Yesterday, we found out that the Washington Blade, along with many other local LGBT papers and media were closing. It’s another blow to the LGBT advocacy project and a blow to print media.

Now maybe I shouldn’t knock blogging. I do it, after all, three or four times a week on two different websites. But as a blogger, I am all too aware of the pitfalls and shortcomings of our particular form of media. Blogging is generally unpaid, or paid very badly. No one is giving you budgets for investigative reporting, interviews, travel. Your greatest asset is the internet, the reporting of other papers and your own particular expertise.

So, I can pore over a recent court decision and give my opinion, but I certainly cannot go to Puerto Rico and find out exactly how the police force handles hate crimes when a 19 year old gay boy is murdered.

When you lose publications that actually report on LGBT events, you start to notice how bloggers are everywhere and reporters are scarce. You start to notice how no one is going to Puerto Rico to report on the LGBT angle.

This is a problem in all media: the rise of blogging, of recycled media, and the fall of investigative journalism. However, when a community is fighting for recognition, against discrimination and for legal equality, reporting is even more important. Officials aren’t always willing to give us the facts about LGBT related events. Reporters aren’t always worried about LGBT issues. Investigative media IS the backbone of our civil rights struggle.

I hope, against hope, that a new publication dedicated to reporting and investigating the news springs up to replace the Washington Blade and it’s sister publications. We need that more than any lobbying effort or any new liberal politician.

This is a good story to end the work week on. Yeah I know it’s not gay news related, but if you get prissy your heart is colder than those yahoos at Westboro Baptist “Church.” Please go get some help. Like today. Remember Damon Weaver? The precocious kid reporter from Florida who was looking for an interview with President Obama? Well he got it last night.

Weaver, Pahokee’s favorite son, sat down for 10 minutes  with Obama in the White House Diplomatic Room. The interview ranged from the serious (give Weaver props for asking about bullying and violence in our schools) to the silly. Damon would like french fries served at every school lunch (not too outlandish really).

This morning the 11 year old boy will be hitting the morning shows on CNN and MSNBC. And I hear talk of him holding a press conference on the South Lawn.

Don’t want to be too cynical (yeah I do) but this feel good story comes at a perfect time for the White House. Obama will be in Montana today  for a town hall meeting on health insurance and if it gets hot, the White House can just point to Damon and the press will lose its mind. This kid is catnip. Remember during the inauguration festivities when  ABC News’ Diane Sawyer almost adopted him?

For the prissy ones already banging at the keyboard about how their grand  gay day has been ruined forevah, here is something you’ll like. While Damon was all respectful to his interviewee, a former president was taken to the woodshed for DADT and DOMA. Blogger Lane Hudson, who exposed Mark Foley for the creep he is, was listening to Bill Clinton at the Netroots Nation conference and had enough. Hudson  stood up and interrupted the Big Dog, and gave him grief for DADT and DOMA.

Two things stand out: apparently some in the audience booed Hudson and some old lady told him to leave. Progressives really hate it when you bring up stuff they don’t want to deal with. Second, part of Clinton’s response is instructive.

“You wanna talk about ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. You couldn’t deliver me any support in the Congress and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military and the media supported them. They raised all kinds of devilment. And all most of you did was to attack me instead of getting some support in the congress. Now, that’s the truth.”

For six months I’ve been reading how President Obama hasn’t done squat for the gay community. Heck I’ve written some the stuff myself. All fair. All fair. Yet presidential leadership does not operate in a vacuum. It would be nice if politicians did the right thing, but it’s naive to think a president is going to put his/her toe in something without cover. Even Damon knows that! What did Franklin D.  Roosevelt say?

“I agree with you, I want to do it; now make me do it.”

RIP Les Paul.

Wasting words about talk drip Bill O’Reilly is…well a waste. Try not to do it because it’s hard to take seriously anyone who is convinced there is some battle to keep people from hitting their knees on  Jesus’ birthday (Christopher Hitchens sliced that hobby horse with ease).

Anyway it looks like O’Reilly is a bit confused about this internets medium. When discussing Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor, he confused some lame comment left about the justice for an actual article on the site HotAir.com.

Wait a minute. I take that back. An over worked Fox intern was the one who was confused and passed the offending words to her boss. The HotAir people were rightfully upset but O’Reilly being who he is could only muster a half baked apology, and the usual bluster how internet comments need to be monitored. He then offered his site, BillOReilly.com, as a paragon of virtue when it comes to civil and respectful dialogue.

