days, shaping who we are, breaking news even primetime superstars, Anderson Cooper and Diane Sawyer, are missing or not aware of so quickly, killing journalism and democratizing the mainstream media.
It is mindblowing the way bloggers blog these days. Screaming for our attention, they demand to be heard. At least some of the time, they succeed in feeding our appetite for juicy bits and pieces of the truth, or even real breaking news that rivals what all-news TV channels are giving us.
Notable New York-based gay bloggers include Andrew Belonsky, David Hauslaib, Andy Towle, Seth Abramovitch, Ethan Gray, Joe Jervis, Sascha, Pauline Park, Big Mouth and John Aravosis. These increasingly well known figures have become more and more influential as a new breed of journalist, creating greater awareness of gay culture in general. And they aren’t just playing around, either.
Some of them have scooped USA Today, the Washington Post, CNN and other mainstream media outlets. They have not only immersed themselves in communications technology, but have also helped change attitude and mindsets as they propel controversial stories into public consciousness.
Call them bloggers and you are missing the point. Call them journalists, and you’ll also sell them short; however, if they are more than that, it is hard to categorize them.
Sometimes, in fact, they are just your neighbors who happen to be more vocal and opinionated. As one of them readily and happily admitted in an interview, he relishes the notion of having creative freedom and blogging is a great way for him to create a public discussion.
"I am motivated by a number of things these days--other than my bank account--as I try to entertain and inform," says the editor-in-chief of Queerty, Andrew Belonsky, only half-jokingly. "We don’t aspire to be news readers. We put a spin on things for our readers’ amusement. But we’re still trying to make sure they know what’s happening where, when, how and why."
Belonsky, who is not one to let his brain run idle, says the diversity of the community is what is keeping him thinking very hard these days. It’s an issue that’s weighed on him since the beginning of his activitism. At one point, in his more optimistic younger days, he thought that a queer utopia--a place where all gayboys could come together and be pals--would someday come to fruition.
"I don’t anymore," he now says. "I realized there could be no one type of community--regardless of sexuality, race, religion. You know, people are shaped by too many factors to relate to everyone else, especially for such an arbitrary reason as one’s sexuality."
What really burns him up is when people refer to "the gay community" as a monolith. "It’s ridiculous," he says. "I think that we need to celebrate the fact that there are different types of gay people--and, of course, all people--and realize that the only thing some groups have in common is that they lack basic civil rights and, of course, sleep with people of the same sex."
Belonsky says he’s also motivated because he believes in what he calls "our mission." "Homosexuality is by far the most divisive issue in America," he notes. "As I wrote in one of my posts, ’gay’ may count as one of the most common words in the English language. And that’s saying something. It’s important to me that our readers understand the homo happenings, but also that the gays--ourselves included--are kept in check."
Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God blog, agrees. "We might see a bit of the power of the blogosphere in this country--the power to make business listen to customers," he says. "To right wrongs is very inspiring. This is the kind of thing that makes us tick." Jervis further happily confesses that blogging has made him more friends than thousands of nights spent hanging out in gay bars. On a selfish level, he says it has immeasurably improved his social life.
"Over the last year and a half my focus had turned to gay activism and general gay culture, with only the occasional short story, running features such as HomoQuotable in which I provide quotes from current gay newsmakers," he says.
Jervis is finally adding advertisers, something he swore he’d never do. "I’ve never dreamed that my readership would explode to the level it is today, making advertising much more lucrative," he explains.
Jervis says he lets the news of the day inspire him to blog. "I am continually torn between my distaste for the rise in PC culture and my desire to see those that bad-mouth gay people get punished," he says. "For example, the silly punishments meted out on students who say, ’That’s so gay’, versus Ann Coulter’s usage of ’faggot’."
Meanwhile, Sascha, the founder of BigQueer, which houses arguably the most active group of gay bloggers, says one of the things that is keeping her thinking hard these days is the horrific injustices that queer immigrants and their partners are forced to deal with every day, "from not being able to sponsor their non-U.S. citizen partners for green cards to the HIV ban that can be waived for straights because they can marry but not for queers. I’ve been very involved personally and professionally with Immigration Equality (www.immigrationequality.org) and it’s shocking how little the queer community, let alone the straight community, knows about these injustices that are fundamentally human rights violations," she says.
Big Mouth, (a.k.a Rey Patmamat) is a playwright by day and a regular contributor on BigQueer. "Unfortunately, writing plays often involves being entertaining and not alienating people too much so the audience hangs around till the end to get whatever message you’ve built into the piece, while still feeling like the play was worth the ticket price," he says. Online, he does not feel the need to entertain so much as he can skip straight to the message.
"They’re paying what they pay every month and can read me or not, and I can pretty much say whatever the hell I want however I want," he says. "I mostly write about the issues of gay America--voting, marriage equality, gay identity in relations to language, ethnicity, and perception, mostly beyond the closet."
Big Mouth says his most recent posts on BigQueer were about the increasing use of the word "faggot" and its derivations ("fag," "faggotry"). Another post considered what it means to be a gay man who wants to get pegged by Jenny Shimizu, which was a cross-post from his personal blog Play Rey Play (http://playreyplay.blogspot.com).
Big Mouth says he thinks a lot about what changed in the world that made gay people stop being queer. "We used to fight for such strange and diverse things as sex positivity, medical reform, cultural representation, and anti-hate legislation; listen to L7 and Pansy Division, and watch Sally Porter, Gregg Araki and Derek Jarman films. Now we fight to have traditional families, rally around self-loathing boy-band members and crooked politicians who exploit their sexuality for personal gain--and pop in DVDs of Will Truman never, ever having sex!"
