The Adventures of JStar88 on The Blue Marble

The queer blogosphere and a dire need for editors

The blogosphere is such a dynamic, incredible vortex of wind and blather. While there are amazing writers who can throw words into keyboards so violently that they hit my monitor with SPLOOSH! sounds and then hang there wet and steaming while I devour them with my eyes, there are others who limit themselves to writing pedantically about other people writing about other people (normally focusing on themselves) and bore me to tears. And I suppose this myopic narcissism is sort of what this entry is all about. Well, that and the fact that there really ought to be red marker-wielding editors roaming about the web as intelligent agents helping us focus and remove unnecessary, redundant and superfluous words.

As some of you know, I am a tech culture writer for NOW Magazine in Toronto. It's a great weekly (similar to the Village Voice in NYC) with a circulation of about 300K and my editor there is extraordinary, talented and beautiful (gotta put that in, just in case she ever finds this entry – though I insist it’s all true). I get to write about almost whatever subject or theme I want, and she helps me tighten and focus my own blather into what are normally fairly decent pieces.

Going from 1200 words (my version) to 700 words (the version that runs) is a process I highly dislike, but that I respect as a necessary evilgood. I get too attached to my words and need to take an objective knife to my creativity – something that’s impossible. Just as it’s difficult to carve up your own child with a knife (even old Abraham had a tough time with it when the Big Guy asked him to slice Isaac), it’s similarly difficult to cut up a few hundred words that you’ve written while high on caffeine and sugar. Well, maybe that isn’t quite an appropriate analogy, but you get what I mean…

For examples of the difference an editor can make, you can check almost any of the articles I’ve written for NOW. My versions are here, and the versions that have run in the magazine are accessible from a link at the top of each page. While I think my versions are better (damn it, why do publications need space for advertising?), especially when dealing with complex issues or really captivating (to me) stories, I think the dead tree versions are all tighter, more focused and easy to digest (particularly for people in transit).

I publish my versions on my site because:

1. It’s my site and I can do anything I want here.
2. It’s interesting (at least to me) to compare and contrast the versions.
3. I like to have an archive of my writing, and think some of my stuff is actually useful to people.
4. Extra content means extra pages views when the search engines’ indexing spiders come crawling.
5. Extra page views means extra ad impressions.
6. Extra ad impressions means extra money from Google’s AdSense program.
7. Extra money from Google’s AdSense program means that I can buy an extra cup of coffee each month, which I can then use as fuel to create more blather and help accelerate the cycle!

See… now THAT never would have been allowed to appear in print, but because this is an editor-less medium, I can do whatever the heck I want and all you can do is suffer through it, skim it, skip it, leave it or ignore it. You know… just like anything else on the web.

But I provide great value. :)

While NOW lets me write about almost whatever I want, I also sometimes get very specific assignments because I can turn things around quickly (just gimme a keyboard and the words spill out) and I’m a metainfovore who can dredge up infotainmentnuggets on the most obscure topic imaginable that will inevitably exist in abundance in the Internetweb's darkest corners (ya gottta love boolean logic).

A few weeks ago, I received an assignment to create a list of Smart and Sexy Queer Blogs for NOW’s pride issue. Being queer only in that I’m odd, and gay only in that I’m sometimes rather happy, I solicited some assistance from an old compatriot who has been known to bat for the other team.

TheFlink, an artiste and writer who would definitely qualify as a non-blatherer, agreed to help. She asked her devoted audience "What's your fave queer blog?" and they responded with underwhelming enthusiasm.

It turns out they didn’t have favourite queer blogs because most of them didn’t know of any. We got a few suggestions from the masses, but had to roll up our sleeves and do our own work. The quality-oriented queer blogosphere was surprisingly elusive, and difficult to pinpoint amid the plethora of sex, drugs and post-op transgender pics.

Going through about 120 gay blogs in a few days was the first major blogtrip I’ve taken in a while. I have some personal blog favourites, and they are part of my regular surfing habits, but I haven’t just gone out exploring a particular flavour of blog since I went through all the poker blogs exhaustively in November, 2004 before going to the first annual poker blogger’s tournament in Las Vegas (where Check n Raise Poker.com was the title sponsor).

Most of the queer blogs I found just sucked. And there’s no double-entendre there.

For some reason, most of the bloggers I found who blogged about being gay in society just didn’t do it in an interesting way. I suppose I could care about their physical endowment, onanism, shopping trips or their running count of bedpost notches, but only if they wrote about it in an interesting way. Even complete sentences would help. As would spellcheck.

I think that a sincere blog about someone’s real experiences dealing with homosexuality in today’s society would be fascinating to people of all sexual orientations. I looked for this type of thing specifically, and found nothing. Even blogs about people in the closet or recently out of the closet (or even straddling the closet) were difficult to find. Those few that I did find were not worth writing about. And that’s a shame.

(Of course, while I may understand the cathartic benefits of writing about technology, music, life in Sweden and other such things in this forum, I suppose the same might not be true for someone struggling through sexual and personal identification issues.)

In the end, TheFlink and I collaborated to create a fairly decent list and we both got some really good feedback about it. She wrote a good follow-up that started a bit of discussion, evidently the punters (1 & 2) liked the references, and I got warm fuzzy props for my writeup of gaypornblog.com: "A weblog obsessed with gay porn. That means explicit, hot gay man-loving sex. Don't visit and complain to us that you found information on hot guys having hot gay sex there. We know." Wheee. Fun. How often will I ever get to write something like that?

Reminder to all: Don't search for the web for gay porn blogs at work on your first day of a new job. There are some conversations and looks from IT that you don't want to have... Fortunately I was up to speed on that one in time, but I'm sharing the tip in case it's relevant to others.

Anyway, digressions from digressions aside, the need for good editors in the blogosphere is huge. And I'll do myself and all y'all a service by ending right now and promising that I'll make a short, succint blog entry sometime soon.

posted by jstar88 @ 1:08 AM