Fabian and I went to see the new Tom of Finland movie on Sunday 5 November 2017. The movie told how Tom of Finland fought against the Russians in World War II, faced discrimination for being gay, then found a popularity base and international distribution network by publishing gay erotic comics in Los Angeles. I was interested because Tom of Finland was one of the early celebrity figures when the gay rights movement developing. He got his work out in many places at a time when it was difficult to distribute anything LGBT+ related. Also, I was interested because my fellow and now-deceased Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz promoted his comics.
In late 2011 the Wikimedia Foundation established the Wikipedia Education Program, which was an effort to encourage any local Wikipedia editors to do university outreach to assist students and classes in editing Wikipedia. There was round of training sessions in the United States and I coordinated the one in Seattle in August 2011 as one of the pilot participants who would be a “Campus ambassador“. I recruited some professors to incorporate Wikipedia into their class syllabuses. Various other people around the US tried to do this but at that time I was only in contact with the Wiki editors in Cascadia.
Unrelated to the university outreach program, there was a July 2012 Wikipedia editing event at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles. At this time publishing notices about in-person collaborative Wikipedia editing was still uncommon so those of us who were watching could have general awareness of all the events which were happening. Unrelated to this event, also in July 2012 I was drafting documentation for a Wiki LGBT community group. In my research for that I saw this Tom of Finland event and wondered how and why anyone would do a Wikipedia editing event with porny comics, and whether it was safe in wiki to showcase an event like this in what I was drafting. From 2011 I had been doing Wiki LGBT+ events around Seattle related to HIV/AIDS and did not then understand how Wikipedia outreach could work in the arts.
In December 2012 the Wikimedia Foundation staffperson who had organized the university outreach program convened a workshop in Atlanta for those of us who had been doing school outreach for a while. Ten of us went there to meet each other and become more aligned with our activities.
I met Adrianne for the first time at that Wikipedia Education Program workshop. All of us met in a hotel lobby and when I arrived there was already a group in conversation at the table. The topic of discussion was sexuality and when I sat down Adrianne continued a discussion about college sexuality in the manner that I felt was uncommon among women and more common when gay boys talk among themselves. I came to realize that someone had prompted Adrianne in this subject and she took the lead in deconstructing the college sexual experience based on relationship and experience examples that she shared and sought to pull out from others at the table. It was apparent to me that Adrianne had the sort of skill set that someone gets from participating in consent training at LGBT community centers, and beyond that, she had a leadership skill set for orchestrating everyone in a room. She told me that she wanted Wikipedia articles about sexuality to be better. I mentioned reading that some Wikipedian had recently done a Tom of Finland Wiki event. Adrianne revealed that this Wikipedian was her. This took all this in as a good first impression.
For context – her event at the Tom of Finland Foundation was unusual for being an institutional collaboration among an organization and Wikipedia editors, and for being in Los Angeles, and for being LGBT+ themed, and for being gay porn themed, and for being presented by a female, and for being presented by someone who was cultivating their own public persona as a spokesperson for Wikimedia projects. I did not know wiki culture then like I know it now, but I knew enough to recognize that Adrianne and her activities were unusual and in my favor as a gay guy. Talking with her made me feel that there was momentum in Wiki LGBT+.
I think that conversation is most friendly and productive when everyone feels comfortable to speak as they like, but at the same time, I know the lines of cultural norms. In general, a space is safer and more comfortable for women when participants conversations avoid a turn toward sex. In general, a space is safer and more comfortable for LGBT+ people like gay boys when people mention sexuality or queerness, because heightened sexuality in a community normalizes routine discussion of queer topics and assists queer people in identifying anyone around who is hostile toward LGBT+ people. Adrianne had an outward presentation which I would stereotype as the appearance of a librarian. When I saw her poking around for sensitivity in the group, I did not have any read on what she was doing, but it seemed like a kind of feminism which would be useful for gay boys. She was being forward in a way that would identify any danger to gay boys and support LGBT+ spaces.
I asked Adrianne how she came to be the organizer of the event and she told me that she had always been a fan. She also told me that there was an artist in residence there, Katie Herzog, who was promoting the Tom of Finland archives and sought out Adrianne as a wiki point of contact. Later I would piece together that Katie modeled the event after the Wiki Loves Libraries outreach model which Pharos established. Lots of people got their start through Pharos.
