Zack Rosen, editor-in- chief of the Washington, D.C. based blog The New Gay, and weeks ago he asked Fleshbot and their readers to help him earn a scholarship to an activist blogging conference called NetRootsNations. In an attempt to cultivate votes aplenty, Zack made “a solemn promise to the Fleshbot community” that if he won he would offer up a naked picture of himself. The appeal was not well received by a number of those within the LGBT community, who felt that the Rosen risked embarrassing himself and, by extension, gays, for in a sense selling himself to attain a goal. Predictably, he won; the promise of erect penis an enticement that the entire online community of Fleshbot could not resist. Tuesday, the prized picture of the penis appeared, along with a note from Rosen that read:
“I want to thank everyone for helping me win a scholarship to this year’s NetRootsNation. And a double thanks for not calling me whore or “an embarrassment to the community,” as the commentators on other websites have done. I figured that many of the readers of this site are pretty cool, intelligent, laid back people with families and careers and interesting lives – people who also understand that a little sex or skin isn’t going to send us to the gulag.
I hope to do some good things in my life and a chance to meet the bigwigs at NetRoots should give me some decent ideas of how to get started. Actually, maybe I can start here by reminding people of three things (that Fleshbot readers probably knew long before I wrote this):
1. Gay men’s bodies aren’t shameful things.
2. Gay sex is natural and pretty damn fun.
3. No one ever won equal rights by keeping their oppressors comfortable.
The pictures (and the site) are obviously NSFW, and as a disclosure, I know Zack, although now I know him in new and oddly personal way.
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