Meet Kamala, the first QPOC EIC of Autostraddle
Kamala Puligandla shares her plans for the queer site.
Kamala working from her desk at home in Los Angeles.
Kamala Puligandla is a fiction writer (check out info about her forthcoming novels here!) and the first QPOC Editor-in-Chief at Autostraddle, the most famous dyke website on the internet. I interviewed her over FaceTime about what it’s been like since she became the head of Autostraddle.
The media world in general is very white and I’m always interested in hearing from QPOC about their experiences navigating that space. What does queer media look like when it’s run by QTPOC? So often the media world is not in the hands of people of color, or trans/queer/non-binary people. When Riese Bernard, the co-founder and former EIC of Autostraddle, announced in June that she was stepping down as EIC and making Kamala EIC, I was so excited for Kamala.
I know Kamala personally, and I know she’s awesome, has strong ideals, and is a great writer/editor. I’m excited to see where she takes the queer site during this transition period.
Yez: Do you remember your first time visiting Autostraddle?
Kamala Puligandla: It launched in 2009 and I remember at that time I did have this dumb blog that I wrote. I had two dumb blogs and one of them was just pictures of women that I thought were hot. I remember looking for pictures of Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat. I just wanted pictures of them and I think that’s how I found Autostraddle for the first time. The sex and dating content is the most hilarious and also the most informative stuff.
Yez: I think a lot of people when they start having sex and they google “how to have lesbian sex,” Autostraddle is the first site that comes up.
Kamala: Yeah! I remember being, like, oh, there’s a lot of this. I don’t think that’s what I first looked up, but that’s what I landed on.
Yez: It’s wild to be the EIC of a big dyke website. Did you ever imagine you would be in this position?
Kamala: No! I was thinking about how when I first took the position as Deputy Editor, my mom was like, explain this job to me. I said, I don’t really know yet. I’m going to go and see, but it’s working on this website that is traditionally a lesbian website. It’s about a lot of queer women, non-binary people, and that was what I was holding in my head. My mom was, like, oh, well, you always used to say that you want to get paid to be yourself and I guess you did it!
I was like, oh yeah! That’s true. That is kind of what I get to do. So maybe I have imagined something like this. I have many times in my life been like I’m going to start my own zine or my own literary magazine/website. I think that’s a cool idea, but it’s cool also to work on this project that already involves so many people and so many people are already invested. I don’t know that I would have imagined this would be my path, but I’m, like, that is a thing that I want. I’m down and invested.
YEZ: Now you have access and resources to be able to either shine light or give other creators a platform for their cool projects they make on the side via Autostraddle. Especially if you think about the connections you might have versus another editor at the site who is not connected to the type of projects you are culturally, or the people you might be in community with in your life.
Kamala: No, totally, I’ve thought about that a lot. There is a core community that’s Autostraddle and that’s a really different queer community or lesbian community than the one I’ve been in or that I’m a part of in L.A. It’s really cool to bring those things together and I think that’s true of a lot of people on staff. We all have different little pieces that we’re putting together and I like that. That is cooler than what I could just bring personally by myself.
I have a question for you. Speaking of someone who did create their own thing, like when you made Dyke Queen zine, what was that born out of for you?
Yez: As you know I worked in queer media for a while as an editor. I quit my job in 2017 because I wanted to go and create my own magazine explicitly for QTPOC lesbians and dykes. I had in mind a publication that was cool, sexy, smart, and interesting. I was awarded the Issues Residency at Hello Mr., the gay men’s publication, and it all worked out. When I was doing the residency, I thought, this (Dyke Queen) is exactly the type of publication that I want to exist in the world. I made it with my friend, Bridget Ore, but it’s hard to keep it running as a print publication. I had a lot of support with that project, but then the residency ended. I’m trying to see where this newsletter goes.
Kamala: A lot of the editors in the senior staff at Autostraddle are white. We still have a leadership that’s extremely white and not to be, like, “I feel alone!” I don’t feel alone, but it is a different place that all of us are writing from and speaking to and trying to find a meeting point sometimes feels hard.
When you said I want to have a place for women and lesbians and dykes to have something sexy and smart and fashionable.
Yez: Yeah, I wanted all of that.
Kamala: So often we don’t get to have those things; we get to have these other things. I don’t know what they are or how to describe it. It’s aesthetically very different from how I identify and even that is something that I’m still trying to figure out how to articulate so I can be like that is what I want more of on Autostraddle. Not that I’m going to go and change everyone’s site, but there is a way that a lot of lesbian media has been like, oh, we should just be thankful that it’s there. We should be thankful that it’s happening and not worried what the aesthetic says about our values and stuff like that.