As usual, O’Reilly  has no idea what he’s talking about. The gentleman who runs Patterico.com, signed up to the Fox News commentator’s site (a mere $4.95) and discovered some commentator who went the high-school route when talking about gays and lesbians. This person has posted 1,960 comments  and his “homo” rant  has been up since May 23.

Patterico has been permanently banned from O’Reilly’s little piece of internets heaven. Oh Bill. I thought you were bigger than that.

I expected that response because it doesn’t seem like my unit pays attention to any local news outside of mass attacks and political events.  They are too busy taking their mind off of what we do here by playing games, watching movies, or chatting on the internet. There was also relatively little attention to the story generated here  – which rendered it hardly noticeable.

If it was noticeable I’m sure there would at least be some anti-gay snide remarks from my colleagues – but nothing.

We hear about the suicide bombers and assassination attempts, but this story of local homophobia eluded us – or maybe we just didn’t care to see or know what to look for. What our masculine patriarchal society would define as “gay” is normal here.

I don’t mean homosexual sex, but the close contact between men that can be seen everywhere.  Men rubbing other men’s arms, holding hands, hugging, kissing (on the cheek), rubbing hands thrrough each other’s hair – all of which I have personally seen.  It’s a lot of physical contact  – it might even be too much for me if I were on the receiving end.

My soldiers constantly report on seeing “gay” activity.  Most recently we were up at one base run by Iraqis and in one of the dorm buildings, an Iraqi man was sitting on another’s lap.  I thought I had good gaydar, but not in this country.  With all this ambiguity I would assume that a gay man would be able to fit in, but apparently this is wrong.

In a CNN report I caught, a local gay Iraqi boy and his friend speak about what it is like being gay in Iraq.  The boy also mentions the “gay tendencies” of the Iraqi people.

Apparently liberating Iraq from the Sadam dictatorship was also the start of hunting season on homosexuals.  In a report by Newsweek, the sad story of homosexuals in Iraq is examined.  Please take note that the stories are almost a year old, with hardly a word printed or said since last summer until this tragic string of murders.  Maybe these murders will spark a new flurry of interest in the plight of Iraq’s gay population – probably not.

I interact with Iraqis often in my work.  We have an Iraqi that has been given the nickname “hotpants” by soldiers in my unit because he is feminine, listens to Celine Dion while working, and wears women’s perfume.  They all assume he is gay, and I would believe it if he was, but now I wonder what he must go through when he leaves the relative safety of our base.  If honor killings and homosexual witch-hunts are becoming the norm here, what kind of fear does he and other seemingly gay Iraqis live in?

I have noticed that I never hear anything about women.  In a culture where women are treated slightly better than cattle it’s no surprise.  Are there any lesbians in Iraq, I wonder?  We hear about the danger that gay men are in, but what danger are gay women in?

Well, Iraq has a long way to go before any real social progress is made.  It seems that my desire to be openly gay in the military pales in comparison to those who desire just to be left to live.  Our presence failed to impress the deeply religious with our ‘western’ ideas.  Gays are murdered in Sader city and it appears no one really cares – the economy is more important.  Where have we heard that before?

It’s been noted by others much smarter than me that it was weird in last night’s presidential news conference that no reporter asked one question about Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to rescue the banks. There was President Obama’s rhetorical smackdown of CNN’s Ed Henry. And did you ever think you would see an Ebony reporter asking a question at a White House  press conference? My folks would have loved that.

The weirdest question was from ABC Radio’s Ann Compton. She confessed to being shocked on being called on (Come on girl! Keep that to yourself!) and then went to the race question. Call me biased but the media seems unable to let the “post-racial  first colored guy to lead the country” thing go. Sure it’s historic that a country, whose history includes slavery and Jim Crow, elected a man of color to lead it. But the election is over, the inauguration is done. We all saw both happen. Now comes the governing part and harping on Obama’s race calls into question the whole “post-racial” America rhetoric. Obama’s answer was his standard response when faced with the ruminate on race requests. Give a nod to the history and move on.

Before you start typing: the reason “post-racial” is in quotes is because it’s a slippery term that does not do a decent job of describing our actual racial calculus.

“Religion and sexual preferences, as well, are sometimes cited as reasons for tourists to be denied entry to one country or another.”

Substituting “preference” for “orientation” is both insulting and sloppy, but it would be easy for someone who reads the article to argue that words are just words. The larger narrative of the piece was that the visa process is often overly restrictive, which suggests that writer Mitchell Higgins was not intending to make a political statement with her syntax. Maybe Higgins should just spend some quality time with the GLAAD Media Reference Guide.

