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Gay Bloggers' Voices Rise in Chorus of Growing Political Influence

By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 24, 2009; Page C01

Only the blogosphere, perhaps, has room for Pam Spaulding -- a black lesbian who lives in North Carolina, the only state in the South that has not banned same-sex marriage.

"California, Arizona and Florida all passed marriage amendments in November," says Spaulding, 44, an IT manager by day and a round-the-clock blogger. "All eyes are on North Carolina now." A few days ago, after reports that groups such as NC4Marriage and Christian Action League are organizing a rally in Raleigh to support "traditional marriage," Spaulding wrote on her blog, Pam's House Blend: "As predicted, the professional anti-gay forces plan to descend on NC." What she doesn't write is that, so long as she's blogging, what happens in North Carolina won't stay in the Tar Heel State.

Pam's House Blend is an influential voice in the gay political blogosphere, must-reads that include the Bilerico Project, Towleroad and AMERICAblog, each attracting a few hundred to a few thousand hits a day. Just as the liberal Net-roots and the conservative "rightroots" movements have affected traditional party structures, the still relatively small gay political presence online is rebooting the gay rights movement in a decentralized, spontaneous, bottom-up way. It's spreading news via blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Online, a story about two 16-year-old girls in a Lutheran private school in California being expelled for "conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians" -- as the school's lawyer describes it -- goes viral. And hits nerves.

"Those two girls live in California. California! Imagine what's happening in, say, Alabama. Or Mississippi," Spaulding says in an interview.

In the past, someone like Spaulding would have been relegated to the sidelines. She doesn't work for national gay rights organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign or the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. She lives with her partner, Kate, an audiologist, in Durham, far from San Francisco, New York or Washington, where gay activism has been historically based. But now she's helping shape the agenda, one voice in a chorus of sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious, often in-your-face voices that is pushing established gay groups and redefining the meaning of grass-roots action in this new media age.

Take the immediate reaction to Proposition 8, the California initiative that banned same-sex marriage: Gay bloggers and online activists scheduled rallies across the country, from Providence, R.I., to Albuquerque. Opponents of Prop. 8 gathered on a Web site called Join the Impact, founded three days after Californians passed the initiative by a vote of 52 percent to 48. Facebook groups were created. "Californians Ready to Repeal Prop. 8" has 256,000 members and "Repeal the CA Ban on Marriage Equality -- 2010" has 277,000.

"What happened after Proposition 8 caught the national gay groups completely off guard. I think it surprised them. I think it really showed them that when it comes to harnessing grass-roots energy, they need to get online," says Kevin Naff, editor of the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper. "What happened online came together overnight for little or no money, and the protests were covered by the mainstream press. If national groups wanted to coordinate the kind of mass protests we saw, they would spend $1 million and take six months to do it."

One of the ways the national groups have adjusted is by blogging themselves. Both GLAAD and HRC have bloggers. Joe Solmonese, HRC's president, regularly reads blogs, including Spaulding's. Reading them can be challenging, Solmonese says. "Put 10 bloggers together in one room and they all have 10 different ideas about how to make HRC better," he says.

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