The Honorable Barney Frank

On Saturday, Dec 6, 2008, Barney Frank spoke at a Victory Fund luncheon at The Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC. We who were at the National LGBT Blogger and Citizen Journalist Initiative were also invited.

Barney spoke about what we should demand of those who say they love us, and, about the passage of an inclusive Hate Crimes Bill, but the funny money-quote is at the end of this two-minute clip from the video I made.

The Meet and Greet

The Washington Blade covered the Bilerico Meet and Greet held at a coffeehouse called ArtfullyChocolate.
You'll find the full set of photos here, but I feel this one, in which I'm with Zamna Avila of AskTheGayLatino, captures my inner ferocity or perhaps just the embers of sleep deprivation.

(And don't miss the pic of blogger friend Mike of DC seated to my right with the fabulous Nick Cargo of PageOneQ to my left.)

Busy Bees

As you might imagine, a gathering of bloggers might be understated as hyper-communicative. Even during the presentations, almost no one stopped surfing, texting, emailing, twittering, uploading, editing, posting and electronically gossiping with a pal across the room. This is not to say that we didn't absorb what was being presented. We are simply of the breed that can intake stimuli from various sources simultaneously and deliver it simultaneously to a number of unrelated recipients. The presenters seemed to understand this and not mind it.

A more cordial group you couldn't assemble.

Blogger Summit- room full of Paul Reveres

Heavy on the political (which is something I mostly leave to others) but, as you'd imagine, a room full of fascinatin gay bloggers is like a day spent at the flea market at Brimfield, MA: acres of interesting stuff each piece with its own intricate history and message and life.

Regarding the political side to this, I'll summarize for you:

In the American Revolution, there was one Paul Revere. Today, in the revolution that has now begun for ownership of individual rights, bloggers are the new Paul Revere, but there are hundreds of thousands of them and they are not all shouting the same thing about the British coming. They are shouting huge heaps of overlapping static. Sometimes they pull together suddenly like a school of fish responding to the force of the current. There is no skill to this. There is only speed. You almost need to be out of the water to see, let alone control this. Nevertheless, the political bloggers feel that coalescence is within their grasp.

Here's the fabulous Mike Rogers of PageOne who is our overworked organizer (and you'll pardon me for liveblogularly skip the links for the moment):



Eric Leven of Knuckecrack and Bilerico makes a point while Nate of the blog www.buffawhat.com does something unrelated on Vimeo.



And of course, JoeMyGod and I do our duelling banjoes thing with our cameras (they are the new fans).