No Pulitzer this year, either

Stonewall Review Gay News
Longtime readers of the Stonewall Review will be amused and bemused by a small item that ran in an odds-and-ends column in the Concord Monitor.

The Stonewall Review has posted thousands upon thousands of entries since we converted to blog format in December 2004 -- as a review of our archive at www.stonewallreview.blogspot.com would show. And our masthead says that we provide "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender news." Nowhere does it say that we are affiliated with any other entity.

At least one reader at the Monitor missed all of that:

Bogus blog

Amid the Raymond Buckley developments last week were some interesting blog posts by someone named Levin Brand on stonewallreview.blogspot.com, a site purportedly linked to the National Stonewall Democrats (of which Buckley is an at-large member of the board of directors).

The blog denounced Buckley, calling for him to "step down or be removed immediately to protect the organization and its members."

But it turns out that the Stonewall blog is a bogus website, not reflective of the organization, said its communications director, John Marble.

"Ray Buckley has always been a strong ethical voice on our board of directors, and we've appreciated that," Marble said. "This appears to be just petty politics playing out among different individuals in New Hampshire. We look forward to be this being resolved shortly."

One may suppose that the item was written by a befuddled heterosexual who doesn't understand that "stonewall" is a generic LGBT term, much as "rainbow" and "lambda" are. (Note for the uninitiated: "LGBT" stands for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender".) A Google of the word "stonewall" will turn up mostly two types of results: queer and Confederate. There are all kinds of LGBT Stonewall bars, hotels, B&Bs, clubs, chambers of commerce, etc. -- and at least one blog; and all kinds of Stonewall Jackson bars, memorial associations, inns, historical re-enactment clubs, etc. All of them are unrelated to the National Stonewall Democrats -- including the one blog -- and all of them have as much right to use the generic "stonewall" as does NSD.

If the Monitor had contacted us, we would have been happy to clear things up; but they didn't.

A review of the Pulitzer Prize web site at www.pulitzer.org shows that the Concord Monitor has never won or been a finalist for any Pulitzer in any of several journalism categories. The Pulitzers are awarded for excellence in journalism, as well as in literature, drama, and music.