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little light

The relatively obscure — but hugely beloved, among those lucky few — “Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza” rocketed up in the last 6 hours from tied-for-3rd to win with 19% of the 610 total votes. Clustered at 13% each came little light’s former tie-mate Julia Serano, the previous forerunner Rachel Maddow, and also-late-rising Missy Higgins (with Serano just leading the pack by 3 and 4 votes respectively). Long-time runner up Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir rounded out the top 5 with 11%.

Other than that everyone else is as much as a procrastinator as I am and ballot stuffers show up at the last possible minute (2/3 of the votes came in the last 12 hours of the two weeks of polling), I learned a lot from this perhaps-silly exercise:

• Some people want well-known names and faces (more on this in a bit)
• Live tweeting the end of a poll that allows multiple votes is good for hours of full-on laughter… for the person who gets to see the numbers, anyway
• Calling Sheryl Swoopes the “only black nominee” in a contest which contains Rebecca Walker (because she momentarily slipped your mind) is a really bad idea — sorry Rebecca!
• It is both harder and easier to spread a link around virally than I’d hoped and feared
• Bloggers vote for their own, and when you host a poll on a blog, the blogger nominee has a bit of an advantage — although it seems particularly right to me that a blogger (though not just any blogger) would win as representative of the decade of 2000-2009

Where was Ellen?

I had many people ask me why Ellen DeGeneres wasn’t among the finalists (also Ani DiFranco, Rosie O’Donnell, and other big-name mostly American mostly white women). As I replied on the poll thread,

It’s certainly not that I have anything against Ellen, and I’m glad she’s doing so well, but there were so many amazing women to choose from that I couldn’t fit them all in. And I tried to give preference to women who had done exceptional things in 2000-2009 (who were really OF that decade), and to women who were not white, cis, and American.

I pulled the 10 finalists out of the 43 reader-submitted nominations more or less by myself, guided partly by the repetition and enthusiasm of people lobbying for nominees’ inclusion, partly by my own analysis of the weight and decade-representation of the nominees, and yes, partly to attempt balance in representation across demographics, to bring to the fore women so often overlooked in mainstream popularity contests.

I wanted to create a list that was not just “Most visible American or Hollywood [white thin cis] lesbians”. One of the things I noticed was that the #biggaybattle (which inspired this poll) was over two white thin cis American men — and of the half of the list I recognized, only one was not white. I wanted to compile a different kind of list, a list that we could be proud of, that queer women of all kinds could point to and say — This is who we are, this is what we do. We are famous, and we are unknown but so worthy; we are partnered with women and with men and we live full lives unattached; we are in politics and comics and music, in science and sports, on the air waves and internet and network TV; we blog and act and act up; we are mothers and writers and revolutionaries, sometimes all at once. We are everywhere.

And maybe that wasn’t what people wanted. Maybe that wasn’t what you expected. But if I did even one thing to raise the visibility of queer women you might not have heard of, if I introduced one person to a queer woman who looked more like them than they had ever seen in the pages of People or Out Magazine, then I count this as an entirely worthwhile endeavor.

Look at the nomination list. That is an amazing group of women. As hard as I tried to balance it, the finalist list is mostly white women (6 white women, 4 women of color), mostly from North America (6 Americans, 2 Canadians, the Prime Minister of Iceland, and an Australian), and (almost?) entirely abled — but still, I am hoping that there is someone there that every queer woman who might stumble upon this blog can identify with in some way, someone every burgeoning queer girl¹ can be inspired by.

A lofty goal for a little poll, to be sure. But there you have it.

Congratulations little light,

Lesbian/Bisexual Woman of the Decade

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Thank you so much to all of you who participated. A poll is nothing without its voters and its publicists: I appreciate each one of you.