But the larger implications of misusing words like “preference” was underscored over the weekend when a spokeswoman for the US Census disclosed that the 2010 census will not distinguish between gay individuals and couples and their straight counterparts. When asked whether the census would question Americans about their orientation, spokeswoman Cynthia Endo said that the census “is all about numbers. This is not about lifestyle or anything else.”

Lifestyle. Preference. Both words imply that being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender is a choice, and that implication opens the dangerous idea that orientation or gender identity can be changed or “cured.” Words have meanings, and in Endo’s case, her words are representative of harmful policies that have real impact. Not being correctly identified– and particularly not being counted– means the LGBT community can be disregarded as a tiny minority. If we’re going to fight for and win the equal treatment under the law we so rightly deserve, we’re going to have to be counted first.

When it comes to police dramas, I’m old school in my taste. Want to hear me yammer all night? Say Hill Street Blues. Out of all the perfect episodes there is one I keep going back to. A nun is raped and murdered. As expected, the police go in overdrive to find the culprits. On the same day the owner of a grocery store is murdered in his place of business. While tragic, the police of “The Hill” are not getting pressure from their bosses and the media to solve that crime.

The owner’s  wife comes to the station to wonder where are the detectives who were supposed to come and ask her questions. Of course they are working on the death of the nun.

Our American mythology of equality is belied by the crimes we pay attention to. Young white girls killed in a Caribbean paradise will get the Nancy Graces of the world on “steeds of justice,” while the murder of brown teenagers gets relegated to page 7. Their names known only by family and friends

We like to talk about community and such, but our own our gay victims of violence are placed on a hierarchy of attention. Everyone reading this knows the life and death of Matthew Shepard. Hard not to really. Mainstream press attention. A play. The murder of this blond young man in the outback of Wyoming was perfect grist for the media maw.

Make no mistake please: no one is trying to minimize the tragedy of the boy’s death; however, the murder of Sakia Gunn was just as tragic but her short life, and death, lack the national resonance of Shepard’s. In 2003, the 15-year-old was stabbed in downtown Newark by an older man whose sexual advances were not returned by Gunn and her friends.

Chas Brack, the director of a new documentary about Gunn, notes that one of the reasons why the young woman’s death failed to strike much heat in the media world was because of access, or the lack thereof, to the media. That’s too fair by half. The Gunn story is not going to get a reporter or writer a plum assignment or some ducats on the speaking tour. Speaking in eloquent tones about murder in the heartland though? That’s the express lane to editors and those in charge of the ink.

The problem with this business model, however, is that it leaves newsrooms beholden to advertising interests instead of readers. And, if the economy goes into a tailspin, precipitous drops in advertising can quickly lead to ruin.

Isaacson says the way to save the news business is to move to a paradigm where newspapers go completely digital and readers pay directly for online content. For example, a web surfer who wants to read an individual story online can pay a nickel – or pay a larger fee for a weekly e-subscription.

The main obstacle is creating technology that makes reading e-news as pleasurable as the newspaper experience. Within a few years, however, new technology will make this possible, with several products scheduled to hit the market.

If mainstream newspapers are having a difficult time, it should be no surprise that gay and lesbian publications are disappearing faster than a rabbit at a magic show. There is a long list of venerable GLBT publications that have recently vanished.

Earlier this month, Gay City News reported, “the investment fund that owns the Washington Blade, the Southern Voice, Genre magazine, and other gay publications has been forced into receivership by the federal Small Business Administration (SBA), which will sell the fund’s assets and distribute the proceeds to investors.” 

When the technology reaches fruition, the GLBT media should embrace Isaacson’s model. The gay community’s top reporters do a superior job covering the news and offer in-depth analysis that can’t be duplicated. I am willing to bet that people will pay for such content.

The question is, will the publications themselves actually survive or will the GLBT media become a collection of enterprising freelance reporters who sell by the story? While most items would not bring a large bounty,  there would likely be a couple of breaking stories that would pay the bills. For example, a blockbuster story with 250,000 downloads at a nickel per purchase would yield $12,500.

Of course, new technology would also have to make it more difficult to cut and paste more than one paragraph per story. And, much like cameras that take pictures of those that run red lights, an electronic surveillance system that imposed small penalties – perhaps a dollar per infraction – would have to be developed. There would always be ways to get around the system. But, one would hope that enough people would have the decency to pay for good reporting to make it work. 

GLBT bloggers should also welcome changes where they would actually get paid for their labor. It is disgraceful that some of our leading lights are posting during lunch breaks at their day jobs. Given their influence and size of their audiences, it is absurd that they have not reaped enough wealth to blog full-time.

