Eventually, I lost count of all the posts and retweets about the rejected ad. A lot more people read about it than commented, though… as near as I can tell, over 1,100 different people have read the post since it went up, and that’s just here on the website. I don’t have tracking numbers for Livejournal, Facebook, etc.

I can’t even begin to track the tesseract pattern that is Livejournal posts about this, but there are a LOT. There are a few hundred already that have sent people to the site, and there’s probably others where links haven’t been clicked, or they link to each other or other blogs… yeesh. If you made a post or know of one, please give me a link! (that applies to non-LJ blog posts as well.) It may be a fool’s game to try and track it all, but I’ll give it a shot.

A few things I want to note:

1. I made a late addition to the bottom of the original post, adding a comment from another member of the FFO editorial board:

debhoag September 9th, 2009 8:29 pm

I’ve been on the editorial board at FFO since it’s inception, and frequently disagree with Jake about pretty much everything, which makes it pretty surprising that I’m still there, I guess. I also write for a magazine (Polluto, from Dog Horn Publisher in London) which delights in exploring the boundaries of human sexuality. My experience has been that our sexuality gilds everything we do in beauty. I’m also a lot pithier than Jake. So, I’m about done. But if it had been up to me, I would have run the ad, gladly. It was not a decision that I was aware of, but I avoid anything smacking of business with all the loathing I devote to politics and PTA meetings.

This was corroborated by an email Jake Freivald sent me yesterday afternoon, which read in part:

there are people on my staff who don’t know about my beliefs, weren’t involved in the decision, and who yet may be affected by being associated with the zine. I am removing them from the staff page until the individual members tell me whether they want to continue their affiliation with the zine.

This was a side effect of posting that email that had occurred to me, and I’m glad it was addressed, and quickly. While Jake Freivald’s beliefs influence Flash Fiction Online’s policies, this should not reflect on the other members of FFO’s staff.

2. The support has been amazing! A huge number of people have expressed thanks for providing this information, and some have posted the ad on their sites for free in support. We’re incredibly grateful to all of these people – there’s just too many to list, but thank you all!

3. One specific offer I do want to mention, since it’s relevant to the industry. Pablo Defendini, the producer of Tor.com, contacted me yesterday regarding the rejected ad. In his email he said:

We find this attitude reprehensible, and would like to do our part in disabusing the public at large of the notion that the SF/F community is not LGBTQ-friendly. Tor.com would be more than happy to host your ad for the LBGTQ issue for free, for a period of, say, two or three weeks leading into the publication of the issue on 01 November?

He and Richard Rhorer are helping coordinate getting the ad up on tor.com for a couple of weeks leading up to the LGBTQ issue’s release, and then for another week after. It was a very generous offer, and I was very pleased to see a show of support for Queer SFF from such a major publisher.

As I said in the original post, we’d love to see people respond to what’s happened by writing their best queer fiction and getting it out there to markets for consideration (even if not ours), or write something to post in your blogs. If our own submissions are any indication, people are taking this to heart, as we’ve seen an uptick in submissions for the LGBTQ issue. This is awesome, and we want to see even more! Help us make this issue incredible!

Speaking of Issue 12: In addition to the content already announced (listed on the Current Genre page), we have a new confirmation: Lee Wind of I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell do I Read?, will be writing an article for us! We’re very pleased to have him as a contributor.

This blog is ostensibly supposed to be about the running of Crossed Genres – yes, all this is completely relevant, but not exactly day-to-day operation stuff. Obviously over the past couple of days we’ve been swamped with the fallout. In addition to furious reading/commenting/emailing, I spent a good part of yesterday making arrangements for the offers of fre advertising mentioned earlier. This included making up new “call for submission” ads, since some people’s sites only had room for horizontal ads and all I had ready was the vertical one.

We found some time last night to do some editing of Issue 11 content. Stil working hard on it, and going to knuckle down again tonight. We’re a bit further behind than we wanted to be – not late by our regular standards, but we’re still trying to finish early and have some extra time for Issue 12.

More info when/if we hear about something new and relevant. Thanks!