SGN Page 48

Friday
April 14, 2006
SGN.org

Volume 34
Issue 15

search only SGN online

Saturday, Nov 21, 2009

SGN ADVERTISING INFORMATION

site map

General Gayety by Leslie Robinson

Lena, technology, and newspaper balance
I spied the headline in the living section of The Seattle Times: "50 Ways to Delete Your Lover." By way of further explanation the page blared, "In the digital age, you can't just dump somebody-you also have to purge him/her from your electronics." Bull's-eye. But not for me. I possess few electronics from which to purge a person, plus I haven't been able to "just dump somebody" my entire life. No, I thought this story could be just the ticket for my tech-loving friend Lena who had recently split from her girlfriend. I set the section aside, intending to go at it with scissors later. (Yes, I planned to cut the piece out and mail it to her. Regular mail. Snail mail. Possibly send it via Pony Express. With the actual newspaper in front of me, I wouldn't dream of e-mailing a link. The digital age is here, and my goal is to ignore it with all the rudeness I can muster.) In hindsight, I know now I assumed two things about that newspaper story. That it would be about straight people, because such lifestyle pieces always seem to be. And that it could be useful to Lesbian Lena anyway, because a relationship is a relationship. And a recently ended relationship is a . . . mess. When I finally took the time to read the piece, I got a shock. The first line began, "A few days after breaking up with his boyfriend, Jeff Ramone couldn't resist . . ." I read it over and over. The first paragraph was about a Gay man, a Gay man checking out his ex's online profile. All the other examples in the story were straight folks, but that mattered not. The story included a Gay example! It even led with it, which was just as big a surprise, because a lead is supposed to draw a reader in, and this one could send a reader out faster than you can say "Cancel my subscription!" Here's a further pleasing tidbit: though I saw the story in the Seattle paper, it actually hailed from The Wall Street Journal. So America's business bible is producing feature stories that place Gays on a par with straights. How long has this been going on? Next, will The American Legion Magazine, in a piece on spouses separated by war, run a photo of a Lesbian loyally tending the home fires while her G.I. Jane battles in Baghdad? How nice that I was wrong. How nice to see that we're being mainstreamed in the living section. Being used as proof of a trend. No matter how lame the trend might be. I wasn't wrong about this story being a match for Lena, not just because, as The Journal appears to have learned, Gay and straight relationships are similar, but because she's proving the story's thesis that electronics add a new vavoom to break-ups. For days after the split, Lena was the Rock of Gibraltar. Then she called me, her voice wobbling. She said she'd just removed all the pictures of her ex from her computer. This action made her sadder than anything else. "Now she's totally off my computer, off my phone." Tears. She was so sad I couldn't joke about the fact that she hadn't deleted the photos, just stored them on some gizmo undoubtedly the size of a caraway seed. I managed, barely, to come up with a techno-based way of lifting her spirits. I mentioned a certain Lesbian online dating site. She had it on her computer before we'd hung up. Won't be long now till she's quoted in a story on how many people these days have online-dating horror stories to tell. Leslie Robinson believes the phrase "user-friendly" is an oxymoron. With luck, you can reach her at LesRobinsn@aol.com, and read more of her work at www.GeneralGayety.com.