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The Autostraddle Insider Issue 100: January 2023

The Editors January 31, 2023

Letter From Your Editors

Hello!

Can you believe it that this is our 100th edition of the A+ Insider? ONE HUNDRED INSIDERS! Here are approximately 100 images of our collective delight:

A square collage of 100 photos of Autostraddle staff and writers’ faces in a grid. Team members shown in the collage are: Riese Bernard, Carmen Phillips, Anya Richkind, Nico Hall, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Heather Hogan, Viv Le, Laneia Jones, Tracy Levesque, Ro White, Shelli Nicole, Vanessa Friedman, A.Tony Jerome, Abeni Jones, Amari Gaiter, Analyssa Lopez, Ashni Mehta, Casey Stepaniuk, Christina Tucker, Dani Janae, Darcy Cooper, Drew Gregory, Em Win, Himani, Julie Gentile, KaeLyn Rich, Katie Reilly, Lily Alvarado, Meg Jones Wall, Niko Stratis, Sa’iyda Shabazz, Sally Neate, shea martin, Stef Rubino, Valerie Anne, Yash Canter. — Everyone in this collage: Riese Bernard, Carmen Phillips, Anya Richkind, Nico Hall, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Heather Hogan, Viv Le, Laneia Jones, Tracy Levesque, Ro White, Shelli Nicole, Vanessa Friedman, A.Tony Jerome, Abeni Jones, Amari Gaiter, Analyssa Lopez, Ashni Mehta, Casey Stepaniuk, Christina Tucker, Dani Janae, Darcy Cooper, Drew Gregory, Em Win, Himani, Julie Gentile, KaeLyn Rich, Katie Reilly, Lily Alvarado, Meg Jones Wall, Niko Stratis, Sa’iyda Shabazz, Sally Neate, shea martin, Stef Rubino, Valerie Anne, Yash Canter

Well friends today you are not getting a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Carmen —instead you’re getting a letter from me, Riese, CEO and co-founder of fledgling internet experiment Autostraddle.com, because it is the 100th issue of the A+ Insider and the 100th iteration of a thing is a popularly accepted moment at which to sit down and look back at the path that began at number one and brought us all here, triumphantly centennial.

We’d laid out a rough plan for A+ at our 2013 Shakedown — an annual tradition wherein all the senior staff of this website gather in a single location for 4-7 days to plan, scheme, grow and change (an event we’ve not held since 2020 due to the pandemic and financial struggles) and decided to launch A+ at the July 2014 Shakedown. We’d spent well over a year at that point crafting the absolute best plan possible; a way to move our business towards sustainability without impacting our ability to reach every queer who needed us. Our web developer knew a little bit about membership programs from their participation in Reddit Gold, and I knew a bit from my 2005 term as an intern at then-bustling literate smut website Nerve.com, which published a “Nerve Insider” newsletter for its members. But mostly we were just making shit up as we went along, like always.

The first-ever Autostraddle Insider was published on July 11th, 2014, the same day we launched the A+ program. That Insider is frankly adorable: pics from camp, interviews with five (5!) new contributors, the absolute most premier conversations (because for the first insider we could pull convos from Autostraddle’s entire history instead of just the past 30 days), Rachel’s “things you m*therf*ckers didn’t read last month,” retro-reading, an infographic of data from the last reader survey, my butt with two A+ stickers on it. Ryan recommended a sex toy. Alex recommended a whiskey. We opened with this picture of our senior team — we’d switch to a “whole team” collage for our second issue — which now inspires me to ask myself WERE WE EVER SO YOUNG???

Four image collage of the 2014 Senior Staff — July 2014 Senior Staff // Back row: Senior Editor Yvonne, Senior Editor Rachel, Co-Founder/Design Director Alex, Intern Grace. // Front Row: Riese & Laneia

Another important thing about that photo besides our radiant youth and that Laneia and I look like proud Moms of very large children in a Christian Family Portrait is that these were taken the day before we launched A+. This is important to note because in the photograph we are happy.