Yez: I’m happy that Autostraddle is still around because so many other lesbian sites have shuttered. AfterEllen is still around, but it’s become transphobic? And that’s another thing on its own. I think so often lesbians/dykes have to create their own communities sometimes in private when they don’t exist in public spaces or when they’re not given bandwidth even digitally on the internet. Speaking for myself I know that I’ve been in queer brunch clubs, queer backpacking groups, queer basketball teams, and now I’m in a queer theory zoom reading group. I see that connected to how Autostraddle went and created it’s own community online. What are your thoughts on that?
Also, I want to note that when I use the words “lesbian culture” and “dyke,” I see them as inclusive words that can encompass many people, not just women.
K: In my head, “lesbian culture” is open to a lot of people even if it is called “lesbian culture.” We have to work on language as a community. I think that “lesbian culture” is not exclusive to women, but what is the future of lesbian culture? It’s going to look different than historic lesbian culture.
Historically, men have always had access to spaces that women don’t. Web property is not that different from actual property in that it is extremely abundant, but I think that keeping up and maintaining a website and a publication based on advertising is a lot. So many publications have closed that are mainstream publications because they’ve found that hard to do. Riese Bernard (CEO and Co-Founder of Autostraddle) has talked to me about how people traditionally haven’t wanted to spend that much on marketing to women exclusively or queer people. People really want to advertise to gay men because they have money so that’s who gets to keep the media sites because they already have the money. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle.
There’s a community aspect of Autostraddle that, yeah, we want to help our writers grow and they don’t need to stay at Autostraddle. They are welcome to have goals and ambitions that are beyond Autostraddle. We are raising money from our community right now, which is not to say that we won’t also try to get some advertising money, if and when, T.V. comes back again, but that’s the goal, to be a place where people can come and find... A lot of people don’t have a lesbian bar or don’t have their queer reading group or don’t have something else they can go to and they can come to the site.
“In my head, “lesbian culture” is open to a lot of people even if it is called “lesbian culture.” We have to work on language as a community. I think that “lesbian culture” is not exclusive to women, but what is the future of lesbian culture? It’s going to look different than historic lesbian culture.” - Kamala
Yez: How is it going as EIC of Autostraddle?
Kamala: I started in December at Autostraddle and it’s August now so it’s been a little over eight months. A lot of it’s been new. I haven't been in the position of being, like, I’m going to manage a website this big. I mean, managing a website at all, for the size of our community, is pretty big for me. That has been a thing that I’m learning, but it’s been really cool. I’ve never worked at a workplace that’s entirely queer and that just brings a totally different vibe to all the projects that we do and the fact that that’s who’s making the work, that’s who’s consuming it, its just a different vibe, like, oh, this is a special thing that I feel extra invested in. That’s a different workplace environment for me.
Yez: Not only queer, but also a team that consists mostly of queer women. That’s a difference too. A lot of other queer sites, at least in the past, not so sure now, have been run by cis gay white men.
Kamala: I personally wish there was other language to talk about gender because I think it’s really cool that it’s a site that’s been historically for lesbians, but one of the parts of our vision is to make it open to more people who are genderqueer, who are trans, and its always been open to trans women, but we want to also be explicitly inclusive of trans men. I think sometimes it’s hard to find the words to be, like, this is the site for everyone who isn’t just a cis gay, which a lot of gay media is.
Yez: I was thinking about this language question too when I was researching and writing out questions for our talk. How to describe Autostraddle? Lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans. I wish there was a word that encompassed it all.
Kamala: and non-binary!
Yez: I read your vision for the site that you published along with a fundraiser you have going at Autostraddle to make up the advertising funds that have been lost because of COVID-19 . What’s some content you’ve posted since you became editor that you’re really proud to have worked on? Or can you speak about future stuff coming out that you’re excited about?
Kamala: I think that’s an important question. A lot of the stuff I do is not necessarily news-y timely stuff as much. I mean I will do it, but some of my favorite stuff has been the APIA (Asian Pacific Islander American) month that I did. I was really into that. They’ve never done that before and we’ve heard from people that they want to hear from more voices from the Asian Pacific Islander communities and that makes sense to me. I was into that.
I’ve started a couple of sex and dating series with some writers. One of them is with Dani Janae and one with someone named Mary Anne Thomas that are essays on queer people of color having sex and how they negotiate their bodies and their dating relationships. I also loved editing this essay by Mandy Harris Williams and this beautiful piece by my friend, Lillian Kalish.
I find that stuff fascinating because it’s a lot of things that I’m thinking about, like, how I want to move through the world. They’re full of great ideas so things like that I feel so invested in. Other things that are personally like my style of things: I love essays that post big questions. I’m hoping to find some more of those in the future, sort of things like the things we’re talking about right now, like what is lesbian culture? What will it look like going forward and who gets to decide that? And actually who doesn’t get to decide that?
