Spaulding the Gay Blade

My bloggrrl Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend is profiled in the Washington Blade this week.

“Politics today in terms of gay and lesbian rights affects me directly, affects me profoundly,” Spaulding says. “There are people who are working to make my life hell. They see me as an enemy when I’m just a neighbor, a tax-paying citizen minding my own business, when I just call it like I see it.”

It’s a nice piece on one of my favorite bloggers, not to mention a good friend. I knew Pam before we were bloggers ourselves (though Pam had an existing personal blog)—we were both regular commenters at AMERICAblog, which is where I also first met Ms. Julien, Holly, The Dark Wraith, and Oddjob. We started The Blend and Shakes within a couple months of each other, and so navigated the political blogosphere on a bit of a crash course together. Pam was a tireless and patient resource, helping me with programming stuff, which I had never done before—and she was always encouraging, always willing to read a post draft about which I wasn’t certain or be on the opposite end of an exasperated venting session.

I can’t even tell you how many emails we’ve exchanged (“Have you seen this shit?!”) or conversations we’ve had about various issues (“OMG—where are all the female bloggers again?!”), how many times she’s made me howl with laughter. To this day, I have never been as excited to be blogrolled by anyone as when I saw Shakespeare’s Sister on Pam’s blogroll.

It seems like there can be a lot of jealousy and competition in the blogosphere, which makes my friendship with Pam all the more important to me. As each of our respective spaces have grown from being teensy little blogs to slightly less teensy blogs, and found ourselves with increasing opportunities or recognition, there has never been anything but excitement on the other’s behalf. When we’ve gotten “big links,” we’ve linked to each other, to try to share the windfall of traffic. Whenever we’d had the chance to mention the other, we have. She inspires me to do the best work I can by supporting me wholly—and I try to do the same in return.

Thanks, Pam—for being a great friend, and for making the blogosphere that much better because you’re a part of it.

(Pam’s away today; if you’re not familiar with The Blend and are checking it out for the first time, here are some of my favorite posts.)