Among the glittering nominees of Hollywood films, television and music honored at the annual GLAAD Awards, one category celebrates grassroots queer media like no other. The “Outstanding Blog” award honors ongoing blogs, typically written and curated by a single person, that exemplifies GLAAD’s mission to accelerate acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community and fight defamatory media coverage.
To preserve the media history that queer blogs represent, GLAAD hosted a virtual chat with the five Outstanding Blog nominees for 2022, moderated by RuPaul’s Drag Race veteran and social media personality Peppermint. The chat touches on every aspect of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, including the challenges and triumphs each nominee has faced over decades of publishing stories that mainstream media either missed or ignored.
The GLAAD Award nominations for My Fabulous Disease are a high water mark for my writing career (I won in 2020 after five nominations, after enduring every Susan Lucci joke you can imagine). Barring an Oscar nomination for the fantasy screenplay of my published memoir, A Place Like This, I imagine “GLAAD Award winner…” will be the lead in my biography. Let’s not prepare that obituary yet; I intend to be writing about what it is like to live with HIV for 50 years and beyond.
My deep thanks to fellow nominee Sue Kerr for suggesting this important time capsule event, and to Rich Ferraro at GLAAD for making it happen and offering the considerable resources of GLAAD to make and promote this video chat.
This is one for the time capsule. I’m so proud to be among the fellowship of queer writers and trouble makers.
Mark
