I’m thinking about community this week, about what it is and how we actually build it. There’s a sort of cynical, sort of factual strain of discourse on queer twitter that posits that “community” is a word that has lost its meaning in the contexts it’s used in online, and that’s not untrue. It’s not useful to say “my community” when you mean millions of strangers and expect it to feed you, fulfill you. As the community editor of Autostraddle, an independent queer website that quite literally relies on material community support to exist (without our membership program we would not have enough money to continue paying the salaries and stipends of the people who make the publication run), I’ve spent a long time thinking about this noun. Like, more than 10 years (yep, I really started writing for Autostraddle in 2012, which means I’ve been mulling over this question for more than a decade!). I used to be one of the people who said “community” when I meant “every queer person on the planet,” and I now see the deep flaws in that cavalier semantical choice. To say we should be accountable to our community, we should care for our community, we should be committed to engaging in repair with our community when ruptures inevitably happen, we should show up for our community with love… those are all beautiful sentiments. And they are rendered fairly meaningless when “community” means “strangers on the internet who happen to use similar words to label their identity as I do.”
There’s this other meme on twitter (god, explaining The Internet to people who aren’t Chronically Online makes me hate myself) that’s essentially like “I’m not meant to be connected to a million strangers on my phone, I’m meant to be in a tiny village and only know 100 people!!!” Maybe it’s not a meme, maybe it’s just a singular tweet I once saw, but I think about it so often. I love knowing more than 100 people. I love being connected to people on my phone, and I like parsing out different words to describe those relationships, because while “stranger” used to mean “a person I don’t know,” we now have more gradients to that category — like, a person I’ve been following on Instagram for 8 years, who I DM with occasionally, whose life I have followed and who has followed mine — they are not a stranger? But also, they are? Like, I don’t know their actual birth name? But I do know that they’re in the happiest looking relationship they’ve ever been in? I know what brand of rollerblades they like best? Is that person a stranger? I know I’m talking about parasocial relationships, kind of, but I’m also talking about something a bit different, a bit more. What about the people we all know on the internet with whom we have genuine connections, even if we’ll never meet IRL? I’m already losing the plot a bit — my mind spirals and sprawls when I star thinking about Being Online, about The Internet, about Social Media — but anyway, what I’m trying to get at is I love the vastness of the world created by the internet and yet I too yearn for this tiny village life where I only know 100 people. There’s too much information out there, there are too many opinions for us to try to chew our ways through… everyone says this. We all know this. “Community” is a word that has lost its meaning because of this vastness, and if life was smaller, it might mean something again.
But no! That’s not true at all. There is plenty of community to be built in cyberspace, plenty of connections to make and accountability to be had and care to extend and real love, really! Marginalized people in particular have found incredible community spaces online that have created material positive gains in their lives, and the disabled activist community leads the rest of us in this undertaking as they’ve been doing it arguably the longest. I’m a millennial — of course I know the internet is no more or less real than “real life,” rather, the internet as we know it is real life. So of course I know community can thrive there. But it still takes effort to create, and it is not a blanket we (by which I mean, Queer People, Specifically Queer People Who Are Chronically Online) can simply throw over every queer person online and cozy up under as if that’s meaningful. It’s not. But this problem exists offline, too. We call our neighbors “our community” without making the time to get to know them. We call our classmates “our community” without putting in effort to understand their lives outside the classroom. Etc, etc.
So if I’m giving all these examples of what community is not, could I maybe do us a solid and also talk about what community is? Nope, in order to get my thoughts on that you’ll have to wait until I sell my novel, LOL. I’m kidding… kind of. I did originally think my novel was a book asking questions about community, and in some ways it is, but I think I see the more I work on it it’s a book asking questions about friendship and selfhood, which are not exactly the same thing. But no, I don’t want to get into exactly what community is in this moment, because I want to tell you why I’ve been thinking about this in the first place.
If you’re a writer who works online in any capacity, you probably saw that Catapult abruptly and unceremoniously shut down its magazine and its teaching arms this past week. For those who aren’t writers, Catapult was an incredible gift to the literary community (there’s that word again). It functioned as a publisher, which is still true (though there were layoffs on the Books team too, at least that arm of the operation is still here), and it used to function as an online magazine and a place to take writing classes. Catapult was interested in emerging writers, in beginners, in people who never had a byline before pitching them. I referred hundreds (literally) of students who had never before been published to pitch Catapult; it was the place for a writer to break in to publishing. I’m not going to touch on what an awful job Catapult’s management did announcing the news (to Publisher’s Weekly before letting any of their staff know they were about to lose their jobs) or how shitty it is to be reminded yet again how little respect and care editors and teachers and writers receive from the companies we often pour our hearts into — I want to talk about the fervor with which we — the literary community (community!) — responded to the news.
People are genuinely heartbroken. For many writers, Catapult was the first publication that printed their work — their first byline. I had an essay published in Catapult a few years ago, edited by my dear friend Leah Johnson, and it’s one of the pieces of writing I am most proud of putting out into the world. I wrote a strong piece, yes, but the care with which Leah tended to my words was so meaningful. Catapult was not a content farm; it was whatever the opposite of a content farm is. If the internet at large is “a million strangers on my phone,” Catapult felt like that 100 person village. Say what you will about management, the editors who worked at Catapult treated their writers with respect, dignity, and yes, love. Leah always says it’s an act of love to edit someone well, and I think what made Catapult special as a publication — and, I’ll say, what I hope we do at Autostraddle too — was the amount of love all the staff members put into the work they did. Is that community? Creating a space for people to feel whole, seen, like they matter, like they are loved?
Or — what am I talking about? How can I be talking about community, about love, in a space that primarily existed as a way for people to work, to get paid, to make money. A job cannot love you — we all know that — but is there ever a reasonable space to love your job? In the arts, in writing, in creative fields — are there times a company funded by a shitty billionaire can still feel like home, like a community, because of the work the people hired by the shitty billionaire do to make it so?
I don’t have a complete thought around this. I think I’m weaving some different threads about some different huge topics together, and I’m not coming up with a braid so much as a confusing mess of knots. It’s also possible this is a little too Insider Baseball for anyone who doesn’t work in publishing, and for that I apologize, but I think the larger questions about community and how we create it and what that word means can apply to anyone in any field, because however many years ago we all would’ve just been people in a tiny village trying to figure out how to live together in… wait for it… community. Right?
Speaking of publishing and community, you may or may not have heard that last week a group of writers wrote an open letter to the New York Times, expressing serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people. As of today, more than 1000 contributors (past and present) of the NYT have signed the letter. 23,000 media workers, readers, and subscribers have also signed the letter, myself among them. I encourage everyone to read the letter and sign it; it is an easy and meaningful action to take against reporting that is contributing real harm against trans people. Hopefully the NYT will actually respond soon. (If you want to read more about the letter, Niko Stratis wrote a comprehensive personal piece for Autostraddle. Read it here: Thousands of Writers Signed an Open Letter to the New York Times Over Anti-Trans Bias, and I’m One of Them.)