Tag: lesbian

NewsFix | Nov. 3

CJBC holds “non-protest rally,” Harvard students protest “The Mikado,” The Heights publishes longform piece on “LG(BC)TQ” students, Northeastern student sues the university

Last Friday, around 40 students held a demonstration in front of Gasson Hall, according to The Heights. The “non-protest rally” was organized by Climate Justice at Boston College (CJBC), whose members were joined by allies from Divest BU and other Boston College (BC) community members.

Members and supporters of CJBC stood in the Quad holding signs and mirrors that read “No Coal” and “Boston College Supports Climate Violence.” Demonstrators also chanted “Board of Trustees, hear our cries. Invest in our future, not our demise.” CJBC’s primary goal is to push the University to divest its endowment from fossil fuel-related assets, including oil companies Exxonmobil and Shell.

Representatives from the University have stated that they do not view the endowment as a tool to promote social justice. CJBC responds that to not divest is a violation of the University’s ethical investment guidelines, which state that BC “is firmly committed to the promotion of the dignity of the individual, personal freedom, and social justice.”

– Connor Murphy for The Heights

A note: Matt Thacker is everywhere. I interviewed him for my video on Divest BU’s outreach program; Elle Williams included a photo of him in her video on DivestNU’s occupation; and now, he’s here. I’ve never seen a single student show up so much for a cause.

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Later Friday evening, at Harvard University, around 10 students gathered outside Agassiz Theater Friday evening to protest the opening night of the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players’ “The Mikado,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

The comedic opera, written in 1884, satirizes British political culture and bureaucracy. In past renditions of the play performed around the world, non-Asian actors have portrayed Japanese characters, and critics have charged the play perpetuates exaggerated stereotypes of Japanese culture and people.

Harvard’s Gilbert and Sullivan Players’ rendition of “The Mikado” claims to grapple with controversial histories of western attitudes towards Japan. Their rendition takes place in a Las Vegas hotel as opposed to the fictional Japanese town of Titipu, and members of the theater troupe have sponsored teach-ins and town hall forums to talk about racism in theater ahead of opening night.

George S. Qiao ’18 said although he recognized the group’s efforts to engage with the history of the production, he felt that they did not go far enough, arguing the show engages with Japanese history in an offensive manner.

– Graham W. Bishai and Jalin P. Cunningham for the Crimson

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TRIGGER WARNING: The story discussed and linked to below contains descriptions of sexual violence.

On Tuesday night, a mini-Spotlight team at The Huntington News, including myself, broke the largest story we’ve broken in my time at the paper. A current Northeastern University student — a young woman who is in my year at the university — filed a lawsuit against the school and five of its administrators and staff members.

Morgan Helfman, a junior political science and sociology major, claims that the university mishandled the campus proceedings that found a fellow student not responsible for allegedly raping her, according to court documents. Helfman, who gave The News permission to use her name, chose to handle her case through the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution (OSCCR), which allows for an internal Student Conduct Board hearing and decision.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday, Oct. 31, seeks damages and attorney’s fees on the grounds of negligence, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, misrepresentation, violation of the Massachusetts Equal Rights Act and violation of Title IX. Title IX is a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational programs. Helfman is seeking a trial by jury.

“I think the school didn’t see me as a student anymore after this happened, and I think students don’t report because of that,” Helfman said in an interview with The News. “And [students] deserve so much more.”

– Rowan Walrath and Rachel Morford for The Huntington News

Reporting this story has been a hell of a time for me on a personal and professional level, but I may (or may not) save that for another blog post. In any case, all notes of self-promotion removed, I highly encourage you to read the article.

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Earlier today, The Heights published a longform article on the history of LGBTQ+ rights for students at the traditionally Catholic Boston College. It’s an impressive piece of journalism, so I advise you to take a look.

In which I give you Autostraddle’s elevator pitch

UPDATE published on June 18, 2017

Yesterday, I discovered that the basis I used to write the beginning of this blog post was false. AfterEllen was not shutting down. It has not since shut down. It has no plans to shut down.

I read Autostraddle’s report on Sept. 20, 2016 (see below), and I believed it. I wrote up an intro to a short explainer post based on AfterEllen’s supposed shuttering. I published it, presented on it, and went about my life. I wasn’t much of an AfterEllen reader, anyway.