The first few hours after our first “join A+ post!” went up were promising – initial comments were supportive, and we’d eventually see 200 new members in the first 24 hours, a solid first step towards our 1k year-end goal. But by the late afternoon, the tone of the comments had shifted. People were… very mad at us.

Many readers felt betrayed and excluded by the A+ program’s existence, saying that the 2-3 A+ posts a month we intended to publish would create a divide in the readership. We’d done what anybody who wanted their website to survive would do and tried to make our new membership program sound as special and appealing as possible — but this resulted in multiple commenters interpreting its tone as elitist, suggesting we valued A+ members over non-members. Readers requested that we hide A+ posts from the main site for non-members, because these A+ posts would “serve as a constant reminder that [non-members are] not fully part of the community anymore.” Unfortunately, that was the only method we’d plotted for advertising the program’s existence.

where is the money going exactly? one reader asked.
i was thinking of buying groceries for my kids, laneia responded.

Some asked why we didn’t simply trust our readers to give us whatever money they were able to spare rather than starting a full-blown membership program. This got my goat very acutely ‘cause in September 2013, a modest GoFundMe I’d created to pay our writers (offering homemade cookies and cards to donors, even!) didn’t meet its goal.

In retrospect, we could’ve analyzed our tone more carefully in that initial launch post. The original A+ member frames on gravatars — a gold ribbon and star inspired by Reddit Gold — were a source of consistent and valid critique, so we changed that right away.

Most of the comments were supportive. But of course we kept dwelling on the negative, turning them over in our minds, growing increasingly agitated. At the time, we had a more accessible and widely used upvoting system for comments, and the critical comments were racking up +1s fast. It was easy to spiral out over this — if offering content for money was fundamentally offensive to our readership, where did that leave us? We couldn’t keep creating “things besides content” to pay the bills, like events and speaking tours, ’cause we barely had enough time to keep up on the content.

Another thing I can see now that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that people were so deeply invested in this community and wanted to read our content so badly that they were actually furious at the possibility that we’d ever publish a single thing they couldn’t immediately read. Even if the way they expressed that sentiment was hurtful and terrifying to us, it was rooted in appreciation for our work.

But at the time we felt defeated. So we texted our girlfriends and theyfriends and we made margaritas and ate our carefully planned meals and stuffed envelopes with A+ stickers and thank you cards and watched Jurassic Park and tried not to get too bummed out.

alex, rachel and riese cheersing with dixie cups

The next morning we went on a hike, as Alex was certain the great outdoors would improve our disposition or at the very least give us some distance from the internet to clear our minds. While Alex scampered up large boulders and Yvonne took photos and Rachel re-applied her sunscreen, I kicked rocks in the dust like a petulant child, unable to snap out of it.

Yvonne in a orange t-shirt and sunglasses, pointing at a trail map

And then we came back to the house and Rachel sat down and pounded out a comment that explained everything — our dire financial situation, among other things —and therefore changed everything. It is a genuine marvel of a comment. Almost immediately, the sentiment transformed, thus beginning a tradition of absolute transparency that remains to this day.

See — 2014 was a very specific time in Autostraddle’s history. We’d just held our fifth A-Camp and because of camp, an increasing number of regular commenters now actually knew each other and the staff, which often impacted the vibe in our comment sections. Traffic-wise, 2014 was the best year Autostraddle would ever have. We were still in a google sweet spot where mainstream websites had yet to publish their own versions of our evergreen posts (e.g., how to have lesbian sex, best lesbian movies), and AfterEllen was really our only competition for dominating certain queer search results. Facebook was peaking, and it was easier than ever to go viral, especially with takes on socially progressive issues. Several of our most viral posts that year were on the topic of trans representation, as few media outlets were interested in giving trans women a voice or pushing back against the accepted trans narratives so prevalent in mainstream media. Queer TV and film representation remained paltry, and as a community we were thus starving for and easily congregating around what little was out there, like Orange is the New Black. I was actually able to take a week-long vacation that summer, my first since our 2009 launch, because a post I’d written about lesbian sex according to Shutterstock on the first day of our Shakedown snagged the top result for “lesbian sex” on google for months, meaning I could step away from the website for a minute without worrying about tanking traffic.

