Ten candles

Happy Birthday dear blog!

Amazingly, I’ve now been writing this blog for 10 years!

In that time I’ve written 3,571 posts (this one is 3,572) on a wide variety of subjects – I’ve used 674 different topic tags, of which 241, the most relevant for now, are displayed on the left side of the main blog page. The most used tags are: On the enjoyable side are Gay Marriage-Marriage Equality (678 posts) and personal stories (361 posts). On the resistance side are the GOP (559 posts) and fundamentalism (278 posts).

Those personal stories in the last 3 years included the death of my father, brother, sister-in-law, mother, and aunt.

In the last couple years readership hit a low of about 40 views per post in June 2016. There has been a definite trend upward since then. In February views per post spiked to a high of 185. Last month there were 124 views per post. In the last month the countries with the most pageviews have been Italy with twice as many reads as second place United States. Third place is France.

I think I’ve told this origin story every years. Back in November of 2003 I started writing and sending emails to family and friends about LGBT news stories. The big event that prompted me was the ruling that the Massachusetts Supreme Court required marriage equality in the state within six months. A few years later my niece suggested I write a blog and be a bit more public in what I have to say. And here we are 10 years later.

It is this blog that helped me develop my understanding of ranking, in which some people declare they are better than others. I have come to see how pervasive ranking is to American and world politics and culture. The current moment of women speaking up to identify men who harassed and assaulted them resulted from men thinking they ranked above women, which entitled them to act as they pleased. The actions of the nasty guy are also because he constantly must prove that he ranks above everyone else.

I still find interesting and important things to write about. Sometimes it is to celebrate community, sometimes it is to resist those who try to enforce ranking and tear community apart. Lately I’ve moved away from LGBT issues, because the broader culture is accepting us. I’ve been focusing on politics because those threats are, at the moment, so much more dire.

I’ll keep writing.