I was glad that Adrianne was a fan and supportive. It is not as if Tom of Finland is unknown or a gay secret because his comics are everywhere and have been for a long time. In 2014, so later than this event, the Finnish postal service published Tom of Finland stamps, so that and the movie and all the books and the decades of cultural relevance had positioned Tom of Finland within the mainstream. Still, I was wondering why she as a girl had particular and extraordinary interest in promoting gay porn. She downplayed the need for any explanation and remarked that the art was meaningful to her. She mentioned that she edited about Jane Austen, so the information that I had was that Jane Austen and Kake’s adventures were comparable literature in her world.
At the workshop some of us in became closer friends. I continued to talk with most of them years later.
I was being vegan at the time. I do not recall Adrianne’s eating preferences. One lunch at the event was take out from Chick-fil-A, a fast food chain based in the area. That company had recently incited a controversy for seeking out anti-gay groups to sponsor in the name of charity. I had the shared experience of not having lunch for that meal with Adrianne. Talking with Adrianne about this is among the experiences on which I think back when I plan catering for events. Anyone will eat vegan food, but when the vegan food is gone, vegans will not eat the meat. Also, the context of food matters. Someone at the event mentioned the Chick-fil-A LGBT hate campaign and said in their own way said that that it was okay to disregard it because corporate value statements should not influence consumer purchase decisions. I never mind missing meals but that experience led me to the realization that on behalf of wiki guests I have to be among those who advocate for the most accessible meal options. Adrianne and I talked about the meaning of food and hosting guests. Event planning is hard!
After the education meetup Adrianne and I had other interactions. In 2014 she joined the planning committee for WikiConference North America 2014 in NYC. The general circumstances were that Wiki NYC had been planning to host a multi-day regional wiki conference for North America. There were about 10 of us as the primary planning committee. Maybe 7 of us were in NYC, and Adrianne was in Los Angeles joining calls remotely. We had a conference grant drafted in late 2013. She lived in California and had finished her PhD a few years before, and had just completed a fellowship, and in early 2014 in the midst of the conference planning she actually got a tenure track job at a university in Los Angeles. When she joined the WikiConference planning committee she was a highly experienced Wikipedia editor with top academic credentials, and someone with experience doing in-person Wikipedia training workshops, and someone who did public speaking about Wikipedia in academia, and someone who was going to bring Wikipedia through a solid academic career path.
She was the most active female in the Wiki LGBT+ community of that time, and particularly relevant to me, she was willing to acknowledge, engage with, and support gay men’s sexuality. I wish to emphasize how uncommon it is for any female to present herself for peership with gay boys on their own terms. Many minority groups which do not overlap in participant base will share common goals and interests, and I have always wished that in the Wikimedia community the advocates for women’s rights, gay rights, ethnicity rights, language rights and all the rest could combine their mutual interests to a common goal. There are various diversity talks and meetups in the Wikimedia community of course, but to have a top-level women’s rights advocate encouraging gay boys to engage with Wikipedia in a way that includes gay male sexuality is an extraordinarily welcoming invitation. Anyone who crosses over from one subculture to another is unusual. Adrianne and I also had a series of conversations about addressing harassment. We had developed a discourse in which we agreed on many points, particularly the need for proactive outreach starting at that WikiConference, and we disagreed on many points. The disagreements do not matter now but even as I think back several years I would be excited to continue the conversation we were having about documentation and reporting of harassment incidents.
The WikiConference was in May 2014. In April 2014 Adrianne could not join one of the planning meetings because she had a sports injury. Perhaps two days later, we got the news that Adrianne was in a coma, but doing well, whatever that meant. We heard that her condition was serious but that she would recover. Dorothy was in touch with Adrianne’s partner and she was the point of contact for us in the conference organizing committee. After a few more days we had an in-person meeting and were told that Adrianne had died from a rock climbing injury. The story that I heard is that she fell from a low distance but hit her head on a rock. It is stressful organizing a conference and we had some problems with Wiki critics targeting this conference with a protest. The protestors were hostile and eventually would do illegal activity at the conference. We all had mixed feelings. Adrianne was dead, so many people were depending on us for this conference, we have to tolerate the strange people who are harassing us and our event, and Adrianne is not going to help with conference harassment or anything else. She was dead. We went forward with the conference.
