Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

OK, so this is just annoying.  Facebook added two categories to “relationship status”  – civil unions and domestic partnerships.  Woo hoo.  A nice win and accurate, too.

So fast forward many months to this past weekend.  I realized I had claimed a name for my blog’s “fan” page (claiming makes it easier to direct people). I wanted www.facebook.com/pghlesbian of course.  It was rejected. So I typed it in another tab and it came up blank. I tried a few variations and eventually realized that it was the word lesbian.  I was stunned.

So I posted my woes and GLAAD responded. They were able to get Facebook staff to set up my “claimed name” and we were set.  Or so I thought until I went to set up a widget for my new blog. That’s when I learned that the word lesbian was also rejected on that deeper level. What?

GLAAD said they would intervene. They also continue to investigate why others cannot used the word lesbian.  But how do you contact Facebook to get the exception.  And why is lesbian a dirty word?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around – if someone misuses lesbian, it should be reported as a TOS violation like any other issue?  Why punish the LGBT community because bigotry might happen?  It hasn’t happened yet.

So I’m working around the widget issue. I have discovered a bunch of bloggers have sort of invented variations of their blog names.  And that really only hurts Facebook by making fan pages irrelevant. Yeah, the widget is fine, but the URL is useless.

I still have widget issues, but that is due to my blog design so we’ll work on that with Team Lesbian Central.

Still, this sucks. Facebook, major fail. I have little incentive to put anything on my page but networked blogs.