Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (October 30, 2009)

THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND
Sarah Warn changed my life.

I don't know how many folks you can say truly impacted the course of your existence, but I can count mine on one hand. And after my partner Brent (you might know him as the Flying Monkey), Sarah Warn is at the top of the list.

So who the heck is Sarah and why am I writing about her in the BGWE? Because besides changing my life, she changed yours as well. You see, Sarah is the founder of AfterElton.com as well as our sister site, AfterEllen.com.

And Sarah announced this week that after 7 1/2 years (and nearly 1,000 articles and blogposts)  she's leaving the AEs as well as Logo. Frankly, I'm not sure what we're going to do without her.

Sarah first entered mine and Brent's life back in 2003 when Brent published his first book Geography Club which Sarah reviewed on AfterEllen.com. After exchanging emails for a while, the two of them discovered that much to our collective surprise, we lived only twenty minutes from each other at the time. Kind of amazing when you think about it. 

Lori, Brent, Sarah, Michael

Over the following months, we got to be friends with Sarah and her partner Lori, and then in late 2004 while eating dinner with them, Sarah told Brent and I she had decided to start a gay male version of AfterEllen.com and wondered if we had any ideas for names for the new site. Brent and I brainstormed on the drive home and thus was born AfterElton.com.

Sarah was AfterElton.com's first editor-in-chief and wrote the BGWE for the first six months. Brent and I were both novelists at the time, but we each contributed the occasional article or review. Then in July of 2005, I wrote my very first BGWE which had no pictures and was one page long. (Man, those were the days!)

By November of that year, Sarah had somehow come to the crazy conclusion I was the perfect guy to run AfterElton and she convinced me to take over as editor. (I suspect that was her plot all along.) I was pretty hesitant about taking the job as I'd never done anything like it before, but with encouragement from Brent, Sarah and Lori, I took the plunge. 

But I wasn't plunging alone as Sarah was right there offering me encouragement, advice and support, but giving me pretty amazing freedom to build the site up the way I saw fit. Working for a friend often changes the nature of your relationship and usually not for the better. Yet I can honestly say working for Sarah only made our friendship much stronger because she's not a regular boss.

Bosses I'm glad I don't have

She's an amazing, funny, warm, generous, caring and supportive boss who takes the blame when something goes wrong and gives others the credit when something is a success. No matter the time of day or night, she's ready to lend a hand whether it be reading a really important article or just listening to a gripe. And where some bosses can only offer criticism, Sarah was almost nothing but praise — and not because that was all I deserved!

I truly couldn't have asked for a better boss — or more importantly a greater friend. And you couldn't have asked for a better advocate for GLBT visibility.