Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Last night, I learned that this blog, Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, won the category of outstanding blog in the national GLAAD media awards. It was our second nomination.

.@PghLesbian24 just won for “Outstanding Blog” at the #GLAADawards. Go take a look at this important blog: https://t.co/HRmbWKRhYJ pic.twitter.com/yP4ZLPnNcH

— GLAAD (@glaad) May 5, 2019

The awards were announced around 8:30 PM Saturday night. I was at home with Laura after dinner at Olive Garden and a quick stop at Starbucks. Then I plunged a clogged drain in the basement and settled in to watch the documentary ‘Knock Down the House’ on Netflix. At this point, I thought the highlight of my evening was the OG server sliding some extra breadsticks into our leftovers bag – that doesn’t happen all of the time.

So I was engrossed in the movie when my phone ‘blew up’ as they say and I read that I had won the category.

Wow. Ok, so I actually screamed “OH MY GOD, I WON” and jumped out of my seat. It took Laura a moment to realize what I was talking about. She demanded I hand her my phone to read the tweet and that I stop jumping up and down because I was scaring the cats. Then she said “OH MY GOD, YOU WON” and joined me in the jumping up and down. The cats by this time had fled for safe haven elsewhere in the living room.

We watched the rest of the documentary and I went to bed at 11 while she stayed up to watch the news and some SNL. A not so typical Saturday night.

A humbling moment – I texted our niece to share the news. I started the blog the day before she was born. She was very gracious, but admitted she still doesn’t really understand what a blog is. So I texted my 40something friends who were in the window of understanding a blog, appreciating the win, and having read my actual content.

This award was for blog content posted during 2018. While writing my annual wrap-up of our year in blogging for 2018, I identified the top most 20 read posts and pulled out some themes to understand what people were looking for when they visited this blog.

It was a tough year, not in small part due to FOX News targeting me (and the blog) in a hatchet piece on my coverage of the Chick-fil-A sponsorship of the Pittsburgh Marathon, generating thousands of hateful comments (that seem now to have been removed from the original piece) that were very hard to process for me. Covering the Grand Jury Report was personally exhausting. Covering the community response to the police shooting of Antwon Rose and the anti-LGBTQ values of a candidate for District Attorney, the list goes on and on.

I’m sort of stuck between “wow, I won” and “wow, this was a very hard year on my blog,” a dynamic I suspect will take a few more days to work itself out so I can enjoy the win. Today, we are going to see a play and then Laura is taking me out to dinner. Then we rush home to put out the recycling! National recognition doesn’t get the chores done. LOL.

Obviously, these stories roll over into 2019. I hope you will continue to pay attention to them and others. This piece by Karen Ocamb explores why we need LGBTQ media and I think blogs fall under that umbrella, especially in regions like Western Pennsylvania where we have no LGBTQ-centric traditional media platforms.

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