So we appeared successful, I think. We were popular, we were growing, we had a camp, we had a freshly-redesigned website, we had a team of incredible writers. But due to the continued disinterest in the LGBTQ+ women’s market, we only made $40k from advertising that entire year. We were attempting to support five full-time workers, four part-time people and dozens of contributing writers and contractors on less than $20k per month. And it turned out that people didn’t really realize that, then! Honestly, people don’t always realize that now — that even though we’re paying our people much better than we did in 2014, we’re still constantly staring down a daunting financial pit. The struggle to make ends meet hasn’t gotten any easier — but we have been able to improve the ends themselves, and that’s something!

The way we view paying for various internet services and subscriptions and memberships has also changed a lot since 2014. Most everybody gets it. The world has long abandoned the idea that any media publication, independent or corporate, can survive on ad dollars alone — you’d be hard pressed to find a newspaper or magazine without a paywall or at the very least, a blog that doesn’t require you to shut off your adblocker to view its content.

But because of the reaction to that initial post, we carefully curtailed our A+ content output for its first few years, trying to keep readers aware of A+ without alienating non-members or making them feel excluded. We were incredibly careful to ensure A+ essays absolutely couldn’t be published on the mainsite before assigning them to A+. For the next few years after that, our A+ content remained infrequent because we simply lacked the time to create it.

At launch, Bronze was our cheapest option — $6/month was the lowest amount we could charge to not lose money if we mailed a sticker to an international member and then they canceled. But perks turned out to be less of an incentive than we’d anticipated, so in 2015 I launched the $4/month Cobalt level, a mailed-perks-free option, crossing our fingers it wouldn’t lead to a wave of downgrades. (It didn’t!)

Now we have our full-time A+ and Fundraising Director Nico and we’re able to publish 7-20 A+ posts a month which are accessible to all members at all levels. And Nico is an expert at making sure our copy draws people in without bumming other people out. We have over 7.5k paid members helping to keep us afloat through a really rough time in the industry. (That’s you!) I think the concept of 7.5k paid members would’ve absolutely thrilled the very professional CEO of Autostraddle.com who was kicking rocks in the drought-ridden dust on that little hike.

As aforementioned, we’d published the very first A+ Insider the same day we launched A+, and I’m so very glad we did. Because during all of the difficult stuff we were parsing through on the mainsite, there was also this place where everyone was simply stoked. We hadn’t been quite as sure about the Insider as we were about the program as a whole — would people like it? Was it too niche? Too self-involved? Not as funny as we thought? But you loved it.

“This is really wonderful content y’all – you know your audience so well,” one reader wrote. “This is exactly the kind of stuff people want to see, but without alienating non A+ members or impacting on the quality of the non A+ site.”

“This all feels so good like the moment when you finally look that person you’ve been in love with for years in the eyeball and say, hey, should we like, make this official or what?” wrote an A+ insider commenter. “And then they kiss you on the mouth and tell you a good joke and you know you’re going to be together forever.”

Thank you to every single A+ member for making it official. Thank you to everybody who’s been here from the start — including everyone who was skeptical at first but came around! And thank you to everybody who’s joined somewhere along the way, or even just last month. Thank you for trusting us to fix what we f*ck up, for championing this program, and helping to keep Autostraddle majority-free-to-read for everyone who needs it. We quite literally couldn’t do it without you!

