All the talk about tapping into the new Stonewall 2.0 energy and harnessing the wondrous new technologies that made Join the Impact and other no-budget, grassroots efforts a smashing success evaporated in a FUBAR-ous vapor last night when a lot of queer activist bloggers and readers found themselves shut out of the No-on-Prop-8 online town hall meeting.

Apparently it’s cool with the salaried suits behind No-on-H8 to discriminate against a minority population within the queer community — namely Macintosh users. Forget that Apple took a credible business risk in gifting the anti-H8 campaign with a cool hundred grand, the event’s organizers opted for a strictly Windows platform. While invited to participate, Mac users were shut out by the requirement that we run Windows software that, in fact, doesn’t run on a Mac. And the alternative Safari-friendly, Live Meeting web client isn’t capable of audio, which makes an audio town hall meeting just a wee bit quiet.

After several, admittedly excitable, emails, I was instructed to dial in by telephone. M’kay… It would have been a whole lot more considerate to have been made aware of that option in advance of this hastily-called event that many of us Mac people helped publicize.

Am I making too much of this? Jeremy, at Good As You, explains why it matters:

Now, this might seem like a little thing to you. But to us, it’s indicative of so much more. In this little LGBT bloggy community that we have going on here, there is an extremely sizable (and growing) audience. Many of us dedicate more time than is good for out health to this cause, not because we are salaried or because it is our best route to fame, but rather because we are passionate. We regularly put life plans on hold and extend our workdays so that we can follow every development on the landscape as they play out. And yet here we have multi-employeed organizations and groups with power structures and loads of financing who fail to understand BASIC technology concepts like, oh, NOT SHUTTING OUT A MASSIVE PORTION OF POTENTIAL LISTENERS OF THIS HEAVILY MAC-USING COMMUNITY! Did no one even stop and ask the “Is this Mac Compatible question?” because it would have been among the first out of our mouths!! And besides being annoying, this failure is also particularly ironic, considering that Apple actually put money in the “no on 8″ coffers!

Qweerty was set to live-blog the event. They were shut out until the call-in option was announced. Anyone interested can jump over to their Live Blogging The No on Prop 8 Campaign’s Virtual Town Hall. Don’t miss the comments.

Andy Towle, at Towleroad, was likewise shut out: L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center Hosts Online Town Hall for Windows Users.

Jim Burroway, at Box Turtle Bulletin, was also shut out. Jim had this to say:

Nearly a quarter of all visitors to Box Turtle Bulletin are Mac users, as is this humble scribe. So are Andy Towle and Jeremy Hooper. Fifteen minutes after the meeting started, organizers belatedly gave a phone number for Mac users, but that was after most had already left in disgust. Queerty was able to phone in twenty minutes after the meeting started.

A forum that was intended to dispel the idea that the No on 8 campaign missed too many lost opportunities before the election missed a HUGE one after the election. It’s incredible that this professional leadership could be so clueless.

The always delightful Sapphocrat at Lavender Newswire did manage to get in and transcribe a good deal of what was said. Sapph’s annotations, by the way, are spot on.

An audio file should be available by this evening at the Virtual Town Hall Meeting page, but don’t be surprised if they’re peddling BetaMax tapes of the event.

Tags: Jim Burroway, Prop 8, Queer History, Queer Rights

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 10:40 am and is filed under People, Places, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.