The Flint Hills Observer
February 1997

She Speaks
by Deb Taylor

Two years ago the first Observer came into being. I remember the evening that I finished all of the articles for that first issue and suddenly realized that I had no mailing list. I created one by searching the Southwestern Bell white pages for addresses of all the "community" people I knew at the time. I came up with around 100 names.

Two years have passed, and the mailing list has grown and changed with the months. The list includes over 300 names, many of whom are still the original 100 "forced subscribers." What’s different now is that I seldom ask people if they want to be on the mailing list; many call to be put on the list because they heard about the Observer from someone else in our community. Others are new people who have found us via the internet.

I believe that people want to receive the Observer for the value it brings them. The newsletter brings both local, regional, and national news. It allows locals to become more cohesive in that we as a community have a common link: we read the same information, and we don’t even have to hang out together! With the growing number of subscribers from outside of Manhattan, the newsletter also links our community with people across Kansas and the U.S. And with our exchange of knowledge and ideas comes power.

Two years ago, I had hoped that the newsletter would catch on and people would not ask me to remove their names from the mailing list in droves. I had also hoped that the newsletter would become a forum whereby our community would feel safe to contribute and to come out in print. This has indeed happened. Contributors seldom ask to have their names withheld. Some community members even list their businesses in the Observer.

What I had not anticipated was that our lesbigay supporters (eg the "friendly" heterosexuals) would also take an interest in receiving information about us. I also never considered that our readers would share the newsletter with our influential supporters in order to further our goals.

So now we on the Observer staff are faced with a new challenge: who gets the Observer? What’s best for the newsletter, and the community as a whole? Do we merely continue to restrict Observer subscriptions to the lesbigay community, or do we open it to lesbigay supporters, many of whom are more active in fighting anti-queer discrimination than members of our community?

Two promises I made to the community when I started this newsletter were to keep our community informed and (at the same time) not compromise the privacy of our community. Does sharing information with caring non-lesbigay activists compromise the privacy of our community any more than providing the newsletter with community members who privately share it with others? Is the community at risk of being outed by lesbigay supporters any more than it is by members of our own community?

I don’t have the answers right now. At this point, my feeling is that those who put their names in the Observer are rather comfortable with their level of "outness" and those who fear this don’t put their names in the newsletter. So, short of having an "exclusive" newsletter list, I see no reason to not extend the Observer to people who care about us and who could possibly help further our equality.

Actually, my present primary concern is the possible unwise distribution of the Observer by our own community. Sharing information about lesbigay issues to inform is one thing; leaving an entire copy of the Observer with a group as big as a newspaper (KSU Collegian or Manhattan Mercury) is quite another. In truth, I cannot control where the Observer goes when it leaves my home. And, after having been in and out of the journalism field for seventeen years, no one needs to tell me about information exchange and the rights of journalists. But, I can encourage our readers to think smart and exercise caution when sharing information with others. Giving the Observer to groups of people (as opposed to a confidential few) puts contributors who list their telephone numbers and addresses at risk, plain and simple. I am a proud member of the lesbigay community first, and a journalist second. This is what guides me when I exchange newsletter info with others. If I want someone to read an article I wrote, I photocopy only the article, thereby ensuring the privacy of our community. I can only hope that, in the future, our subscribers will exercise the same caution.

I welcome your comments and ideas on this matter, and I hope you’ll continue to read and support future issues of the Observer.