Bloggers Are Changing the Way the Gay Rights Movement Communicates - washingtonpost.com

Description

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 ...

Original URL

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/23/AR2009022303105.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/23/AR2009022303105.html