Daggone! Enough of y’all meandered over to the Bloggies website to vote this thing in as best glbt weblog!
I would like also to thank whichever mysterious nominator(s) tossed my well-worn baseball cap into the ring in the first place, and whichever Bloggie finalist-winnowing committee people plucked this blog out of the pile and brought it to wider attention as a finalist. For most of us, publishing a blog with any sense of mission and regularity is a labor of love, receiving little or no fiscal compensation. The quality of the community the blog helps to collect is our daily bread, and recognitions like these are our butter. My plate runneth over.
I’d like to give a respectful bow to the other Bloggies best glbt weblog finalist blogs, Queerly Complex, Lesbifriends, Naked Blog, and Aussielicious (way NSFW! unless you work at Babeland or Good Vibes! Suitable For Major Winkie Viewage is what that puppy is! Plus general madcap Aussie fun!). Now if you visit this link to a YouTube plea by Lesbifriends‘ author and feel regret about not voting for her blog because she’s so spunky, I can only offer condolences, since the whole shebang’s done this year. But she makes a good point: we pretty much are all different, and are all mutual supporters, at the largest level.
As with The Lesbian Lifestyle’s annual blog awards (this year’s “Lezzys” will be announced Wednesday night , 9-11pm EDT, on The Lesbian Lounge podcast), it’s an enormous honor at all to be considered for special recognition among my peers. I feel strongly that all us queer folk and our allies online value one another’s presence, despite or maybe even because of the infinitesimal hair-splitting and incessant in-fighting that we can engage in over the political struggles that mean so much to us. I’m so very glad we’re out there, being out, here.
Does Lesbian Dad represent queer folks online generally? Oh hell no.
Without even skipping a beat I could list a half-dozen other blogs which I think serve or represent LGBT people and interests far, far better than this one. Here are the ones that spring instantly to mind:
See? Didn’t even work at that. Mostly because most of them are in the LD sidebar. They’re all huge, either group-authored or ridiculously hard-working single-author-authored; they all have deservedly wide audiences and provide a daily digest of critical news and analysis for a good many of us. Go to any of their blogrolls and you’ll find a ton more.
Then there are gobs of great culture (mostly pop) blogs, also big and must-reads for many — for us gals, AfterEllen, Dorothy Surrenders, AutoStraddle, and Grace the Spot, for instance. Countless other writers do an amazing job of sketching out their individual queer lives in personal narrative blogs like this one; I read a ton of them, mostly the parenting ones of old friends or folks who’ve become friends thanks to the internet (there’s a humungous, if sometimes not utterly updated *cough* list of lesbian family blogs at LesbianFamily.org). A lot are in my rolling “Featured” blog roll over in the LD sidebar, along with hetero ally friends from the blogosphere. I wish I had time to discover and read more.
One of the best things about awards dealies like the Bloggies is that they can enable new readers to connect to new clumps of blog community. So I want to extend a hearty welcome to those among you who meandered over here to answer the question, “Who is this Lesbian Dad anyways? Never heard of him. Her.” If you hang around and check it out, you’ll quickly find that this is no general interest LGBT blog. It represents just one slice of LGBT community: mine. And those like me, whoever they may be. On our behalves I’ve jumped feet-first into some political battles and issues, but then I’ve spent a good long time by the side of the pool (or wherever one jumps feet first) towling off and recovering, thanks to my advanced years and tender sensibilities. I write predominantly about my parenting experience, but many other topics shoot off from around that.
Like with us queer folks, we’re basically a ton of other things in addition to being queer folks. With queer parents, we’re even a ton of other things in addition to queer parents. Or even genderqueer parents. Living on the West Coast. Running around with white skin- and middle class-privilege. Trying hard to pay attention, and spread the wealth of love.
Lesbian Dad is written by a parent who answers to the name "Baba" and works toward a world in which amor does indeed vincit omnia. 
Yay! Congratulations! A much-deserved honor indeed.
And where I will generally agree that the other blogs cited are good ones, and deserving of recognition, in my opinion the element that sets yours above the others is the great attention that you pay to the words you choose; you manage to find the ones that go through my brain and down to my heart and gut. Amazingly, your photography does the same. (Not many people have this dual talent, you know.)
So HURRAH for you, and HURRAH for those wise enough to recognize your talents!
Well deserved, my friend…well deserved. This is why I shudder every time I have to go up against you in The Lezzy Awards! Congrats!
Congratulations! Your writing and photography is definitely worthy of the recognition.
Thank you gals, very much. And shudder not, Vikki. You bring the goods big time and yer people they love you, for good reason. I’m among ‘em. However this year’s hoo-ha goes.
For the Bloggies, apparently the pack of nominees gets winnowed by a group of 200 randomly chosen folks who’d nominated a blog in the first place. Beyond that I don’t know which categories, though one person (who provides some pointers here) evidently winnowed in 10 of the 20 categories.
My impression is that the finalist blogs might have piqued some folks’ interest for one reason or another (see the link above for some good ones), but from within the LGBT community online none of us is particularly GIANT or anything. No disrespect, but that was my impression. I don’t know Australia or its online community, so I’ll recuse myself there re: the Aussie blog. But the finalist list in the LGBT category (glad it was brought back this year) seemed a bit unlike those in some of the other categories, where quite well-known or widely read blogs floated to the finalist list. All of which gives me the sense that we in the various sub-culture niche blog areas wind up getting a bit more of a “wild card” experience in these things, if a broad cross-section of mainstream blog readers (whoever the heck that might be) provides the pool for the finalist-winnowing.
That’s certainly how I think this blog caught some finalist-winnowing person’s eye in the Weblog Awards way back in 2006. I still sometimes think this blog was plucked out of obscurity merely to stir up some dust, since several single and group-authored neo-con political blogs were also chosen. Dust sure was stirred! And I certainly appreciated the learning experience and the boost in exposure at the other end of the whirligig.
Go figure. I’m definitely not complaining about the opportunity to represent, to whichever community, on whichever grounds. If the end result is that the kids being raised in LGBT-headed households grow up in a world that comprehends their family a bit more, then great. Deal any of us a wild card and we’ll do what we can with it!
Congrats and a hearty well deserved!
May you let the love in and keep sharing your wonderful self with us readers.