There are many issues here, one is the totally disrespectful way it’s been handled -- the owner just out of the blue fired everyone without any prior notice and now is insulting intelligence of the website’s readers apparently believing they will stay to read old articles and give him ad revenues.

YO afterellen writer and regular jezebel reader here. Everything Trish said is true. They told the writers yesterday that Friday would be the last day AfterEllen would publish as normal. They hopelessly mismanaged us while constantly stretching themselves thin, buying new properties and refusing to fix even the…

Let me just put it this way.

Eventually you’ll just click a button that lets you “buy” the video for a dollar (or whatever) for unlimited plays, or unlimited within 24 hours (so you can show your friends!), or able to link it to a certain number of people, or whatever.

I feel super conflicted about this. It’s sad to see the biggest site for publishing lesbian voices get shut down, and doesn’t make things feel any more diverse.

The take-home of this whole mess is that we don’t have nearly enough queer women’s media out there to represent us. I was reading the comments on the Autostraddle post about AfterEllen’s closure yesterday, and somebody said something that gave me literal chills: “Imagine if this happens to Autostraddle, too, and all…

It’s sad because of the lack of media focused on queer women. But AE has been a den of mediocrity for many years now. And a largely white one at that. It’s hard to get too worked up about it or even deny it’s probably a smart business decision. Who was the site even for anymore? It was too tepid to speak to most queer…