Yvonne and Grace holding a white board that says "Welcome to Autostraddle Plus"

Laneia and Riese holding a whiteboard sign that says "Welcome to Autostraddle Plus"

Love,

Riese / Carmen / Nico / Laneia / Kayla / Heather / Anya / Viv

These posts were hella popular last month.

Yellowstone lesbians kissing — I think I’m gonna like it here.

Finley and Shane dance like Magic Mike while doing demolition on The L Word: Generation Q — I think I’m gonna like it here.

1. Woke “Yellowstone” Cowgirls Kiss, Ruin Real Americans’ Favorite Show, by Heather
2. The L Word Generation Q Episode 306 Recap: Questions for the Universe, by Riese
3. The L Word Generation Q Episode 303 Recap: Quiz Showdown, by Riese
4. The L Word Generation Q Episode 304 Recap: Last To Know, by Riese
5. The L Word Generation Q Episode 305 Recap: Locked Out, by Riese
6. 31 Christmas Movies With LGBTQ+ Characters, by Riese
7. December 2022: What’s New and Gay and Streaming, by Riese
8. Daniel Sea on Max’s Return to The L Word: Generation Q, by Drew
9. The 10 Best Queer Movies of 2022, by Drew
10. Disney+’s Willow Has Multiple Queer Characters To Root For, by Nic

Nine Important Excerpts From Editorial Conversations

Heather: do you think we could train PR people to actually say wtf they mean. like what does this MEAN [redacted]??? “Really proud that there is LGBTQ+ visibility in this upcoming pre-school animated series from our Kids & Family!”
“there is lgbtq+ visibility” is the “love is love” of PR people
Shelli Nicole: also on the note of training PR people – like, can we also have them say what they mean when it comes to HOW MUCH queerness is in the “queer storyline” ? like does she mention shes queer once or is there an actual storyline where queerness is hella featured
Riese: i have sent pleading emails to so many pr people
like please can u simply tell me these things so i can promote your shows for free
apparently they cannot they want me to spend a minimum of three days on assembling the streaming guide!

Riese: Gretchen made me this:

big bird painted blue in a cage, looking forlorn, saying in a speech bubble "i am simply asking for L word episodes to be delivered in a timely fashion"

Ro: Important question: Is it “dykey-r” or “dykier?” As in “more dykey.”
Laneia: @Kayla Kumari didn’t we just decide on this ? what was it
Ro: Omg is this in our style guide? 😂
Laneia: once we settle it this time IT WILL BE
Ro: I love my job.
Kayla: Dykier 👩‍⚖️
Ro: Bless you, Kayla!

Laneia: what if and hear me out what if a haunted doll lookbook for 2023
Riese: i consent
is there a way to be a haunted doll without having to wear a dress
can haunted dolls wear like little knickers like newsies
are boy dolls ever haunted
oh yeah chucky huh
is that a haunted doll
i love his look
Nico: it’s a possessed doll
a magic-doing serial killer puts his soul in it
but yes boy dolls can be haunted
of course
Laneia: a haunted newsies outfit would be lovely
Nico: oh actually one of the most famous haunted dolls is a boy but i don’t wanna look him up because i am actually wary of that curse
Laneia: !!!!!!!
Kayla: Wowowowow haunted doll lookbook yes
For all gender expressions

Kayla: you know
i do believe in ghosts
and yet i somehow had not considered
that the light that randomly turns itself on and off in our kitchen is the doing of one
Nico: ooooh
i love that you were just like
ah yes this impossibility
not a ghost tho

