Happy new year - glad to ring in 2014

Happy New Year, everyone! It's bye-bye to 2013. I hope you all had a safe and fun evening celebrating. Kate and I both fell asleep and missed the ball drop hour, lol.

2013 was a year of personal milestones and observations. Here's just a short personal look back (after all, I can be self-indulgent on my own FB wall, lol).

-- I closed PHB after 9 years of online citizen journalism, with amazing send-offs from Michelangelo Signorile, Melissa Harris-Perry, and many of you with thoughtful FB messages and Tweets;

-- I celebrated my 50th birthday in NYC with friends and family;

-- I marked 20 years at my "real job" at Duke University Press;

-- And, of course, 2013 was a year of dealing with life-altering health challenges that are here to stay (and was the impetus for closing the blog).

Despite the personal setbacks related to the latter, it was a positive year to witness changes in LGBT life in the U.S. The civil equality ball has moved forward faster than I could have predicted, with the fall of a big piece of DOMA and more and unexpected states welcoming marriage equality.

On the other hand, we've got intransigent inequality in many states, where you still cannot be out on the job, there are no public accommodations protections, and marriage recognition is a pipe dream waiting on SCOTUS. Transgender rights have a long way to go no matter how you slice it. I hope the LGB movement puts forth the effort to effect changes that make a difference.

And race relations? Jesus, our country needs a reboot on this one. Re-electing the first black President only seemed to exacerbate the crazies on the Right, and generated precious little intelligent dialog along with cluelessness-- pretending we don't have a serious problem in this area is ludicrous. Trying to assign blame rather than accepting and working through the role privilege plays seems to be a challenge we cannot quite reach these days.

That whole Rodney King "can't we all just get along" rings in my head quite often.

But it's 2014 now, so I look forward to more news, more joy, more frustration and life in general -- as it is, while I work to make it what I hope it can be. Many gracious good wishes for you and yours.

On July 1, 2014, Kate and I will celebrate 10 years of marriage (thank you, Canada!), so it's a nice milestone in this new year that we both look forward to!

The Advocate asks - Is Pam's House Blend Impossible to Reproduce?

I laughed when I saw this headline at the Advocate's web site -- you only see it when you share the article on social media such as Facebook. The actual headline is:

"Good To The Last Drop:
After a decade as the loudest — and sometimes only — digital voice in the South coming from an out woman of color, Pam’s House Blend closed up shop July 1. Now she may never be replaced."

I was interviewed a few weeks ago by The Advocate's Sunnivie Brydum about the end of the Blend's run and completely forgot about it -- I've been snowed under on the day job that I've held all during the nine-year run of the blog. It's what keeps the roof over my head; blogging was never profitable for me, and I explained why in the piece:

"Despite its countless accolades and ever-increasing traffic, the Blend never gained the type of financial foothold that some more mainstream, news-heavy LGBT blogs have secured. Spaulding believes the reason behind that is two-fold. First, Spaulding’s refusal to run what she calls “skin ads” — services targeting gay men with often racy images — that pay handsomely, kept the Blend’s earning potential relatively limited. And, “while the work at [The Blend] was important, it didn’t necessarily entertain in the same manner as those blogs that would generate advertising of that sort anyway,” says Spaulding, referring to higher-traffic sites largely targeted to and run by gay men like Towleroad, Joe.My.God, and Queerty. “At the same time, [Blend] readers were looking for connections to the content to their lives as LGBTs, people of color, people not from gay ghettos. That kind of content may generate awards, and reach readers of influence, and even get me invited to speak on the panels at important conferences, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

Which is why, throughout the Blend’s existence, Spaulding held down a full-time job in addition to her tenacious blogging. But the toll of working essentially two full-time jobs — while only receiving the salary of one — eventually wore on Spaulding, who struggles with several chronic health conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. A decade of hard work depleted Spaulding’s reserves to the point that she decided to close up shop in July."

