AfterEllen, “the pop culture site that plays for your team,” will be shutting down this Friday after 14 years. I am deeply saddened.
Trish Bendix, the site’s editor-in-chief, wrote yesterday at the Advocate a “Eulogy for the Living: On Losing AfterEllen and Queer Women’s Spaces.” In it, she explains, “Evolve Media purchased AfterEllen from Viacom two years ago. They gave us two fiscal years to become their LGBT property and profit in that space, and they found we are not as profitable as moms and fashion.”
Not that AfterEllen ignored us queer moms. Founder Sarah Warn wrote back in 2003 of “TV’s Lesbian Baby Boom,” and how it threatened to reduce all lesbians to a single story of motherhood, even though there was nothing wrong with well-written stories about lesbian moms. More recently, they’ve featured “celesbian moms” and writer Lucy Hallowell has been doing a great job of recapping The Fosters.
I owe a personal debt to AfterEllen as well. Sarah Warn offered me some banner ads on the site way back before it was bought by Logo/Viacom and then Evolve. That helped Mombian gain traction when I was just getting it started. Later, she offered my spouse and I the opportunity to do a vlog on lesbian parenting, which we did for several years.
AfterEllen’s impact was much bigger, of course, giving voice to many aspects of queer women’s culture. The way it helped Mombian is just a small example of the type of community building it nurtured. As Bendix writes: “AfterEllen is just one of the homes lesbian, bisexual, and queer women will have lost in the last decade. 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.”
She notes, “Evolve has decided to keep the site and its archives alive for now, with a promise of periodically publishing freelance pieces in the future. I am not sure what that will look like.” Go read the rest of her piece, which is not only about AfterEllen, but about the future of queer women’s spaces in general.
The loss of AfterEllen is a loss for all of us. My thanks and best wishes to Trish and all of her staff and writers who helped make the site what it was, who entertained us, gave us hope, made us think, and helped us feel not so very alone.
[Update: 7:30 p.m., 9/21/16: Emrah Kovacoglu, general manager of TotallyHer Media (the part of Evolve Media that controls AfterEllen), has said that the site is not shutting down, but was not able to keep Bendix as editor-in-chief. He asserts that readers will be able to access the site and its content, including the forums, and “freelancers and contributors” will continue to provide coverage. Bendix herself had said that the parent company would “keep the site and its archives alive for now, with a promise of periodically publishing freelance pieces in the future,” but also saw this as a sign that the site “will be effectively shutting down.” LGBTQ Nation reports that after her piece this morning, “Bendix got an email telling her she was fired immediately and withdrawing her severance offer of three weeks pay.” If Evolve/TotallyHer are hoping to keep attracting an audience of queer women, that’s not how to go about it.]