March With Us This Sunday!

The NYC Digital Activists will march in NYC Pride for the third year this Sunday. If you would like to march with our group, we step off at 1PM, on 37th Street between 5th Avenue and Madison. Find Section 11, Group 13. All are welcome! Look for our banner. And join us!

Pam's House Blend Joins Firedoglake

At today's Morning News Dump with Lizz Winstead, Pam Spaulding made the big announcement that she'll be folding Pam's House Blend into a subblog on Firedoglake. FDL founder Jane Hamsher:

Pam's House Blend has long been one of the most compelling and influential sites in the blogosphere. Founder Pam Spaulding has used the platform not only to speak out herself as a woman of color and a member of the LGBT community, but also to play host to many other fine bloggers who have worked with her to build PHB into a robust activist community. Pam was also one of my first friends when we were both posting at Daily Kos, before Firedoglake even existed.

So it gives me great pleasure to announce that Pam's House Blend will be joining the Firedoglake family of blogs. I think it's a perfect union - as the task of hosting a blog and performing the tech, legal and security work to keep it up and running becomes more and more complex and expensive, it will free Pam and her fellow bloggers to spend their time doing what they do best, which is blog. It also allows us to feature the work of a really amazing group of writers on FDL, and be tremendously enriched by the PHB community.

We wish her well.

The Daily Kos Lounge

At the moment I'm blogging from a big comfy floral sofa in the Daily Kos Lounge, an oasis of recliners, couches, and power strips (yay!) that runs down the center of the main hall of the Minneapolis Convention Center. That's my 'puter in the foreground and Good As You's Jeremy Hooper is across from me. I have no idea what the deal is with the kiddie pool.

Fake Lesbian Bloggers Get Animated

Morning View - Netroots Boys

The first familiar faces I ran into here in Minneapolis were Washington Blade staffers Chris Johnson and Phil Reese.

Evening View - MSP Light Rail

I barely had ten hours back home after Key West and now I'm in Minneapolis all week for Netroots Nation 2011. The weather here sucks and this is the ugliest fucking hotel in the history of the universe. And of all the parallel universes. (I'm guess I'm a little travel-fatigued.)

New Blog

I'd probably have to name the dad on Flipper as my first gay crush.

Lez Get Real Blogger Also A Man

On the heels of Gay Girl In Damascus scandal comes news that the author of the popular Lez Get Real is also a man.

Just one day after the author behind a popular Syrian lesbian blog admitted to being a married, American man named Tom MacMaster, the editor of the lesbian news site Lez Get Real, with the tag­line “A Gay Girl’s View on the World,” acknowledged that he is also a man. “Paula Brooks,” editor of Lez Get Real since its founding in 2008, is actually Bill Graber, 58, a retired Ohio military man and construction worker who said he had adopted his wife’s identity online. Graber said she was unaware he had been using her name on his site.

This bit kills me: "In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian."

Quote Of The Day - Tom MacMaster

"I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone -- I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about. I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience." - Heterosexual American writer Tom MacMaster, confessing that he was the author of Gay Girl In Damascus, a blog which gained international attention last week when MacMaster pretended to have been kidnapped.

NYT: Is Syrian "Kidnapping" A Hoax?

The New York Times warns that not one person can report having actually met or spoken to the lesbian blogger allegedly kidnapped yesterday in Syria. In fact, some recent entries on her blog may have first been posted in 2007.

Although it remains possible that the blog’s author was indeed detained, and has been writing a factual, not fictional account of recent events in Syria, readers should be aware that the one person who has identified herself — to The Times, The BBC and Al Jazeera — as a personal friend of the blogger, Sandra Bagaria, has now clarified that she has never actually met the author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog. Ms. Bagaria told The Lede that she had also never conversed with Ms. Arraf face to face via Skype, but had conducted an online relationship with her since January entirely through Internet text communications

.

SYRIA: Lesbian Blogger Amina Addalla Allegedly Kidnapped In Damascus

Details are sketchy, but here's what's being reported:

As the anti-government uprising in Syria has unfolded, Syrian-American blogger Amina Abdallah has attracted readers and been noticed by The Washington Post, CNN, Time,and The Guardian for her musings on the protest movement and what it's like to be gay in Syria. But her blog--A Gay Girl in Damascus--broached a very different topic today: Someone introducing herself as Abdallah's cousin wrote that Abdallah was seized by three armed men while on her way to meet with protest organizers. The cousin adds that while the family suspects Abdallah was seized by Syrian security forces, all that's known right now is that she's missing.

