The Overnight Broadcast

Linux.com is no longer a news source. They appear to have laid off most of their staff, including longtime editor-in-chief Robin Miller. Speculation is new management at SourceForge.

I’m a little late in getting this news, though there was a time I would have been right on top of it. One of my first regular contract gigs was with SourceForge (and VA Linux/OSDN/OSTG) predecessor Andover.net, writing shareware reviews as “Dave” of DaveCentral (now extinct). In 2000 I went to work for NewsForge as an editor.

Those opportunities came about after conversations I had with Robin Miller both on and off the old NetSlaves mailing list. Oh! Fun bit of trivia: The mailing list eventually resulted in a book in which my experiences at CNET’s early days made up a fun chapter titled The Fry Cook.

About the time I was laid off from NewsForge in 2001, OSDN was dealing with a revolt at Linux.com which they decided to end by locking out the site’s paid staff and volunteers. Huge drama at the time, lots of entitlement whining and outraged harrumphing and probably some justified complaints, too. It was astounding.

At some point in time whatever the corporate powers that be had hoped to accomplish with Linux.com failed to happen and suddenly NewsForge was the new Linux.com — that is, the domain newsforge.com suddenly redirected to Linux.com with all articles and editorial staff, too. Not sure when it happened, the last time I paid any attention to the site was in 2005 or ‘06 when I made some overtures regarding freelance opportunities (they were receptive, but I changed my mind).

After all that time, after all that drama, after all that money, Linux.com now appears to be a lightly-trafficked and very generic discussion forum. While some people holding onto ancient resentments might see this as a Pyrrhic victory, I think it’s just a damn shame and such a pointless flush. Perhaps the ad market is really that bad? There’s only a few people who know for sure, and they’re probably not going to talk.

I hope that everyone who was laid off gets through it okay. One thing I learned in 2001 is that it’s hard as hell for a middling freelance writer to get work when there are suddenly thousands of brilliant writers competing for the same jobs.

There was an article on Salon this weekend asking where all the drag queens have gone. It’s rather unremarkable, the sort of thing I would have written when I was the same age as the essayist. What captured my attention was the debate in the comments section, kicked off with this gem:

How badly do gays want to get married? Because if they are truly serious about it, the dresses will have to go. Politics is serious business and you have to take yourself seriously if you want others to do the same. Prop. H8 isn’t going to get overturned by marching through the streets in drag, it will have to be in regular street clothes and possibly door to door. This could be a big reason why it is no longer fasionable. Gays are starting to get seroius about their political struggles and that means taking on a face the general public recognizes and can sympathize with. Take it from someone who lives in hater coutnry, the more “normal” you look, the more seriously you will be taken.

Oy, the assimilationists have arrived early this year. We usually don’t hear from them until the summer months, when pride rolls around.

Casual observation has shown me that the bulk of assimilationists are psychologically broken in some way. The typical background seems to be an involuntary outing ending in rejection by friends and families. Sometimes it’s a deliberate outing gone horribly wrong, or something else entirely, whatever the reason might be it’s left them with a pathological need for acceptance.

Instead of working it out in therapy, assimilationists believe that the path to acceptance lies in curtailing the behaviors of others. According to them, we — and therefore they — would have total respectability, full rights including marriage and oh, so much more, if we’d just get rid of all those freaks parading around half-naked during pride events.

There’s just a few things that the assimilationists tend to forget when they start screeching about throwing the drag queens and leather daddies under the bus “because no one will take us seriously unless we act seriously”.

It was those freaks — the men in drag, the lads in leather, the cigar-chomping dykes roaring down the road on their motorcycles — who did the organizing and the activism over the past 40 years, all the heavy lifting that helped us to take the rights we have today. We are where we are in terms of society and sexuality because of them and we got there while they were marching down Market street in all of their non-conforming glory.

I’ve dealt with people who’ve cited sexualized behavior at parades as one reason they won’t support equal rights for their fellow Americans. Key words in that last sentence: one reason. Get rid of the leather and the drag, and they’ve got fifty other reasons queued up to tell us why they’d still hate us. We could strip ourselves of all dignity and self-respect in the quest for their acceptance and they’d still call us fucking faggots and vote to take away our rights. They’re a group that’s rapidly shrinking in size and influence and since they’re mostly older, literally dying out. Why would we want to waste energy on appealing to them?

Would we have found faster acceptance without those sexualized and flamboyant men and women grabbing the attention of every evening news camera crew? Sure, no doubt about it. Every movement would probably have an easier time of lobbying if their more radical members would simply shut up and sit down. When it comes to GLBTQ rights, most of us find the idea that asking a part of our communities to suppress themselves — you know, keep it in the closet — to be abhorrent and opposite to everything we’ve worked to overcome.

We’ll take full rights, oh yes we will. It won’t be tomorrow and maybe not even next year or next decade. But we will take them, and we’ll take along everyone, even those in their thonged and/or bedazzled glory, to the finish line.

It would be easy for me to end this rant by demanding the assimilationists take a bit of their own medicine by sitting down and shutting up. I don’t want that, but I would really appreciate it if they’d locate a nice therapist with a comfy couch and talk out their issues.