Still blogging away on LGBTQ topics, but it’s not big money
Most blogs have a relatively short lifespan, lucky to find a burst of enthusiasm before morphing into something else entirely or disappearing into the online void.
But Sue Kerr is among those who have been able keep her blog — the award-winning Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents — going for a decade and a half while parlaying her longtime activism for the LGBTQ community in Western Pennsylvania.
“As a person who is disabled and queer, I’m living in this intersectional space that most people don’t think about,” she said.
“So if I don’t say something, who else will? I’m disabled, but my partner has a good job and a good income. She has health benefits, so I’m lucky, but it shouldn’t be [about] luck,” Ms. Kerr said. “I have a lot of friends who are in a position where they’re afraid to say anything. I’m not afraid. I’m
Sweat equity
anxious, but not afraid.”
In 2005, Ms. Kerr created the Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents blog to try to have a positive impact in a community struggling against marginalization in a region where homophobia was anything but subtle.
“Most blogs are gone within 90 days,” she said. “The lifespan of blogs surviving past 90 days is two to three years. I’m now heading into year 15 with my blog.” The blog is averaging 23,000 unique visitors a month.
“It is almost impossible to earn enough revenue from blogging to make a living,” Ms. Kerr said. “I’m happy when I can cover my expenses. It’s not a hobby. I’m just an unpaid blogger.”
Last year, Ms. Kerr became a columnist for the Pittsburgh
Current, the city’s newest alternative weekly.
Because prominent gay publications like Planet Q and Pittsburgh’s Out stopped publishing a decade ago, Ms. Kerr felt even more compelled to make LGBTQ voices heard.
She has approached that mission on a variety of platforms, ranging from editorials at online news outlet PublicSource to a twoyear visiting artist’s residency at the Most Wanted Fine Arts gallery in Garfield (now undergoing a move to a new location).
It was at the gallery where Ms. Kerr came up with her #AMPLIFY LGBTQ Project, which showcases members of the community in what were once thought to be unlikely places.
“We have over 300 Q&As providing a very substantial database on LGBTQ experiences,” she said.
Having begun as a blogger, Ms. Kerr has become an artist, a writer and an advocacy journalist in recent years, though she still considers herself primarily a social worker (but one with a platform).
Not too long ago, she and her partner, Laura Dunhoff, drove out to rural communities — Elk County, Clearfield, Potter County — to get an idea of how LGBTQ
people in those places were coping.
Shortly after that sojourn, Ms. Kerr learned from social media that the Elk County LGBTQ Facebook group had its first Pride Event in a park where more than 50 people showed up. The group was growing long before she made contact with them, but she feels a responsibility to highlight their efforts.
“All they did was make signs and hang out and be visible,” she said. She then interviewed them for her blog and decided to reach out to other rural groups.
“What do we know about Altoona?” Ms. Kerr said. “Altoona just had its first Pride march.”
Ms. Kerr is encouraged that there are more LGBTQ journalists working for mainstream media in the area than ever before even, though a lot of them aren’t as open about their sexuality. “We have representation, but we don’t have visibility,” she said.
Learning experience
The daughter of a steelworker, Ms. Kerr grew up in the shadow of the mills in West Mifflin. She left her working class Catholic community in 1988 for Marymount University in Virginia where she got a bachelor’s degree in political science.
As part of her undergraduate education, Ms. Kerr was awarded a Pittsburgh Foundation scholarship and was assigned as an intern to the office of then-freshman U.S. Rep. Rick Santorum in 1991. She was originally assigned to Sen. John Heinz’s office, but when he was killed in a helicopter accident, she was reassigned.
“He was really nice to us [interns] and a lot of congressmen were not,” she said recalling that period of working in Mr. Santorum’s office with affection despite their stark political differences today. “I drove him back and forth to the airport because I was the only intern who could drive a stick.”
During those long drives, he would ask her about her family and her studies along with other “very appropriate boss-type stuff,” she said.
At the time, working in the office of the future U.S. senator and two-time Republican presidential candidate — now considered the bete noire of LGBTQ activists — didn’t present Ms. Kerr with a case of cognitive dissonance.
“I was 20,” she said. “What did I know about who I was or my identity? I wasn’t out. I didn’t know I was gay. I really didn’t question it. I was so busy trying to survive all those years,” she said.
“I had a very traumatizing childhood. I was in no position to understand anything about myself in my early 20s. I never questioned a lot of things. Yes, I’m Catholic. Yes, I’m a Democrat. Yes, I grew up in West Mifflin. Yes, I love Pittsburgh,” she said reciting a litany of things she considered the major markers of her identity at the time.
In her senior year after her internship, Ms. Kerr began reading feminist authors and immersing herself in perspectives far removed from the nostrums she internalized in Pittsburgh. Still, she credits the time in Mr. Santorum’s office with providing some of the seeds of her latter transformation — if only by negative example.
When she went to grad school in 1997 at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied social work and community organizing, she understood herself a lot more thanks to therapy that helped her deal with much of her unprocessed trauma.
Ms. Kerr worked at various social service organizations after her graduation from Pitt in 2000.
In 2018 and 2019, she was nominated for GLAAD’s national media award for the most outstanding blog. She lost in 2018 but won this year.
“It’s good to have that sort of validation for the work that I do,” she said.