Call them bloggers and you are missing the point. Call them journalists, and you’ll also sell them short.Sascha truly believes that blogs have a direct impact on society by connecting people around the world and enabling us to develop communities and sub-cultures based on ideology, not geography. She believes that the greatest benefit of a blog is how quickly and easily it spreads information how and anyone with Internet access can start publishing immediately.
Sascha is quick to point out that BigQueer is not a news publication and not looking to break news. "Our little group of queers at BigQueer represents a diverse cross-section of the queer community," she adds. "We don’t always agree on issues like marriage, sexual racism, outing, Mary Cheney, or politics; but neither does the global queer community."
BigQueer, she adds, was created to explore the different ideas percolating in the community and dig deeper into topics. Instead of breaking the story, the BigQueer bloggers hope, after a few days or weeks or months pass, to explore a topic critically. But that’s not to say that they don’t appreciate humor and the occasional fluff pieces.
"We’re not doing this for profit or as a business so we have a little more flexibility than many publications in the length and timeliness of our posts," adds Sascha.
Trans-activist Pauline Park, of www.paulinepark.com (also an active blogger on BigQueer), believes they are all fans of their "rivals" and competitors who consistently do the same heavy lifting and provide a sort of gay news clearinghouse for folks to easily learn of issues critical to their lives.
The bloggers at BigQueer all say they like Towleroad because Andy Towle and his team of bloggers are a well-rounded source of cultural information. Park says blogging enables her to communicate directly with an audience unmediated through the media, including the gay media. Most of her contributions to BigQueer have been about transgender issues. Her latest piece concerns the termination of Steve Stanton as city manager of Largo, Fla., following the public announcement of his decision to transform from male to female. She is also working hard on the violent arrest of Nadine Smith, the black lesbian executive director of Equality Florida, for advocating on his behalf.
They all agree on something important: That the current group of established gay organizations aren’t speaking for the gay man and lesbian on the street anymore, but kowtow to the powers-that-be. "I wish that it weren’t true," says Ray "Big Mouth" Patmamat, "but it is. We are overdue for a good, outspoken queer who will lead us to really shake things up and change the system. Love him or hate him, Larry Kramer did it in the ’80s and no one really has done the same since.
"As long as we depend on or believe in ridiculous institutions like the Human Rights Campaign to fight our battles," Patmamat continues, "we’re not going anywhere winning anything. I mean, they’re lobbyists--they’re not trying to change hearts or minds. They’re part of what’s wrong with our government, not a path toward what’s right about it. Rather than being the outsider voice that can finger wag and force on society the perspective it’s lacking, so much of queerness in the 2000s has been about in-fighting. Whenever we’ve done that before, we’ve gotten trampled, topped, bottomed. Pick your position."
Sascha has spent a lot of time reading pioneering gay activist Doug Ireland (direland.typepad.com/direland), who has become especially active in the situation in Arab countries, which are among the most anti-gay in the world. She says she appreciates the editorial focus of Jeremy Hooper as well. And she also doesn’t believe that we have a leader. But she differs from Patmamat in that she doesn’t think that’s necessarily bad.
On the contrary, Sascha says that a "thought leader" conjures up Orwellian images. "We’re developing a decentralized yet collective thought leadership that is made up of the ideas of many people from many backgrounds and cultures," she says. "It is constructed and deconstructed by and for the community repeatedly through our various media forms." Perhaps this change, she adds, has come about in part as we have moved from broadcast media, which encourages passive involvement, to interactive media, which encourages interaction with form and content more directly.
"We’re seeing is a generational and ideological split in gay activism," Belonsky adds. "We have older generation who stand behind some of the more established and press-ready leaders, such as Larry Kramer. And then we have a younger, seemingly quieter generation who use different tactics to make their politically-minded moves." He cites Lane Hudson as an example of the latter--although he hastens to add that direct action and street protests can get you only so far.
Belonsky believes that the very fact that there is no queer "community" means that there is no single gay leader or even cadre of leaders. "There are indeed many fronts in our fight," he says. "That’s the beauty of being queer: There’s no one type. We don’t all need to be homies. We do, however, need to fight for basic civil rights."
Ethan Gray of ShadeofGray, a gay blog which won The Verve Awards 2006 for Best Blog Writing, says that "one of the reasons I think the community is lagging is that so many organizations that are supposed to be looking after our interests are mired in red tape, incompetence and more importantly, politics. They could all use a nice kick in the groin."
Gray, currently working on a new story about an old theme, the proverbial ex, is taking stock of his personal life. He’s busy blogging about "that one ex even years later can drive us insane." I’ve met him!
For all these bloggers, after posting a fleeting thought, curious insight, personal theory or random rant on their blogs, they all seem to go off and attend their regular business for a few hours. Then they return to their e-mail boxes and sort through the messages.
"In this quiet, exhilarating, and scary moment, they realize that people are listening to them, and they care about what they have to say, discovering their voice is a liberating and revolutionary feeling, " says a fan of Andy Towle, Seth Abramovits and Andrew Sullivan.
Indeed, people are changed by this experience and become thoroughly immersed in the world of blogging. Certainly, the pursuit of new ideas, creative partners and reader contact consumes many hours of the day, especially with Web outlets churning out stories and videos that quickly gain traction across the Internet.
If nothing else, blogging gives us the chance to record events that are happening in the worlds of technology and science, silly jokes that occur to us, accomplishments and worries, and just random posts. "The more notable gay bloggers add color to our world. And no doubt are a force to be reckoned with," says Gray. "I think they force people to think twice or hard before messing with the gays."
Laugh if you want, but this, too, is a form of activism. The best of the bloggers anger us, inspire us and finally move us to action outside of the virtual world, in the very real world of physical action.
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