By Karanja Gaçuça

Its pride week and to Greet The Press was just the perfect beginning to kick off this week's Pride events here in New York City. Presented by "The Future" a multimedia company targeting the LGBT community, Greet the Press was a spectacular gathering of modern gay media personalities representing print, online media and new media leaders in the black gay media. It was my privilege to have been invited to be one of the panelists on this, what I consider a very important forum produced by Dwight Allen O'Neal, and Richard E. Pelzer II, and co-moderated by Nathan Seven Scott and Cornelius Jones, Jr.


 

The event was billed as one to bring together the faces of the Black gay media, to address our lack of prominence on the national stage, to answer questions on important issues regarding our ability to tell our stories, and to hopefully harness the strength of our numbers into a bigger stronger more united force to reckon with. 
I personally think this event succeeded in bringing many of us together and get us acquainted with each other, which I believe is the foundation for collaborative efforts in the future.

The panels were broken up into three segments, including a separate panel for each of the three categories represented, i.e. print, online and new media. This gave the audience an opportunity to listen to the various perspectives of all of the panelists over a range of issues. It also gave us panelists the opportunity to express our views being that we were broken into small panels of four or five at a time,, as opposed to the possible fifteen that we could have had, had we all been on the same panel. The various panels addressed questions ranging from what we felt were the barriers to a greater synergy on the part of players in the Black gay media, why, if anything is it important to have a Black gay media, as well as why it might be important to have Black gays represent us in the mainstream media.

I had the opportunity to point out that it is important for us to have our own media, "because if we do not tell our story, others will", and indeed, I believe, when others write our story, they will misrepresent us according to their own limited and colored impression of what and who we are. It was my honor that Teneille Craig of Boys+Clothes, an online magazine for the "Rebellious Urban Fashionista" and one of the other panelists, in her blog about the event, quoted me on the above adding that it was the most powerful quote that she left with from the evening, which is certainly flattering coming from a respected fellow writer, panelist, and fellow entrepreneur in the media seeking to fill the gap in media for us in the larger Black community. Print media panelist Marcia Cole of Ambermag.com issued what was billed as "the quote of the night" a quote by A.J. Liebling of the New Yorker "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own it" which certainly struck me and left me determined ever more to continue to oan my own little corner of online media acreage.

This event was a powerful one for me, leaving me feeling highly empowered, enlightened, and definitely appreciated by my peers. This was also my first panel, and I have to say that this feeling is one that I have to say was somewhat new for me, having always worked and competed in the mainstream, whereby I always felt, even when I was appreciated, that there were certain question marks at least from one or more quarters, regarding one aspect of my contribution. Here I felt that I was among peers who looked at me through no glass and purely saw me as a blank slate, waiting to be filled by my own writing that I was putting on it with my contribution. It left me psyched to do more such peer events, and I am certainly ready and waiting for the next one.

Another extremely striking aspect of the evening for me was the amount of talent present. I am currently doing a story around the statistic I heard on Soledad O'Brien's "Black in America" on CNN last summer, that the prospects of Black men with college degrees are equivalent to those of white male felons. The amount of intelligence and talent was particularly striking, to me, given that most of the people on the panel as well as many others that were in attendance that I am familiar with, are people who seem to have opted out of the workplace to become entrepreneurs because of a perceived lack of an outlet for their talents and achievements in the mainstream workplace, from my personal experience with some of those I know in that room.

All in attendance almost to the last man, are people who have stepped up to address the need for Black gay media due to our realization of the need for it, in spite of the fact that almost all of us are working against an upstream current particularly on the question of financing our various media forums, which is an issue that was addressed by one of the panelists, Derrick L Briggs of ADTV, a YouTube video program.

All in all, an extremely positive effort, that left me pining for more, and looking forward to the next one. It was to be followed by "Dishing It with Dwight" scheduled for Saturday June 25th, an event that I plan to cover on the pages of this site, so stay tuned.