A Facebook page demanding Amina's release has been launched.

Daily Grumble

For those unaware, Google/Blogger experienced a global outage for the last (approximately) 24 hours, taking down tens of millions of sites and doubtlessly losing them zillions in ad revenue. For now, things appear to be working. You'll notice, however, that all of my 25 or so posts from yesterday have vanished. We'll see if they reappear. Thanks for hanging in there.

Did You Miss Me?

Hello, is this thing on?

Queerty Relaunches "Without Snark"

Several weeks after announcing its own demise, Queerty has relaunched this morning with the below promise.

While we are committed to maintaining the best of Queerty, we also recognize that you have demanded change. In recent months the Queerty patented wit devolved into predictable snark, eviscerating everyone and everything in its path. Some of the comments simply piled on. We will maintain the independent voice at all cost, going after with a vengeance the powerful, the hypocritical and the just plain foolish. But now we’ll also strive for a better sense of journalistic balance and fairness. In other words we’re going to keep afflicting the comfortable; only now we’ll take care to comfort the afflicted as well.

More on the relaunch from departing owner David Hauslaib.

JMG Blog Year Eight Begins

Today is the seventh blogiversary of this here website thingy. As is tradition for today, here is my very first post.

April 27th, 2004

I was born and raised in rural North Carolina.

My fondest childhood memory is of playing in the dense, acrid, poison fog that was belched out by the county mosquito control truck during its daily dusk-time trip down our dirt road.

The cry of "Smokey! Smokey!" would fly up and down Nine Foot Road once the first faint sound of the pest control truck's generator was detected in the distance. Trailer screen doors would slam open and kids would pour into the street for ten minutes of gleeful, giddy, mad dashing around in the thick white clouds of DDT. We would smash into each other with full force in the blinding swirls and just scream and laugh hysterically, pick ourselves up and start running again. Parents had not a whit of concern about their children playing directly behind the spewing pipes of a pest control truck. In fact, NOT being allowed to play in the poison fog was often held out as potential punishment for misbehavior.

I think this explains a lot about me.

I appreciate all of you being here for these last seven years. Help yourselves to some cupcakes and punch. Please don't let the cat out.

And onward to JMG year eight.

The End Of Queerty

After spending the last week offline due to "technical difficulties," it appears that the long-running and popular LGBT news/gossip site Queerty is no more. Gay porn site The Sword (NSFW) has an email from the site's founder which reads in part:

As many of you know, last year Queerty partnered with the folks at 353Media to handle its operations. I transitioned out of my original role to make time to tackle some unrelated projects, and a trusted crew took the reins. Sadly last week, in a scenario that began with some technical headaches, has ended with 353 opting not to continue operating the site. It is a decision I was saddened to hear, and I worked to find an amenable solution that would keep Queerty online. That effort was unsuccessful.

UPDATE: Queerty has posted the below message.

After more than five years of serving the LGBT community with news and entertainment, Queerty has come to a close. The decision to shutter the site was not an easy one to make, and it is with great pain that we say goodbye to our loyal readership. From all of Queerty's writers and contributors, from our first unto our last day, thank you for spending some time with us.

JMG Wins 2011 GLAAD Media Award!

Tonight this here website thingy won the first-ever Outstanding Blog category at the 2011 GLAAD Media Awards! The word went out on Twitter hours ago while I was still working the red carpet downstairs and I totally didn't know I'd won until at the after party when I congratulated another winner on the escalator and they said, "Oh, you too!" That sent me running to one of the video screens where the names of the winners were scrolling. Totally worth missing my traditional pre-Black Party disco nap! Many photos of the evening to come!

CNN Covers Born This Way Blog

Nice piece from the author of Born This Way Blog, which posts childhood photos that seem to predict the subject's future gayness.

HomoQuotable - Andrew Sullivan

"The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up. And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime." - Andrew Sullivan, announcing that his blog is leaving its four-year home at The Atlantic.

Born This Way

Born This Way: "A photo/essay project for gay adults (male and female) to submit pictures from their childhood (roughly ages 2 to 12) - with snapshots that capture them, innocently, showing the beginnings of their innate LGBT selves. It's OUR nature, our TRUTH!" Hit the link for adorable baby queers.