Yesterday, I was on Twitter when the site suggested I follow AfterEllen’s account. “That’s weird,” I thought. I clicked on it. There were new tweets. I clicked on the website link. There were new posts. The site was full of content, far beyond what AfterEllen’s outgoing editor-in-chief, Trish Bendix, had originally said would be limited to “archives” and “periodically publish[ed] freelance pieces.”

I’m now aware that Bendix’s post seems to have been the singular font of information about AfterEllen’s supposed shuttering. Autostraddle ran with it. There was some confusion in the days following: see pieces from Nylon and Slate. Personally, I didn’t check it out. With total trust in Autostraddle, I didn’t think I needed to.

I do feel personally upset by this—an apparently non-amicable parting of ways resulted in misinformation from one of my favorite sites and a quiet drama between the two major online spaces specifically created for queer women.

I apologize for the incorrect information. If I had been doing original reporting, I would have contacted everyone and verified everything. I did not do my due diligence here.

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ORIGINAL POST, published on Oct. 11, 2016:

This blog post outlines a presentation I will be giving in class this morning on a media site of my choosing.

Three weeks ago, Trish Bendix of AfterEllen, one of the world’s largest media sites for queer women, announced that the site would be shuttering. Heather Hogan, a senior editor at Autostraddle, wrote the following the day the announcement came out.

AfterEllen’s announcement comes during a year when the media landscape is changing more rapidly than it has in over a decade. Every week, it seems, news breaks of another site laying off dozens of beloved writers, as sites with big time capital — the BuzzFeeds and Vices of the world — suck up more of the market and more of the advertising money. And as Facebook continues to change the way websites find readers. And as fresh-from-college writers are forced to devalue their work for “exposure” and veteran writers are deemed disposable. The most vulnerable websites, of course, are those who cater to niche markets, particularly ones who cater to women, and super particularly ones who cater to queer women. AfterEllen, it would seem, has been swept up in this tidal wave of change.

With AfterEllen’s departure from the queer media scene, Autostraddle is now the world’s most popular independently-owned website for queer women, with over one million unique visitors and 3.5 million views each month, according to the site’s about page. But its future, too, hangs in the balance.

Autostraddle was founded in March 2009 by Marie Lyn Bernard, a.k.a. Riese, who currently acts as the site’s CEO and editor-in-chief. Riese established a foundation for Autostraddle by recapping “The L Word,” a soap-opera-esque show about a gaggle of queer ladies which has mixed reviews and which I am only mildly ashamed to have just started watching. Now, Autostraddle has six full-time employees, although its team — which includes senior staff, editors, staff writers, visual people, writers, interns, video people, general contributors, community moderators and A-Camp organizers — is much larger.

The site features daily content: aggregations, columns, comics, opinion pieces, TV show recaps, personal essays and so much more. I’ve never seen original reporting from Autostraddle, although that’s not really what the site is for. It’s basically a really big blog with a ton of contributors. It does provide news from outside sources, however, and is consequently the place where I — and I’m sure many other people — learn things like the tragic fact that Jazz Alford, a black woman from Alabama, became the 22nd transgender person killed in the U.S. this year on Sept. 23.

SimilarWeb, a service that provides information on website traffic and other statistics, gives us the following insights into Autostraddle’s readership.

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You could probably deduce that most people who read Autostraddle today don’t just stumble across it. More than 73 percent of viewers get to the site via direct or Google search – they already knew it existed, or they heard about it from a friend. Personally, I only discovered the site because I knew my girlfriend frequented it. (I don’t spend as much time on the gay Internet as I should.)

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that with the changing media landscape, Autostraddle, one of the last big independently-owned queer media sites in existence, might be in dire straits. That said, the lovely ladies running the site have employed a number of revenue strategies:

More than anything, Autostraddle is a community. There is an uncountable-from-the-outside number of people with Autostraddle accounts who comment on posts with anything from praise for the writers to insightful queer haikus. The team has also taken huge steps to make sure that the community is inclusive: the site has a trans editor, for example, and “Our Pulse,” a series of essays by queer Latina and Latinx writers, was launched just two weeks ago.

Autostraddle is a safe haven. It’s one of the very few places where queer women can congregate and just be queer women. We can learn and talk about things that have to do with LGBTQ+ issues, feminism or neither of those things – just the world at large. If you have any interest in supporting independent, queer media, check it out. Take a look. Support it, because it’s one of the last things we have.