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Living Out Loud (On Outing Myself in the Newspaper)

Jon Cox — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 07:47:06 +0000

This past Saturday, Fayetteville, AR, held a local event as part of the Great Nationwide Kiss-In. I know this not only because I attended, but because I coordinated it. I had never planned a protest before, and didn’t quite know what to expect. It was pretty easy. I made a few phone calls (the City, the Town Center, and the Farmers’ Market), let them know about the event, and asked kindly for reservation. The City called proved superfluous, as I was not asking for any roads to be shut down. The Town Center just needed a heads-up on the use of their plaza, and the Farmers’ Market gave us a booth for free.

Being affiliated with a 501(c)3 really helped out. As the event was sponsored by the NWA Center for Equality (dues paid member, represent) I had a built-in net of help; the booth at the Farmers’ Market used their tent, table, and members. Our ribbons and other supplies were purchased by the center. I didn’t buy anything, just planned. A friend wrote our press release, and sent it to all of the news outlets. I made the facebook invite, and invited some friends. They invited some others, who kept the process up. Last time I checked, 1014 people had been invited. 101 had confirmed their attendance (these numbers never pan out, and we never got a full count, but the paper estimated 100 people showed). I sent out emails asking for volunteers, gave them all a couple of hours to work at the booth at the Farmers’ Market, and planned on being there the whole morning.

The night before the protest was spent mostly cutting ribbons and decorating our poster. That morning we set up at the market and began to wait. Eventually Saundra, an Avon lady, dropped off the box of lipstick samples she had promised us, and the real fun began.

Boyd Logan's kiss

The samples were in response to a question many people had raised on the facebook invite: “how can I participate if I don’t have someone to kiss?” We threw some ideas around (a kissing booth), and eventually I had that “A-ha!” moment: we’ll get a poster and some lipstick, and people can show their support by kissing the poster. This turned out to be very popular, and a lot of people at the market came to our booth and kissed our poster. My favorite kiss was by Marley, an 18-month-old whose (straight) parents encouraged her to kiss. A lot of people picked up our rainbow ribbons, too (we ran out!), and some of them gave us donations for the ribbons! Not once did we ask for money, but we ended up making $34!

People started showing up about 30 minutes before the protest. And with the people came the media; all three local news stations sent cameramen, both papers sent reporters, and a CNN iReporter drove down from Bentonville to cover the event. I had a couple of TV interviews before the event. At 5 till, I got everyone to congregate around the steps—where we had placed a pride flag—and I took the “KISS” poster with quite a few kissprints on them. I did a countdown using my watch, and saw everyone smooch for a second. I walked down into the crowd asking where my kiss was until the boy appeared out of nowhere, pecked me, and let me get back to interviews.

After the kiss proper, I was questioned by both papers. I gave pretty simple information—I’m doing this cause I feel safe to be gay in Fayetteville, and I want everyone to know that I feel safe. Right as I was winding up, Barbara Rademacher, the CNN iReporter, asked me for an interview. By now I was familiar with what to do—I spelled my name and repeated my spiel (somewhat quickly) about why I planned the event. I helped take down the booth, then went home, napped, and caught myself on the 6:00 news. The night was filled with celebrations—Casey Willits congratulated me on a good first protest, saying that I really got the numbers out.

Front Page of the Times, baby!

But it was Sunday morning that I was waiting for. I got copies of both papers and took them down to the center. There were a few of us there, and we looked over the articles together. The NWA Times had put us on the front page, with a nicely-sized article and a kind of obscure photo. The Morning news put us a few pages in; no article, just some captioned photos, but they actually showed two women kissing (a same-sex display of affection was not to be found on any other report). We were all pleased by the coverage. A few hours later, we found the CNN iReport, and felt that that gave a good depiction of the day’s events.

On Monday morning, I awake to a text message from Casey Willits: “Fwd:The Fayetteville kiss-in is featured on CNN.com today.” My only response: “Holy shit.” I quickly ran over to CNN.com and, lo and behold, found a link to MY interview. It’s not just any Kiss-In that’s featured on CNN, it’s the FAYETTEVILLE event. By this time, I’m getting pretty damn excited. I pimp it out to everyone I can think of—Twitter, facebook, text messages. Random friend requests start coming in on facebook, with messages like “Jonathan, I saw you on CNN and as a gay southern man who has a home in Little Rock, I am so proud of you and I hope that we can become facebook friends! Hugs! Michael” attached to them.

In my excitement, I call my mom. “I MADE THE FRONT PAGE OF CNN!” I tell her. Her response: “your grandfather is pissed off.” She doesn’t share my elation at the success of the event. This has been the only negative reaction I have received so far. Overall, the iReport has been viewed almost 30,000 times. Combine that with everyone who reads the paper and watches the local news, and it’s probably safe to estimate that I was outed to around 45,000 people. And damn, it feels good. All of the reactions, save the one from my mom, have been incredibly positive and really inspiring. My favorite reactions are as follows:

While staffing the booth at the market, I ran into my 8th grade guidance counselor, with whom I was very close. She told me she was proud of me and donated $20 to the center without being asked
The next day, Karla Caraway—practically a surrogate mom due to the amount of time I used to spend at her house during middle school and jr. high—told me “Saw your pic in the paper this morning. Good going–proud of ya!” on Facebook
Karla’s husband, Steve, works at the Morning News, and emailed me a copy of the photo of me they ran
All sorts of showings of support on twitter and facebook poured in. Lots of texts from friends telling me how awesome the CNN front page was

A lot of the comments the CNN story received went along the lines of ‘I didn’t realize how open-minded Arkansas had become!’ While this isn’t necessarily the case for the whole state, it certainly is for Fayetteville. Practically the whole city now knows my sexual orientation, and not a single bad thing has happened to me because of it. As far as protests go, I can count the Fayetteville Kiss-In as a smashing success. It did exactly what I wanted, by showing that Fayetteville is an open, safe, and accepting place.

