A Sordid Tale of AfterEllen with Former Content Contributor Karen Frost First of all, for people who might not know… What is AfterEllen? For the Generation-ZERS AfterEllen was founded in 2002. Prior to its founding, there hadn’t really been a queer women-specific site that focused on queer female representation in the entertainment industry. AfterEllen flagged for readers when there was a queer female character on TV, offered movie reviews, and conducted interviews with women in queer roles. Over time, the site went through several sort of cosmetic variations, to include video logs and sock puppet re-enactments of “The L Word,” but for 17 years it’s stayed true to its original ideology of identifying and promoting queer female visibility on TV and in movies. Show Notes: Before the Intro - 15 secs What About Dat? Is a Podcast Queens Production, Sponsored by Archetype Footwear. Archetype Footwear OVER MUSIC INTRO - 30 - seconds Jen - Welcome Back to another episode of What About Dat? A podcast where I talk about socially relevant television and speak with thought leaders who want greater visibility and representation in film, television, and digital publication for women, lgbtqia, and their allies. Today on the podcast we are joined by arm-chair TV-Pundit, former content contributor for AfterEllen, Lez Watch TV, and Tello Film Productions. The Queer Queen of analytics and data and Young adult novelist of the upcoming, “Daughter of Fire Series,” Book 1. Conspiracy of the Dark. The lovely Karen Frost. Jen - Thank you so much for joining me today, I’ve been a huge fan since you decided to eat your sandwich next to me at Clexa Con. Karen - Thank you for having me. Jen - What did you do before writing for AfterEllen? What compelled you to reach out and become involved in the publication? Karen - I’d read the site since probably a few months after its founding. Every day, I would go on and see if there was a new article. Frankly, back in the early 2000s there was so little representation that there were only new articles a few times a month. The site was absolutely pivotal to my formation of a queer identity as a teenager, and I’d always dreamed of contributing, so when a call went out for writers in 2015, I hoped I’d be picked. Jen - Of your 182 articles what is the piece you are most proud of? Karen - Let me preface my answer with a bit of a story. In 2016, there was a MASSIVE uproar in the queer female community after the character of Lexa on the CW show “The 100” was killed. Without getting into fandom-specifics, one of the things to come out of it was the feeling, “Why are our characters always being killed off?” For the first time, someone put together the data on it, and we discovered that 25-30% of all queer female characters have been killed off on TV shows. That’s a rate orders of magnitude larger than straight characters. Put another way, there was a statistically significant tendency of shows to kill off our characters. But had no one done the math, that knowledge would have remained in the realm of “feelings” rather than “data.” Because of work to highlight this problem, the next two years saw a plummeting in the number of queer female characters who were killed. Now, to get back to your question of what article I’m most proud of, I would say that the articles that I’m most proud of are the ones that used data to make a point about representation, for example showing that an actresses’ best chance of getting an Oscar nomination and winning since 2002 has been to play a queer character. I believe that it’s hard to convince Hollywood to have more representation using just “feelings,” but if you use data to show the profitability, then it’s hard for Hollywood to say no. Jen - At ClexaCon, you briefly mentioned a mass exodus from AfterEllen? What happened? Why did so many writers cease their involvement with the publication? Karen - The mass exodus happened in September 2016 when then-editor Trish Bendix was fired after six years at her position. Evolve Media, who owned AfterEllen at the time, announced it could no longer keep a full-time editor given that AfterEllen wasn’t meeting revenue goals and that it would be reducing the amount of content produced. The relationship between Trish and Evolve immediately soured, and all the writers but me chose to leave in solidarity with Trish. Anyone interested in those dynamics should read an article Trish posted about the dying queer media and the struggle to monetize it. She had a first row seat for years in seeing how the entire media landscape was affected, not just AfterEllen. Jen - You wrote an article entitled “Why I stayed,” which was a compelling counter-argument for why you were going to continue to contribute articles to AfterEllen during a time when other people were leaving. Why did you stay?...