I think those are questions that are coming up for our community that we’re going to have to decide. So, that’s something, but I think in the near term, Carmen (Autostraddle’s Deputy Editor) and I are planning for a Latinx Heritage Month. We have a lot of different plans for things; we’ll see what happens.
“I’m hoping to find some more of those in the future, sort of things like the things we’re talking about right now, like what is lesbian culture? What will it look like going forward and who gets to decide that? And actually who doesn’t get to decide that?” - Kamala
Generally, I want to have more. I want our regular daily content to be a wide-variety of things: funny, informative, deep, art, pop culture, and for it to still be trans-centered, and POC-centered. I know in the past we have had a lot of disability writing and writers who can talk about being disabled, but we don’t really have any right now so I’m hoping to get more of those on our site.
Yez: You’ve talked about how part of your mission at Autostraddle is to make it more POC-centered. Autostraddle has been around since 2009, and it’s exciting that you’re being given the opportunity to change the site to be more inclusive, but I’m also wondering isn’t that a lot of pressure to put on one person? Or two?
Kamala: Yeah! It is a lot to put on one person. Yeah, I was going to say it would be too much if it was just one person. And, also, sometimes it feels like too much even just being me and Carmen. But we have a lot of writers who are black, writers of color, and many black writers that Carmen specifically picked to write for Autostraddle.
There are a lot of people who are doing this with us and I think that what happens with us and I think this is a problem that any site that’s trying to be a business of some kind runs into is we have this whole divergence of like there’s the stuff that we do, we’re really proud of this work, we feel really good about it, it centers all the people we want to center, and it’ll get like half the traffic of some post that’s like about a white lesbian celebrity. In a way it’s very hard. Sometimes that feels demoralizing. And I’m, like, that sucks, and sometimes I’m, like, that’s ok that’s the way it has to be sometimes.
I would like for those things to come together at some point. I don’t think we’ve figured out the exact recipe for that. Like what that means. Sometimes a Janelle Monae post will do well. It’s not just only Cara Delevingne, but there’s things like that that are always going to get more hits. If we’re trying to sell advertising that’s important, but then the other side of that is I can publish an essay about someone who’s like South Asian, bisexual, about their identity, and even if that only gets 500 eyes on it, those people feel so seen and love it and I feel like that’s also really, really important.
Yez: I think you’re right. It’s a balance because of course celebrity stuff is going to do really well in general. It’s someone everybody knows, like Kristen Stewart, who is a lesbian god for many people in our community, lol. I’m sure anything you write about Kristen Stewart goes insane, but it is what it is. You’ll figure it out.
Kamala: Exactly! Yeah, that’s also what people want to see. People want to see Kristen Stewart stuff just as much as maybe I don’t want to see Kristen Stewart stuff too. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t put it up on the site.
Yez: Also, for a lot of queer people she’s a root, you know? She elicits an impulsive emotional response in people, so they want to hear about her and what she’s up to.
Kamala: Yeah, people have a lot of attachments to her. Yeah, I understand that. I have room for that.
Yez: If you had to put this down in a couple sentences, what does your dream version of Autostraddle look like?
Kamala: I want to take this strong community vibe with all the different kinds of things you would want to talk about with your friends and I want to move it from a really specific type of white lesbian who goes there everyday and bring you, me, and people like us, to be coming to our site for great entertainment, really good takes on art, funny and smart writing about television, and cool relevant essays about our identities and our lives and things we’re negotiating as we go through our lives as lesbians.
I want a multitude of perspectives on all the same things that we usually have.
Yez: Is there anything else I haven’t asked about that you would like to share?
Kamala: One thing I do want to say is that in so many ways I was hired in December at Autostraddle to start a change, to transition away from things that have been really centered around white women. It’s been a really slow process. It feels like I’ve been here doing so many things and on the other hand I can also see how it’s a slow change. I think that I am realizing that everything big comes slow because you have to build it from the very small in order for it to be strong. I am being patient. I could say it’s going to be like this in one year, but I don’t know that. I think that I have to build a strong foundation to listen to people and to take everyone's feedback and build something together. I’m recognizing that it’s going to take some time.
“I think that I am realizing that everything big comes slow because you have to build it from the very small in order for it to be strong. I am being patient.” - Kamala
Yez: It really does take a community, not even just your co-workers, but also your readers and writers.
Kamala: I think for some people certain kinds of changes feel really risky and I’m trying to make room for that too.
Yez: I agree with you though that you have to go easy on yourself because it is going to be a slow process and that’s OK!
Kamala: I have so many things I want to do! And I’m, like, no I have to do this right.
Recommended by Kamala
Kamala’s favorite dyke meme accounts:
Kamala’s current reads:
There There by Tommy Orange
My Baby First Birthday by Jenny Zhang
Babyji by Abha Dawesar