Blogger gets respect

Durham resident writes on progressive issues

It was her third time seeing John Edwards in person, but this time he was with his wife and kids shopping at Target. So the supporter of the former presidential candidate kept her distance.

But when she went home, Pam Spaulding did what she does most nights: She blogged about it. A few days later she got a response to her post about the sighting: "You should've spoken up!"

The comment was from Elizabeth Edwards.

Spaulding, a Durham native, is a bit of a local celebrity these days, recognized in supermarkets and airports by her dirty-blond dreadlocks. And it's all because of her blog, Pam's House Blend (pamshouseblend.com), which turns four years old this month. The progressive, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issue-centered blog is also one of the first to acquire press credentials to this year's Democratic National Convention, which is granting access to bloggers for the first time.

It's a responsibility Spaulding takes seriously -- even if some politicians and mainstream media don't think a blogger deserves to have it.

"Sometimes, yes, it's profane, sometimes it's rude, sometimes it's not grammatically correct, but the medium is different. It's fast and loose," she says. "But that does not mean that the ideas are bankrupt, that the criticism isn't legitimate."

Pam's House Blend has won a number of awards, including the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Monette-Horwitz Trust, for making strides toward the eradication of homophobia; Best LGBT Blog in the 2005 and 2006 Weblog Awards; and accolades from the likes of gay activist Mandy Carter and former Democratic Senate candidate Jim Neal.

The site gets about 5,500 hits per day and is one of the top 50 progressive blogs on the Internet, according to the New Politics Institute. Though there are four other contributors on the site now, the quick-witted Spaulding posts multiple times a day.

"She knows what she's talking about, so you need to be careful before you challenge her," Neal says. "She will pound you if she doesn't agree with you or if she doesn't think you're giving her the answer to your question."

Spaulding's particular blend of posts focus on doggedly following gay issues in Washington and exposing the seeming hypocrisy of media outlets and politicians; a current target is alleged bathroom foot tapper Sen. Larry Craig, who is co-sponsoring a Marriage Protection Amendment in Congress. Each post contains well-documented links and footage, and Spaulding makes sure to add a healthy dose of snark.

Pam's House Blend doesn't focus on North Carolina issues, but Spaulding says she uses her experiences here to form a perspective that's different from those of pundits in Washington and New York.

"Those guys live, sleep, eat and breathe politics, and they don't know how real people live," she says. "They get tunnel vision, and they're convinced that they're right. They think of the population at large as illiterate and easily manipulated."

She's found this year's election interesting to cover, though disheartening in the ways the topic of race has been used and -- in her opinion -- abused.

"It was pretty clear in mainstream media coverage that they didn't know how to talk about it except only in the most exploitative terms and that made it very dangerous -- to unearth it and not really deal with it," she says. "Why are the people in Appalachia so easily stimulated into saying, 'I just won't vote for a black man.' There's no exploration of those issues."

Becoming an activist

It was when she entered junior high school that Spaulding first became aware of the significance of her racial identity. She was the first black student to make the honor roll at Pearsontown School in Durham (now an elementary school) -- where blacks were the majority.