brought to you by the letter 2

‘Interested especially in the publishing and communications needs of small businesses and organizations grounded in community’ is verbiage I’ve had at the top of my LinkedIn profile for a few years. To present, it bears only limited relation to paid work I’ve been fortunate to get, but it’s a very true thing to say of me regardless and is adequate, let’s say, to the purposes of LinkedIn.

Utility of the expression on LinkedIn aside, what it even is to be ‘grounded in community’ would be hard to say, of course. Community is one of our problem words. In all sorts of people’s experience — all through history, without doubt, and perhaps in special ways as generalized condition of modernity — to be or fail to be sustained in community is likewise a major problem. Certainly I can speak to aspects of the difficulty in my own life.

One tangle of pathways by which I’m continually challenged in taking hold in one or another scene of community stems from the fraying, progressively over many years and changes of place, of my adherence / adhesion across the spectrum of conservative ideological tenets and identifiers, and with it from increasing leftward affinity and affiliation. ‘Grounded’ in particular can be elusive as life is political.

I am in any case member of various groups and organizations, actively involved to the degree I can be — among them for some time now a labor union in the sphere of media work. Something this involvement exposes me to in new ways, in some sense bringing me ‘into community with’ while simultaneously heightening my outsider sensibility toward, is queer politics and sociality. Lately, that’s meant a modest beginning of appreciation for LGBT (hey, 2SLGBTQIA+) journalism at local / regional scale.

Below, I highlight a couple of recent items reflecting collaboration and fellow boosting among a number of independent media projects in the U.S. — the principal thing a late-December This News Is So Gay conversation with blogging veterans Sue Kerr and Mark King. That episode was followed early this month by a seven-part News Is Out capsule series (published via This News Is So Gay), ‘The Map of Us,’ designed to image a wonderfully stubborn greater North American queer news-market ecosystem’s spread and mix, which I’ve linked separately and which I take it as sort of preface-companion to.

The ‘map’ portrayal offered there stands strikingly in opposition, for me at least, to another item landing in recent months, one I come to in part thanks to my older connections and which I advert to in this post only to recognize as peculiar element of a wider contrary sociopolitical backdrop. I’m referring to essays in a ‘post-liberal’ and, further, (as I understand it, limitations acknowledged) a ‘post-queer’ vein, joined under ironic title Inversion and premised to great extent on doubt about, or rather perhaps on distaste for, meanings or implications of the usage community that ‘The Map of Us’ would seem to spring from urgency to affirm. For something of its flavor, you might listen to a contributor my circles have overlapped with in past, currently on Catholic-right publication Compact’s masthead, talking with collection editors Pierre d’Alancaisez and Amir Naaman on his own podcast.

This antagonism in politics-and-language terms is complex and deserves separate attention. I don’t mean to broad-brush. But the weight, in my eyes now, of all the variously common un-straight folks in conflicted but insistent and fertile weaving of fragile human mutualities that give rise to a market-currents object like ‘The Map of Us’ is enormous set against the Inversion essayists’ pallid natural-order-realist denial politics and cultural nostalgism. Call me a liberal I guess.