And about the question regarding the Blend being impossible to reproduce --  it's true -- and not because of yours truly, but because "new media," blogs and traditional news media were in a very different state way back in 2004. Would a black lesbian (and unknown) voice producing a political blog out of NC even be noticed in 2013? Read the article and weigh in.

I love the bit at the end of this piece (I didn't suggest it, btw):

"Spaulding still maintains a personal blog at PamSpaulding.net, where she writes about non-political passions including health, pit bull advocacy, and her favorite — if much-maligned — band, Journey."

Yeah, baby!

Journey sampler

(Unexpected) reaction to the announcement about the end of Pam's House Blend...and a chat with Michelangelo Signorile

On Sunday I thought I could get away with announcing that I was shutting down Pam's House Blend (closing the coffeehouse on July 1, its 9th birthday) with little fanfare, as that's a pretty dead day when people are out and about, and it was also Father's Day.

Boy, was I wrong. There was a massive outburst of reaction on Facebook and Twitter and the Internet (see at the bottom of the post). It was overwhelming -- and kind of weird, like being at your own funeral without the pine box/urn. I say "unexpected" in the headline because I truly didn't think it would matter this much. I still have a hard time placing the work I do on the blog in the context of things like "success" or "popularity" because the latter is hard to gauge sitting here where, aside from a few comments on the blog or social media, just how far and wide your words reach, since most people lurk, not comment. The former is hard to define in today's new media world -- success can come in awards and honors (I do have a number of those), professional opportunities (those never materialized in any way that I could consider quitting my day job), or financial (that's laughable). But apparently the Blend is well-loved by enough people that they kindly shared their thoughts on Sunday in numbers that surprised me.

The blog will be closed, but I'll still be active on social media (FB, Twitter, etc.); I'm just not up to long-form blogging/reporting anymore. If I am not able to do it to the standards I have kept up over the years, it's time to let it go. I know it's time, because the decision was easy; I know my physical limitations now and I'm not in denial about what I can accomplish in a given day. It takes all of the energy I can muster just to be able to hold down my 75% day job.

***

On Tuesday I went on the Michelangelo Signorile Show on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. I am honored to call Mike -- a legendary LGBT activist and journalist -- a dear friend and he's been a big booster of the Blend over the years. He also recently co-authored with me a chapter about the Righthaven copyright scourge and its impact on media authorship in a book, Copyright Shakedown: The Rise and Fall of Righthaven.

Anyway, we chatted for about 15 minutes about closing the coffeehouse, and discussed the state of blogging back in 2004, and how it has changed over the years, particularly with the recent high impact of social media. You can read Mike's write up on Huffington Post, where he is the editor of Gay Voices. A snippet:

Spaulding talked about starting the blog in 2004 and never imagining it would become the award-winning, highly-noted must-read site that often garnered media attention as well a notice from mainstream gay groups Spaulding sometimes criticized, like the Human Rights Campaign.

“There were not many blogs out there [9 years ago],” she said. I wasn’t blogging to an audience. I was just blogging about my frustrations about the virulently antigay campaign that George Bush was running. For the first year to year-and-a-half the most I had in terms of readership was 300 people. I thought that was enormous and that I’d never surpass it.”

Looking back, Spaulding is especially proud of the diverse voices she brought to the PamsHouseBlend and the political blogopshere, readers and writers who’d often begun posting in the diaries on the site and rose to become regular bloggers, including the prominent transgender activist and blogger Autumn Sandeen.

“I’m really proud of that,” Spaulding said, “because that was a voice that was missing at the time in the blogosphere. There really were not any transgender bloggers at the time among the A-list blogs. I think that kind of exposure led to more discussion about transgender issues.”

Here's the audio:



I couldn't capture all of the reactions on FB and Twitter, but thanks to Storify, here's a good number of them from good friends, readers and fans (sorry, no reaction so far from professional anti-gays Porno Pete or Bam Bam Barber yet, lol).