by Mel Green

In which our erstwhile reporter dons her Radical Arts for Women t-shirt, which confers superpowers sufficient to push through another day of (mostly) interesting sessions on Day 2 of Netroots Nation, despite far too little downtime and an overabundance of stress hormones.

I was going to try something different today writing what I hoped would be a shorter midday post. The idea was to get one of my requisite “two posts a day from Netroots Nation” posts out of the way (the other is my automatically generated Daily Tweets post on my personal blog at Henkimaa.com), rather than a semi-comprehensive end-of-day post at the end of yeah the day duh, so that maybe I could get to bed at a reasonable time.

Didn’t work out. I started the post midday, but here I am past a Minneapolis midnight trying to complete it. I did, however, have a great visit with an online friend who drover over from Wisconsin so she could meet me, and tomorrow morning I get to sleep in a little.

But I still gotta watch it. With several late nights in a row, between late arrival in Minneapolis on Tuesday night, and staying up late to write end-of-day posts, piled up on top of all the info, discussions, general excitement, & too much coffee — Friday morning had me already with a very big headstart in the exhaustion department. As I tweeted around lunchtime: Thursday my biggest problem was keeping my devices recharged; today it was keeping myself recharged. I’m back-against-the-wall exhausted, & sorely need some downtime.

I get to sleep in I get to sleep in I get to sleep in….

Lucky for me, though, that Friday was a day with slightly fewer sessions I wanted to attend. And in between those sessions, I was partially reenergized by good conversations with some of the other Alaskans down here for NN11, including John Aronno of Alaska Commons, John Creed of University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Chukchi College in Kotzebue, and Jeanne Devon of The Mudflats, who was doing a book signing of Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin with coauthor Ken Morris. (The other coauthor — Frank Bailey, whose story is told in the book — was unable to be here.) Jeanne and Ken told me that the first time they met face-to-face was yesterday; and Ken still hasn’t met Frank Bailey in person.

In between talking with my fellow Alaskans, I actually, yes, attended some sessions. In the morning I went again to the Morning News Dump, though frankly I was too depleted to enjoy the humor. The big stuff of the morning was a Q&A with White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer — a conversation which has already generated a few headlines, as Kaili Joy Gray, who blogs as Angry Mouse on DailyKos, wasn’t exactly gentle with Pfeiffer — generating a lot of Twitter commentary from conference-goers ranging from “she’s being too combative” too “he can’t answer a damn question, his excuses for Obama don’t wash.” I retweeted a sample of tweets of different POVs (again, my tweets will compile in a Daily Tweets post on my personal blog Henkimaa), and I shared in the impatience & outrage on some of the LGBT issues Pfeiffer was grilled on like DADT & DOMA. Basically I still felt that (1) no matter how much we support Obama (& overall, I mainly do), we need to hold him and all Democrats’ feet to the fire; and (2) no matter how much we might think Obama sucks on some things, the alternatives being touted this weekend at the Right Online 2011 conference up the street at the Hilton (yes, the same hotel where I’m staying) are one helluva lot worse.T he worst moment of Pfeiffer’s Q&A for me was when he said so. As I tweeted —  Gray’s question, Pfeiffer’s answer, my response to it:

why shd LGBTs still vote for Obama? b/c he’s better than the other guys. Same old answer. We need to keep pressing the Prez. #NN11 #nn11lgbt

Not so much in the news headlines, but important nonetheless: the LGBT strategy session also held this morning. This brought together everyone (or almost everyone) who was at the LGBT Netroots Connect preconference on Wednesday, plus perhaps 30 or 40 more people who hadn’t been here that day. Our task: to discuss what has worked and what has not worked with four standout issues at the federal level — DADT, ENDA, DOMA, and UAFA (Uniting American Families Act)— and what we can and should do better to push our issues towards positive results. The group I was in mostly talked about DADT and ENDA, but our chief insight fairly well matched the chief insight of another group: the need to put faces on our issues: real people telling real stories about how these laws, or their lack, affect our lives. Well, there’s a lot more to be said about that.  After the session, I introduced myself to Zack Ford, who writes for Think Progress LGBT — one of my most important sources for LGBT news that matters.  Zack told me that we in Alaska should make sure to keep him and his colleague Igor Volsky in the loop on important stuff in our state, because Think Progress — unlike many national LGBT blogs — does its best to keep on top of what the states are doing: a fact to which I can attest, having followed it for several months.