Laneia: were y’all’s parents into horror? bc my mom LOVES IT and she tried so hard to be like LOOK STEPHEN KING IS ART LANEIA, OPEN UP YOUR MIND
Kayla: No my mom hates movies
Laneia: meanwhile i was having nightmares about the sister in pet sematary BUT OKAY
Nico: we’re a stephen king family
you kinda gotta be
Kayla: More specifically, the only movie my mom likes is Mean Girls
Nico: wild your mom does not like movies
Kayla: I didn’t watch horror until I came out
Laneia: “i’m coming out as gay and also TWISTED”
Kayla: EXACTLY
Saw Jennifer’s body in theaters in high school because my also closeted friend made me and after I was like cool I will never see a horror movie again for the rest of my life
Nico: dying
Laneia: omggg
what a pure distillation
Nico: the horror section in blockbuster was so thrilling to me as a child
Kayla: Then I saw Black Swan in college (still closeted) and was like this is the greatest movie ever and proceeded to see it minimum of 4 times in theaters
Nico: until the day i was finally able to touch and take
Kayla: I didn’t even see SCREAM until a friend made me in college
Laneia: the box with the monkey on it
burned into my brain
Nico: but for years leading up to that, i remember just walking through the horror aisles on the way to the sections i was allowed to choose from, looking at the covers, feigning disinterest

Kayla: i wish the pr person obsessively emailing me about the launch of Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits Volume 2 – Deluxe Edition (Remastered) would just go ahead and send me a free copy of Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits Volume 2 – Deluxe Edition (Remastered)
Laneia: the least they could do

Riese: when i die i want my tombstone to say only: <span style=”font-size: 1rem”>
bc it will be the death of me
maybe one day i will know
why it appears
maybe i will never know
life is full of mystery and wonder

Laneia: lol ok i just asked chatgpt to make a list of words for the theme “girlboss new year” and wow
1. “Girl power”
2. “Girl boss”
3. “New goals”
4. “New year, new me”
5. “Empowerment”
6. “Female strength”
7. “Girlmax success”
girlmax success is something

*a few minutes later*

Laneia: ahem
for the theme “lesbian potluck”
1. “LGBTQ+”
2. “diverse dishes”
3. “inclusive community”
4. “women-loving-women”
5. “queer foodie”
6. “vegan options”
7. “dessert swap”
8. “romantic partners”
9. “food allergies”
10. “all are welcome”
maybe next week’s word search is AI generated and based on lesbian potlucks bc i don’t want to keep this to myself
Kayla: This is at the very least a listling without commentary
Laneia:
1. “Gay feast”
2. “Queer eats”
3. “Ladies who lunch”
4. “Femme feast”
5. “Girl grub”
6. “Sammie social”
7. “Lickin’ the pot”
8. “Dyke dining”
9. “Queer cookout”
10. “Gal pals chow”
what in the everloving world
Kayla: Dyke dining is like my whole Thing

What We’re Reading

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

by Blair Braverman

Letter From Your Editors

Top 10 Most Popular Posts From December 2022

Nine Important Excerpts From Editorial Conversations

What We’re Reading

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

The Sleeping Car Porter

Ducks

6 Times We Almost Kissed

I’m Afraid of Men

People Change

White Girls

A Day of Fallen Night

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care

Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Spare

She Gets the Girl

Trust Exercise

Financial Feminist

Babel

High Times in the Low Parliament

Before We Were Trans

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

IT

Black Women Writers at Work

Fairest

Conflict is not Abuse

Sweetlust

How Horny Are Your Board Games?

What We’ve Been Watching

The L Word: Generation Q

The Brady Bunch Movie

The Traitors

Welcome to the Chippendales

Sick

Firefly Lane

Rye Lane

Nope

Aftersun

You People

3 Women

Raise the Red Lantern

M3gan

PR Emails That Lost Their Way

Nicolodeon An actual graphic that Riese actually sent to the Showtime PR people

KKU LookBook

Failure Is An Art Form

Was It True That Furbies Could Swear?

Haunted / Not Haunted

#1 Hare-Raising

#2 Not Cool

#3 I Dreamed About Clowns Last Night Actually

Bonus: Ghost Footage

Vintage Slack Convo: What Should We Call The A+ Levels Though

Here’s to 100 More!

XOXO

Team Autostraddle

The Editors

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