Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

It has been quite a few months – we’ve been invited to contribute to the Post-Gazette Forum section, working on the first issue of the AMPLIFY zine and exploring a stage play performance for Pride month. All exciting stuff, but also time consuming – that, plus fundraising for AMPLIFY has literally consumed most of my free time.

And I lost track of the incoming contributions to the project, realizing today that we have nothing to publish. Several are in the queue, waiting for some information, photos and so forth. But for the most part, we’ve hit a wall.

Now, the best source of referrals (since Day One) has been personal requests. General Facebook posts, ads, mentions on other sources such as Huffington Post help a little bit but for the most part they do not really connect with people. I’ve had dozens of people tell me that they appreciate being invited, in spite of the fact that our messaging is very clearly inviting people to initiate their own contribution.

So what does the wall mean? Certainly, we have not exhausted the LGBTQ folks living in this region – we estimate that number is between 80,000 and 200,000. And we have plans for more outreach and resources (hence, the fundraising) to get me in front of folks in the outlying counties to ask them to contribute.

But maybe this is the natural ending in terms of people who want to contribute? I don’t know. But it definitely means we’ll be taking a hiatus of undetermined length.

If you’d like to personally invite someone to contribute, that would be terrific. The important links are:

• The Q&A form http://bit.ly/AmplifyLGBTQ
• The general project http://www.pghlesbian.com/amplify
• The donation link http://bit.ly/Donate Amplify

In the meantime, we’ll be evaluating how to move forward. Our regular blogging will continue, of course. I’m sharing this in the interests of being transparent about the project. We aren’t quitting, but sometimes it is necessary to reevaluate.

I do appreciate all of your support. I hope you will invite someone to contribute if you think their voice would matter. And I hope you will stick with us as we go through this phase of the project.