I wrote an article for AfterEllen once. It was terrible, shortsighted and poorly edited, the kind of thing that a privileged early-twentysomething who’d only ever written academic papers would write, which I did in the too-rare downtime between studying for law school finals. It was about sweeps lesbianism and why sweeps lesbianism was good, because hey at least it was something. So in case I’m your fave, now you know I used to be way more problematic than I am. I got the gig because Sarah Warn, the editor at the time, saw me complaining about coverage on the site. She challenged me to share my voice and my opinions, the first time anyone outside of my college mentor had. I wrote the article under a pseudonym, because I was afraid of outing myself and applying for jobs.
That was what it was like then. I’m not stupid, I know people are still afraid of being outed and living their lives, but I’ve been able to move past that as the culture I live in, and the area I live in, has become less intolerant. The world isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot different now than it was back when I wrote that article, or when Warn founded AfterEllen, in 2002.
AfterEllen is closing tomorrow, shut down by its parent company Evolve Media, because queer women aren’t considered profitable. So while the site will continue to exist, as a place on the internet, it won’t get regular content updates and most, if not all, of the women who wrote for it are gone. It’s the end of an era, one that touched the lives of so many queer women, that was woven into the very fabric of some of our identities. I still criticize AfterEllen (I did so in a tweet a few hours before news broke that it was closing), but it’s probably the single most important website in my life.
The thing is that when you’re part of a marginalized community, it’s not just important to have a space to be yourself; it’s important to see other voices like yours, shared, cultivated, and valued. To know that your stories are stories worth telling, and stories with talking about. Sure, it’s recapping, fun videos (This Just Out remains one of my favorite webseries of all time, and I found it on that site, and you should all give it a watch), fandom, and the Hot 100, but it’s also about carving out a space, however small, in a giant internet of mostly straight people, tailored towards their experiences and lives. AfterEllen was something different. It was for us. It was by us. It was invaluable. And tomorrow, it’ll be gone.
I never became a professional writer in the way I was thinking I would when I first wrote that article a decade ago, but I do write professionally. I know my voice is valued. It’s hard to define what the loss of this site means, when the world is so different now. I can still get the content I want elsewhere. It’s user generated all over tumblr, y’know? That’s really the legacy of AfterEllen. It lives on, in places like Autostraddle and tumblr, in celebrities like Kate McKinnon, and on mainstream websites that can no longer ignore the portrayal of queer women in media and the existence of queer women behind the scenes. The legacy of AfterEllen lives on in us, who at that site learned the value of our voices, stories and lives.