Social Media Becomes Physical

Jon Cox — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:43:05 +0000

Last week, I blogged about how the City of Fayetteville is warming up to social media in at least some respects. Really I was just happy to see those Facebook and Twitter buttons up there in the corner of the site.

Well, I saw this banner in the union yesterday. I guess someone doesn’t understand the idea behind hyperlinking.

I don't think you can click these buttons.

City of Fayetteville warming up to social media

Jon Cox — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:45:53 +0000

Header on accessfayetteville.org

I was looking at a map of the city parks system tonight when I noticed something praiseworthy about http://accessfayetteville.org. In the upper right-hand corner of the header is a link to the city’s respective pages on Twitter and Facebook.

If you read this post, I detail a bit of the controversy about the city of Fayetteville adopting social media as a technique for information distribution. It’s nice to see those links there, even if the matter is a bit undecided as of yet. If I were planning on visiting Fayetteville, I would definitely check out those links to see what was up in the area.

I crunch the numbers on Fayetteville’s Social Media resolution

Jon Cox — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:43:01 +0000

Last Tuesday, largely because of a tweet by Alderman Petty, I went to the Fayetteville City Council meeting to voice my favor for the social media resolution. It had previously been tabled; I didn’t see what the big deal was about. During the public input, a few elderly citizens expressed discomfort at the idea. One woman said that, while at first glance it seemed inclusive, it was one of the “most deeply exclusive” measures that the city could adopt, remarking that approximately 1/4th of the city was under the poverty line and very likely could not afford luxuries such as a computer or internet. Furthermore, she dismissed the possibility of them using the computers at the library by claiming that there would be a rush to the free internet, effectively overwhelming the system.

My retort was plain and simple, largely because I had neither the time nor faculty to research what I wanted to say. What I did say is that, while such technologies are expensive, they are in fact provided for free. A free, if even time-limited, technology is inherently, even infinitely, more free than the city’s current method of using the NWA Times to communicate decisions to the population. I readily owned up to not subscribing to a paper.

Here’s what I would have said, had I been capable of doing the research:

First off, Fayetteville’s population (during the special census of 2006) is 67,158. However, it is ridiculous to assume that all 67,158 of Fayetteville’s residents are politically engaged and particularly care about politics. I think a good number to follow would be the amount of people who voted in the 2008 mayoral runoff election. Why the runoff? They’re drawn in solely for local reasons, and not to cast their vote for president.

According to this post on NWAnews.com, the mayoral runoff had Jordan defeating Coody with 5,796 votes over 4,319. 5,796 and 4,319 equal 10,115, or 15% of the 2006 population. Assuming that the 10,115 voters represent an even cross-section of Fayetteville, we can estimate the number of impoverished citizens who are also locally politically engaged to be 2,528.75 (using the detractor’s own standard of Fayetteville’s poverty).

This library report (pdf link; curiously enough when I first tried to access faylib.org, I was prompted to take a survey on how important having the internet in the public library was to me) from the opening of the Blair Library—almost 5 years ago, and almost certainly outdated—says that the library has 125 “computer workstations.” The library is open for 64 hours a week; 11 on Monday-Thursday, 8 on Friday and Saturday, and 4 on Sundays. According to the library’s computer use policy, “There is a two-hour time limit for the total amount of computer access per day.” Assuming that there is, in fact, the “overwhelming rush” described by the lady at the city council meeting and that the library computers therefore are in full usage 100% of the time, that means that an 11-hour day can see 750 individual users (with the last 125 only getting 1 hour of access), an 8-hour day can see 500 individual users, and a 4-hour day can see 250 individual users. That means that, in any given week, and assuming that each person uses a computer for the full two hours, the library is capable of handling 4250 computer users per week. And while the two-hour policy applies only per day, meaning that theoretically the same 750 people could occupy the library computers 100% of the time, it is highly unlikely. As is, the library presents more than enough opportunities for all 2528.75 impoverished-and-politically-active citizens to access the internet at least once a week.

More statistical fun:

I once saw in an ad on Razorback Transit that 7 in 10 students live off-campus. Given the U of A enrollment of 19,194, this implies that 13,435.8 U of A students do not live on campus. Now, not all of them necessarily live in Fayetteville. Let’s assume that three-fourths of them do. That leaves us with 10,076.85. If we then apply the poverty line, we get 2,519.2125 impoverished college students living within the city. If we then apply the politically active number (15%, achieved by using the results of the mayoral election), we end up with 377.881875. Those 378 politically engaged and impoverished students have free internet at the university, and would not need to use it at the public library. This leaves just 2,150.75 people who would theoretically rely on the library for internet. That’s just slightly more than half of the 4,250 users the library is capable of handling a week, meaning that, theoretically, the non-university impoverished and politically engaged citizens could have 4 hours of free internet access a week at the public library.

4 hours of free internet access a week is hardly crippling.

As a postscript to the elderly woman in front of me who smugly smiled every time someone mentioned the age gap, Facebook’s largest growing segment right now is women older than 55.

But people usually go in with their minds made up and work the facts to support them. After all, I just did.