There are Wikipedia articles about her now. Noam Cohen, Wiki NYC’s native Wikimedia movement journalist, wrote about her death. Noam’s articles have been at the center of many now-canonical stories in the Wikimedia historical narrative. In this case he was the first to write about Adrianne’s engagement with Wikipedia. Shortly after she died someone made a Wikipedia article for her. The article went for deletion discussion, where I voted delete because there was an existing precedent that English Wikipedia does not pass biographies as notable when the only third-party source to cite is a single obituary in The New York Times. Reviewers had addressed this issue before and even a research team had talked through the possibility of automatically generating Wikipedia articles for all persons who were the subject of an obituary in that paper. In the days of that discussion, it happened that following Noam’s article lots of other commentators started publishing their variations of Adrianne’s obituary. With multiple perspectives and sources to cite the biography definitely passed Wikipedia’s inclusion criteria.
When I read the obituaries for Adrianne I began to think about how deaths and obituaries and mourning times are for the living. Adrianne no longer cared – she was dead. Noam profiled her because he wanted to advocate for Wikipedia and recognize the loss of a strong leader in an under-served space. Other people had their reasons. When I read the profiles about Adrianne I felt like they did not capture the way that I knew her, which was as a female who could package gay male sexuality in a context for the general public. Promoting Tom of Finland erotic comics is not as compelling when a typical gay guy does it, but when a female English professor does it, then that makes the experience more accessible to anyone who wants to visit the subculture. Even today there is continual Wikimedia movement research on online harassment of women, and there should be, but aside from Adrianne there have been no other women who stepped into the gay male space with authority and insisted on advocating for gay boys in a way comparable to the girls. Very few people outside of a subculture can advocate strongly and effectively for a subculture. It was a real loss for gay boys to lose Adrianne. It seemed weird to me that her obituaries focused on what she did for women, but when I started to read them, I had to agree that literature and women’s advocacy was most of what she did. Still, a significant part of her activity was gay male advocacy with a bold position on encouraging expression of sexuality.
After Adrianne’s death I talked with Rachel Wexelbaum who was to become very active in Wiki LGBT+ organizing. Rachel edited Queers Online, a March 2015 book (based on 2014 research) which included “Queering Wikipedia”, a chapter about LGBT+ projects in Wikipedia including a narrative of the Tom of Finland Wikipedia editing program. That chapter was mostly Rachel’s work and all of her initiative, but I was fortunate to have accepted Rachel’s invitation to join in researching it and coauthoring it along with the event host Katie Herzog. who organized the Tom of Finland wiki editathons while she was artist in residence there.
Whenever someone develops a Wikipedia article that becomes the foundation of all future research on that topic. All diligent people who start their research, whether journalist, student, researcher, hobbyist, or interested person of any sort, check the Wikipedia article on a topic. Because of Adrianne the Wikipedia article on Tom of Finland has been in better shape since the 2012 event. Anyone who researched Tom of Finland from that point, including the screenwriter for the new movie, and any producers who did research to consider funding its development, and any film executives who have to be cautious about the promise that a biography could have in a dramatization, either read the Wikipedia article or had their staff read the article. No one in this new movie or any similar new movie could be so far removed from Wikipedia. In that since, Adrianne gets some wiki-credit for flapping butterfly wings and turning a wiki event into a movie and a more complete historical record.
There is another part to this story to mention now and tell another time. Adrianne died on 9 April. Cynthia Ashley-Nelson, user:Cindamuse, died on 11 April. Cindy was also a strong female leader, Wikipedia power user, active in developing women’s articles, super active as a second-generation Wikipedian in the education program, resident in Cascadia and participant in outreach events there, and had recently accepted an appointment to serve on the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee. She had traveled from Seattle to Berlin where at Wikimedia Conference 2014 she would represent Wiki Cascadia values and lots else. She died on her first night there before almost anyone had met her. There are not a lot of us wiki community organizers in the world, and fewer still in any given region, and then considering a slice of interest like women’s issues makes for only a handful of people. To lose Adrianne and Cindy, who had great overlap in scope and wiki engagement, was a major disruption to any wiki women’s outreach in the United States. Not only do I miss them, but also, they were alive and active in a strange time in history where they were highly influential in directing a project affecting lots of people. When they died I grieved their deaths, and I also felt the loss and odd coincidence that two leading activists in the same space should die at once for unrelated reasons.