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PlanetOut.com R.I.P.


The cheerful April 7th headline: "PlanetOut Has a New Family" appears to be the sole indicator on the world wide web of the sad ultimate demise of the PlanetOut.com URL (which is now re-directed to Gay.com under the ownership of Here Media). The saddest thing of all has to be the fact that this moment seems to have gone past unnoticed by gay bloggers and traditional LGBT media alike.

I'm having my own personal moment of silence for this final nail in the coffin.

Okay, no, actually the saddest thing is the incredibly lame clip art image (above) that they used for the post.
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Will Clark World said…
Wish I could work up some emotion but those sites were (and still are) too bound up by their own need/desperation to seek the approval of straight corporations. You can't pretend that sex isn't part and parcel a fundamental issue when you're talking about a community that is only defined by same sex attraction. The downfall for our media is in the delusion that there's something wrong with our sexuality and rather than celebrating it, our mags either make it super sleazy (well, porn) decide that everything porn related is super sleazy or pretend that a tight swimsuit on a hot guy is just 'fashion'. Eventually even the hard core members that want to see GLBT media succeed can tire of this.
10:30 PM
Jenni Olson said…
Hey Will — Thanks for your reflections on this and I certainly hear your points. I think many people don't realize that PlanetOut.com originated as a very grassroots kind of community which really did have a great deal of political integrity around this issue in particular. As the site evolved we definitely came up against these conflicts (especially around mainstream advertisers). I left back in 2003 or so — everything changed so much in the last several years. I am more lamenting the final demise of something that ended years ago. In particular it is very sad for me that the enormous queer film database we created (PopcornQ) is completely gone now. It really felt like my life's work in so many ways (it originated as my thesis project for my B.A. back in the late '80s and evolved to cover thousands of movies — including hundreds of short films which are not referenced ANYWHERE else online, not even imdb.com). Thanks Will!
3:56 PM
Unknown said…
PlanetOut had become a poor shadow of its former self. Nonetheless, it's always sad to see something that once held such promise dissolve.

Frankly, in the end, the popcorn chat room simply became a private chat room for very hot private girl chatter and not about the movies.

Any chance you could reconstitute your film database in some other form?
9:02 PM
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