If you were a queer woman who was at least partially conscious at some point in the past 20 years, chances are you read an article on AfterEllen. You may have loved it, you may have hated it, but at the end of the day you were grateful that it was at least kinda gay -- just like you.
It's a lesbian, bisexual and queer woman-focused site, writing about pop culture from a feminist perspective. And on Tuesday, AfterEllen Editor in Chief Trish Bendix posted an article on her Tumblr announcing that the site, one of the earliest and largest for queer women, would be virtually shutting down at the end of the week.
Despite some of the most thorough Abby Wambach coverage in the biz, Evolve Media, who owns AfterEllen, decided to fire its editor in chief and continue only with freelancers: a skeleton of its former self.
All across social media, queer readers who grew up on AfterEllen mourned. AfterEllen wasn't just a small LGBTQ vertical but a whole site dedicated to queer women -- and now it, like hundreds of other spaces for queer women, seems ready to disappear.
After Bendix posted her announcement on her Tumblr, fans of the site protested, and Evolve Media quickly clarified their position. The site would live on without an editor-in-chief and exist entirely with freelancers, Evolve Managing Director Emrah Kovacoglu explained to Mashable in an email:
The site was not profitable and Evolve is very committed to running profitable enthusiast sites. Profitability is not something that has been easy to achieve in our industry recently...
As a result we made the decision to let our full-time editor-in-chief go. We plan on leveraging a couple of our senior managing editors inside the company to work with the same freelance contributors who have been producing most of the content on the site.
For Bendix, her dismissal, and the dissolution of the position altogether, meant the site had been effectively eviscerated. Freelancers had not been informed, Bendix explained. Content would be primarily evergreen. A website for queer women, The Advocate postulated, could potentially be run by straight men.
"Essentially the site will have no editor or full-time staff. . . . None of our contributors seem interested in continuing a relationship with the site as it will otherwise run no recaps, columns or otherwise regular content that readers have come to us for since 2002," Bendix told Mashable in an email. "Evolve does not want people to think it’s shutting down because they still want the clicks from evergreen content and occasional promised freelance pieces."
AfterEllen was founded in 2002 with a clear mission: to explore, through criticism and original reporting, representations of lesbians and bisexual women in pop culture. It was one of the few, and sometimes only, major site for queer women in the early 2000s. Though its focus was pop culture, it, like so many other queer spaces, started to take on different roles.
Through the AfterEllen Top 100, you could read about the 100 hottest queer celebrities (there were more than 3?) and discover what it means for sexuality to exist along a spectrum. You could share their extensive The Good Wife recaps and celebrate the small moments that happen every day that would no one would ever call gay -- but are definitely, deeply gay.
Were you dying to know the difference between Canadian lesbians and American ones? How much did you want to know about Tegan and Sara? Everything? Did you want a daily update?
AfterEllen was the place, and the home, for you.
After Bendix posted her announcements, readers came forward and explained how instrumental the place had been in helping them come out, and finding community at a time when they had none.
Over time, AfterEllen went through a number of structural changes and owners. Evolve Media purchased the site from Viacom in 2014, before effectively closing it this week.
In 2009, the site Autostraddle was born, which focused on queer women (cis and trans) with a slightly broader reach: news, politics, and culture. Some of the editors and writers had grown up with AfterEllen, some had even worked for the site. Though the sites had different coverage and occasional points of contention, they shared the same sense of justice and a vision for a happier, queer-er world.
As queer culture moved into the mainstream, sites like Buzzfeed established popular LGBTQ verticals and introduced slick, consumable humor and explainer videos. Whereas AfterEllen was a site made for and by queer women, outlets like Buzzfeed and HuffPost Queer Voices helped straight people understand queer culture. Readers could peruse these generalist websites and discover queer content, even if they weren't looking for it.
Tumblr, which was founded in 2007, also became a popular social platforms for queer youth. Writers, particularly trans writers and queer women of color, were given an extra microphone -- it's just that no one paid them to be there.
So it might seem misplaced to grieve for AfterEllen when so much has taken their place. After all, 2016 was a particularly tough year for digital media. But Autostraddle lived, and other sites kept their LGBTQ verticals. Was there really so much to mourn?
Yes, Bendix explained, because AfterEllen's (effective) closure is part of a larger phenomenon: the dissolution of spaces for queer women. There are no lesbian bars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Washington DC. Even in New York, home to around 65 bars for gay men, supports only four bars for queer women.
"We’re often on the brink of not existing anymore," Heather Hogan, senior editor of Autostraddle, wrote on the site.
So while it's great to see larger digital outlets expand their LGBTQ coverage, sites like Autostraddle continue to advocate for queer women's media, managed by queer women. Brands like The Advocate and Towleroad, who cover the broader LGBTQ community, originated with gay men. Autostraddle is one of the few recognizable sites remaining made by, and for, queer women.
And while LGBTQ verticals on sites like HuffPost queer and Mic provide great original reporting and insights, they can't, given their audience, quite provide the level of obsessive specificity that AfterEllen and Autostraddle can. AfterEllen has a whole vertical dedicated specifically to Kristen Stewart. A whole vertical.
Autostraddle noticed that there was a lesbian (one, single lesbian) in the Jon Benet Ramsey documentary. Who else noticed that? Why would non-queer people care?
LGBTQ verticals in mainstream sites exist partially to educate and inform cis and straight communities, queer-focused websites maintain more of an internal dialogue. It's great and profoundly important to watch Buzzfeed debunk LGBTQ myths -- but on sites like AfterEllen and Autostraddle, those myths don't need to be enumerated. They're understood to be fiction.
After Bendix announced her departure, fans of the site issued loud rallying cries and encouraged queer folks to support their queer media. It's unclear what, exactly, that means or how effective it would be. (Should queer women click on more display ads? Or pay subscriptions to non-existent sites? Or just tweet really, really hard?)
It can seem almost impossible to slow the erasure of queer women's spaces, both digital and physical. Yet for Bendix and others in the community, that doesn't make the struggle any less important.
"AfterEllen is just one of the homes lesbian, bisexual and queer women will have lost in the last decade,” Bendix writes. “It was a refuge, a community, a virtual church for so many. I’m not sure that some people outside of us can really ever understand that.”
The hundreds of thousands of readers of AfterEllen are being forced to say goodbye to the site, and many of the spaces they grew up on. With these disappearances, lesbian, bi and queer women have had to scramble to fortify the remaining communities they created with no clear idea of how long they will last.
