Before I graduated from the publishing industry to become a totally broke independent, I honed my repartee skills on a viciously left-wing website that was popular with a devoted lesbian crowd while I worked a day job as an Art Director, but first I needed the right avatar for my online persona: a "front" for my actual intellectualism as a genuine media professional working in the big city among so many striving, pseudo-literary poseurs.
I found the perfect image in an actress whose breakthrough part had been playing it straight in a thinly-masked gay role about a female boxer from the 'hood. Because I was training hard in MMA at the time, my sports lingo was freshly dyke-friendly, which dovetailed nicely since the "out" actress had practically crashed her car on the set of a popular t.v. show with her also-drunk girlfriend in the passenger seat. She was dysfunctional enough for me to pass muster with the bullish traffic cops on the site. It got me "in" with their gatekeepers, as I began hunting the board during the annual summer slowdown that's our industry standard. I was so good at it, in fact, that I became a "starred commenter"; meaning, out of all the responses their articles generated, mine would be at the top of the list as a preferential read.
It was incendiary. As I won every conversation, the trolls went wild with bloodsport. The message boards were so hot that the editors, in a fit of diva pique, decided to remove them from the article's features one slow Monday morning, as their entire audience (myself included) wrote them the painful truth: our sparring meant to be a sideline to their "ChickLit" main event was far better than any trite, canned copy a bunch of easily-programmed drones could ever hope to write.
Their collective online works were such robotic, politically-correct pieces of crap, that any ass-kissing, first-year student at a women's college could regurgitate the tepid curriculum of an average "Gender Studies" class on their site. Their supposedly select cadre of special guest writers and accompanying editors didn't have an original point of view in the entire pretentious place, but I did. I was so unnerving to the home team that I earned a "rep" that carried me all the way here, to you: my beloved, faithful audience living in the land of the free and the home of the brave, in an actual writer's paradise that's "The Promised Land". Thanks for sticking with it. <Ding ding!> "HERE. WE. GO!"
