by Melissa S. Green

This is a fairly bare bones report of the LGBT Netroots Connect preconference in Minneapolis held earlier today.  Tomorrow begins the Netroots Nation conference proper, about which I’ll be also writing over the next few days.

I flew down last Friday morning to Portland visiting my ex-partner and a couple of other friends, and getting something of a quickie education in some of Portland as seen through the eyes of the homeless.  (More on that later on my personal blog Henkimaa.)  But yesterday was my big travel day: 3 flights and 10 hours from Portland to Minneapolis by way of Seattle and Denver, that last leg with a ride so bumpy that the back half of the plane (my half) didn’t get beverage service: the pilot directed the flight attendants to sit down. I got into my hotel, the Hilton Minneapolis, sometime shortly after midnight Central time. The preconference was also held here in the Hilton — which left me a little more time for sleep than attendees housed in other hotels got. For which I was immensely grateful!

It was a pretty intensive day. There were scores of people — I’m not great at estimating numbers, but I’d guess at 100 to 150 people in the room, people from across the U.S., bloggers as well as activists in a number of organizations that many Bent Alaska followers will be familiar with — e.g., the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Freedom to Marry, GLAAD, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, etc. A lot of people knew each other, by virtue of attendance at previous Netroots Nation conferences, through contacts in their home cities or over the Internet, or both. We were encouraged a couple of times to sit at tables that weren’t filled with people we already knew. It took me little effort to comply: I didn’t know anyone. At least, not outside my phone acquaintance with #nn11lgbt organizer Mike Rogers and reading acquaintance with some of the blogs represented. I’m lousy with names when they involve many many people over a short span of time, so I’m not going to try to introduce the people I met, for fear of getting names wrong or leaving people out.

I livetweeted large portions of the day, though my tweets can hardly capture the full gist. My tweets will be automatically compiled into a “Daily Tweets” post on my personal blog Henkimaa tomorrow morning. (I won’t be crossposting it to Bent Alaska, but will link to it from there.)

Update: See The Daily Tweets 2011-06-15: LGBT Netroots Connect at Henkimaa.

Here’s a summary of the day’s sessions, taken from the agenda. I’ll have a little more to say about one of the sessions in a follow-up post.

Session I: Problem-Solving the Movement

This was a large-scale brainstorming session, broken into five items brainstormed in five-minute sprints at each table of about 8 people apiece. We’d brainstorm on one item, then pass our question to another table while we worked on a question some other table had just worked out. It was amazingly productive. One of the organizers told me afterwards that the full product of our work would be typed up and made available to us later.

Here’s the questions we brainstormed on. Assume (as we did) that all involve the overall movement for full LGBT equality.

1. Identify 5 key gaps in the movement.
2. How can we engage more effectively across race/ethnicity?
3. How can we engage more effectively across generations?
4. How can we engage more effectively across faith/non-faith lines?
5. How can we ensure the LGBT blogosphere is strong and well-funded?

I’m personally very interested in question 4, given my sense that too often we cede questions of religion/spirituality/faith to those who persistently stand against us. But question 5 is also strong in my mind these days, given my position now as a coadmin of Bent Alaska. It led quite naturally into the next session I participated in —

Session IIa: Utilizing Blogging, Social Media, and Online Activism to Effect Change. How to individuals and organizations build an ecosystem that is sustainable and supports blogging while maintaining independent perspective? How to make it sustainable? How can organizations that receive foundation funding help funders understand the value of also funding bloggers? Does it matter if straight men are blogging as lesbians?

The last question is a reference — referred to a lot today — to the discovery that two supposedly lesbian bloggers were in fact heterosexual men posing as lesbians. And I think you know our answer to that question. The other questions — quite a bit more complex. And I’ll probably have more to say about them later, after going through some of the Netroots Nation sessions on related topics. But I felt one of the other folks present summed it up well in saying that we’re trying (still? again?) to build a sustainable infrastructure for the movement for LGBT equality — one in which bloggers as “media voices” retain their independence, while still furthering our shared goals — and all of that without burning us out.

Session IIb: Building Coalitions. How do bloggers and organizations work together on campaigns, ballot measures, candidates, redistricting, clean elections, education reform, etc.? We will reference Session I as a central framework for discussion, and will talk through case studies of successes and train wrecks.

I didn’t attend this session, as it was held at the same time as Session IIa. But I’m guessing the folks who attended it made considerable progress, judging by the whoops and applause that we occasionally heard form our side of the room.

Session III: Immigration Reform Through a Queer Lens. Panel featuring Tania A. Unzueta, Immigrant Youth Justice League and Association of Latino men for Action; Reyna Wences, Immigrant Youth Justice League; Juan Rodriguez, Students Working for Equal Rights; and Felipe Matos, Presente.org and Students Working for Equal Rights.

This panel featured four young people announced today as winners of the Freedom From Fear Award, which honors “ordinary people who have committed extraordinary acts of courage on behalf of immigrants and refugees — individuals who have taken a risk, set an example, and inspired others to awareness or action.” All of these speakers face the double risk of being both undocumented and LGBT. Listen to them at the Freedom From Fear website; I believe video will also be coming; we’ll post it on Bent Alaska when it becomes available.

Session IV: Is Fighting for Marriage Equality Strategic? How can marriage strategically help us get closer to full federal equality? What other equality opportunities does marriage open up to us?

There was a lot more disagreement than you might have thought during this session — including from me. And it’s the one I’ll be writing a separate post about. I believe video and/or audio of this one will also be available later, at which time we’ll post it.

There’s more to come on LGBT issues at Netroots Nation tomorrow through Saturday. Stay tuned — I’ll be writing about it.