We do. With us learning the ropes as new bloggers for the LGBT community at the time, it was an eye opening experience. During the National Equality March in DC there was a lot of coverage on the events and players—as we’re sure most of you recall. Particularly there was plenty of coverage surrounding President Obama’s appearance at the HRC dinner. Shortly after the dinner there was a televised debate about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell on CNN featuring Dan Choi, Dan Savage, Hilary Rosen and Michael Signorile.
Hilary Rosen was the only one defending Obama in this debate. The other three—Dan Choi, Dan Savage and Michael Signorile, were pretty adamant in their criticisms aimed at Obama for his inaction regarding DADT. In the below YouTube video Rosen while debating with Dan Savage drops a bomb. It occurs precisely at 1:34 minutes.
We remember watching this and thinking when it happened, “what? what does she mean? what’s she saying?” At that time RENWL.org was new-ish on the block. We didn’t know much about anything. We didn’t quite understand at first that what Rosen was saying was that the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) had told Obama some time ago to hold off on any stop-loss action in regards to DADT. All four of those people—-Choi, Savage, Signorile and of course Rosen, were already aware of this. And yet, there they all were on live television— Savage in particular—-ranting yet again that the president was a coward for not doing anything about DADT; something Savage and Signorile along with many others in the gay press throughout 2009 had started to prop their careers on. The gay masses were eating it up. Why stop? In other words, all of their lip service and indignation at Obama was just an act—–a sham—-like fake roller derby girl fights kinda’ sham. All four of those people had known for quite some time that the SLDN had requested that the president not make an executive move on DADT. Rosen just got tired of the phony attacks in the moment and dropped the dime. Right on live television. It took us a minute to figure it out, but we got it. However instead of reporting on this ourselves, still unsure of our own opinions and frantic for feedback and approval we immediately consulted the “big LGBT news bloggers” who we admired at the time and followed on Twitter. We wanted to see what they thought of the transaction between Rosen and Savage first before expressing our own conclusion on what we’d heard.
Posting on their blogs and by tweets, we asked, “what’s the deal with what Hilary Rosen said?” No one responded. No one. Not only did they not respond to our inquiries they didn’t report on the Rosen outburst themselves. As far as the gay press and the LGBT blogging community was concerned it was as though Rosen’s statement never happened. That creeped us out. Still does.
Bottom line: we do not trust the gay mainstream press or the greater LGBT news blogging community. We feel just fine being and staying on the outside of things. We don’t mind it at all.
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