[Marxism] Steve Gilliard remembered

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, December 30, 2007
Steven Gilliard Jr. | b. 1964
Invisible Blogger
By MATT BAI

The sidewalks of Harlem’s main thoroughfares are wide and inviting, and 
in the 1960s the kids playing “boxball” shared the asphalt squares with 
some of the greatest orators in creation. The most famous spot for 
speechifying was the “Speakers’ Corner” outside Lewis Michaux’s 
bookstore on 125th Street, where Malcolm X delivered his lectures on 
race and politics. On weekends or after work, fathers took their boys 
down to the corners in Harlem to watch any number of would-be firebrands 
engaged in emotional debate over Vietnam or the state of race relations 
or Bobby Kennedy’s political future.

Steve Gilliard was born into this Harlem and took it all in, but he 
wouldn’t find his voice on the corners. He was quiet, bookish, 
overweight. He won entrance to an elite high school, where he passed his 
time reading obscure military histories, then studied history and 
journalism at New York University. He found his true calling, though, on 
the Internet. In 1998, when he was 34, Gilliard joined a new site called 
NetSlaves.com, whose blogger-reporters chronicled the misadventures of 
the new high-tech work force, and there he discovered his own kind of 
incendiary oration. It was by the dim light of a computer screen, rather 
than on the sunlit corners of Harlem, that Gilliard took to expertly 
excoriating the moneyed establishment.

By 2003, Gilliard had become one of the first official “guest bloggers” 
on Daily Kos, then on its way to becoming the most influential of the 
new liberal political blogs, where he informed his indictments of the 
Iraq war with detailed references to the British occupation of 
Mesopotamia. Eventually he created his own site — “Steve was a big 
personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage,” Daily Kos’s 
creator, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, later wrote — and became one of a 
small group of early political bloggers with his own devoted following 
(and a self-sustaining, if modest, income from ads). On Gilliard’s “News 
Blog,” along with the partisan attacks on Republicans that made him a 
hated figure on the conservative blogs, he specialized in applying 
history to the present day, which made him an unusual and distinctive 
voice. In 2004, he banged out a remarkable 37-part series, the 
equivalent of about 200 typed pages, chronicling the foibles of European 
colonialism.

Though Gilliard, unlike many bloggers, always used his real name, few 
readers knew much about him. They didn’t know, for instance, that at age 
39 he had open-heart surgery to repair an infected valve. They didn’t 
know he lived alone in a small apartment in East Harlem. And, although 
Gilliard often wrote about race and alluded to his own perspective, a 
lot of readers never realized he was black. In the incident that brought 
him the most infamy, Gilliard acidly attacked Michael Steele, the black 
Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland in 2006, as a traitor 
to his race. Black conservatives like Steele infuriated Gilliard, who 
couldn’t understand how any African-American could support a party that 
exploited racial prejudice. “I’s Simple Sambo and I’s Running for the 
Big House,” read Gilliard’s caption, below a doctored photo of Steele as 
a minstrel. Only after the post earned him headlines in major newspapers 
and recriminations from politicians of both parties did a lot of readers 
come to understand that a white man hadn’t written it — although, for 
Gilliard’s critics, that hardly made it less offensive.

The paradox of Gilliard’s existence is a familiar story on the blogs, 
where people often adapt avatars that are more like the selves they 
imagine being. Online, he was vicious and uncompromising. In person, 
Gilly, as his close friends called him, was reserved and enigmatic. His 
writing at times betrayed a sense of loneliness and dislocation. In 
2000, after seeing the movie “High Fidelity,” he posted on NetSlaves.com 
a melancholy reflection on life as a geek. “Geeks live in an eternal 
conflict between their love of topic and love of people,” he wrote. “I 
wonder if people substitute fascination with things they can control 
over things they can’t — other people. You start to wonder if you’ve 
created a world so limited that you can’t really reach beyond it.” He 
lamented that he didn’t know what it was to “wake up naked in a strange 
bed,” but, he wrote, “at 35, I’ve figured out that this is it, at least 
for now. Anything I do, any life I make, is going to revolve around 
words and computers and strange, bright people.”

It was a life both short and loud. What began with a bad cough just 
after Valentine’s Day became a spiraling infection that ravaged 
Gilliard’s vulnerable heart and kidneys, and he spent most of his last 
four months hospitalized. The identities he kept separate for most of 
his 42 years collided in the days after he died; the few dozen mostly 
white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time 
the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and 
relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at 
that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. 
They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the 
way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them 
not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might 
deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

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