Fans may balk, but they must realize they are also getting shortchanged. Imagine how much better most blogs would be if the writers had another 8-10 hours a day to conduct research? The products would be infinitely superior and be of greater value. Ultimately, the axiom, “you get what you pay for” rings true.

People must also realize that the status quo will soon lead to burnout among the best bloggers. Without a financial incentive commensurate with their work, don’t be surprised when your favorite bloggers choose relationships over readership. If you don’t pay, many will fade away – which would be a great loss to the GLBT community.

In order for this business model to work, the leading bloggers, gossip sites and journalists will have to create a new type of union – where they jump off the cliff all at once.  There would also be an initial loss of readers, but who cares? The writer would still make more money by retaining a subset of paying readers. And, many of the dissenters would come back when they realized the true value of a product they once viewed as their birthright. 

On a similar note, the continued improvement of E-book technology may save the GLBT publishing industry. On March 29, the legendary Oscar Wilde bookstore will close in Greenwich Village, citing economic trouble. This follows the demise of the famed bookstore Crossroads Market in Dallas.

With few venues to sell books and fewer publishers, it is a tough time for gay authors. While the major retailers have GLBT sections, rarely do these books receive prime shelf space. E-books may be a way to cut out the middleman, save on printing costs and let gay authors sell directly to the reading public. Best of all, no more hand cramps from book signings!

The article in Time Magazine showed that the very concept of a magazine was a relic beyond its time. In the end, the tumultuous changes forced by the recession may be what resuscitates and revolutionizes the GLBT publishing industry.

For those who pulled up the new whitehouse.gov website on Tuesday and have been staring at the civil rights page with loving, tearful eyes, you are in good company. The transformation from Bush to Obama can’t be expressed adequately. This is a victory in itself. And to have a President come out against DOMA and in favor of the Matthew Shepard Act is stunning. I know that I have had a lighter step since the official transition.

But an article on Politico.com yesterday makes an important point (well, it makes seven points, but I’m focusing on the one I found most convincing). The economy is in trouble, leaving many media sources without adequate funding for correspondents and investigative reporting. At the same time, the Democrats control Congress and the Whitehouse. This creates a decrease in oversight from independent media sources and a decrease in oversight from the political opposition.

Things will likely move fast in this government – at least so far we’ve seen a freeze on political salaries and the closing of Gitmo. Having the numbers to push through legislation will assist, hopefully, a faster recovery for the U.S. economy as well as lending itself to progressive civil rights bills. We might just see the fastest turn around in American history.

But Obama, no matter how much we want to trust him, is one leader amongst a large group of the same old politicians we’ve been criticizing for two years. If he doesn’t have the ability to keep an eye on all earmarks and spending or, god forbid, he chooses to spend unwisely himself, who will be watching?

Most importantly, even if we agree with what the new President is doing, healthy debate is an important legislative tool. It makes the decisions better, but also improves the reasoning behind those decisions and the defense of those decisions in the public eye. We need opposition to become better at doing what we would have done anyway.

I am hopeful about the next four years. But I also wish we had a little more dissent (and a little more money) in the media to ensure that the hopefulness doesn’t lead to blindness.

Who is running the shop over at NBC’s Today show? Crazy as a loon Ann Coulter was booked to plug  her new tome Guilty. Why Coulter still gets TV time is beyond me. It isn’t like she is saying anything new. Let me see if I can paraphrase the Coulter oeuvre: liberals are namby pamby  atheistic communists who want American daughters, and sons, sodomized by the terrorists. Conservatives, however, love their God (Christian) and country and defend freedom with no fanfare from the biased media.

I miss anything? If NBC wanted to talk to a serious and smart conservative, why not pick Bryon York, Mark Steyn, or Conn Caroll. The first two are associated with the National Review, the magazine that gave Coulter her walking papers after some 9/11 mess she wrote. Maybe smart and serious don’t mesh well in the morning.

Anyway, after picking Coulter, the show decides to drop her and the excuse given was lamer than any lie I’ve told a bill collector. She was dropped, allegedly, because the news from Washington D.C. and Israel was just too breaking. Fair enough, but  Perez Hilton’s new book found time to break through all of that riveting news coverage?

I’ve never been a fan of the Coulter, but this mess pulled by NBC will just line her pockets with book cash. She’ll now head over to Fox News (as she did last night) and cry about the liberal media doing her wrong. And the Coulter as victim routine grates you know? If TV executives want to keep putting her face on the screen, fine. Have her on, be fair and tough, give her a donut and some coffee when the interview is over and call it a day. Everything else just gives her more time to roll out her nuttiness.