The afternoon session attended, “Bullies and the Blogosphere: Creating Safe Spaces in Our School and Online,” featured Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, Laura Rico of the ABC Federation of Teachers in California, Julie Blaha of Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, and Scott Zumwalt, manager of the It Gets Better Project.

Early on we were asked for a show of hands of who had been bullied in school. I’d say a third to one half of the audience raised their hands. But no one raised a hand when asked if they’d been bullied over Facebook. Reason? — because most of us in the room had graduated high school before Facebook came along.  But bullying nowadays is not, as when we were  young, only at school itself: it penetrates deeply into the home lives of bullied kids through Facebook, Twitter, texting, and other social media.  And, as the AFT folks pointed out, there’s been a rise of bullying on grounds of race, disability, immigration, economic circumstances, and LGBT status. (Think of how it affects kids who intersect in more than one of those categories.)

I think most of us in the audience were familiar with the It Gets Better Project, but I was still interested to hear Scott lay out a capsule history of how the project began and took off far beyond anyone’s expectations. He also played us the It Gets Better video that Google Chrome put out. As I tweeted,

I’ve seen Google Chrome It Gets Better video before, but in this company it esp moved me, tears to my eyes #NN11#nn11lgbt

I wasn’t the only. Blogger Noah Baron tweeted,

panelist read email from guy who changed his mind about killing himself bc of It Gets Better ad. Lots of watery eyes here #nn11#nn11lgbt

A couple of more of my tweets sum up my feelings about the session:

Here’s where I remember how it was for me coming out at 19 in college. So scared, alone…. #NN11 #nn11lgbt

I’m so proud of LGBT elders like us doing what we are doing to make it better for LGBT youth. #NN11 #nn11lgbt

Though it’s true, as someone pointed out to me later, that the session was superficial in its discussion of what we can actually do — besides creating new It Gets Better videos — to combat school bullying.

Here’s the Google Chrome video:

After the session I spent a couple of hours manning… no, womanning… no… queering… the LGBT Netroots Connect table in the Exhibit Hall — trying to finish this post, but instead having a marvellously in-depth conversation with Phil Attey, Executive Director of Catholics for Equality. An important contact for me: he gave me a lot of good background on the divergence of opinion between the Catholic hierarchy and Catholic laiety on a whole number of issues, but most especially marriage equality and other issues of LGBT equality.

As the post headline indicates, today I wore my black Radical Arts for Women t-shirt — the one RAW made up a couple of years ago after Anchorage changed it’s PR motto from “Wild About Anchorage” to “Big Wild Life.” RAW’s tee reads “Big Wild Lesbian.”  And I got lots of compliments on it all day.

Not so many, though, when I walked back to the Hilton and met up with a crowd of Right Online 2011 conferencegoers.  ;)

A couple of good accounts of some of the news coverage of Netroots that I ran across over the course of the day:

• “Netroots Nation Day 2: Media Overplays Obama Angst” by Ari Melber (The Nation, 6/17/11).
• “Netroots Challenge White House Spokesman on Gay Rights” by Evan McMorris-Santoro (Talking Points Memo, 6/17/11).
• “Russ Feingold: Democratic Super PACs Are ‘Dancing With The Devil” by Evan McMorris-Santoro (Talking Points Memo, 6/16/11).

And that’s enough for now. I also took lots of photos, but those will have to wait.