Reply #19: I'd like to participate here, if that's okay.

[Lyric]

I agree with the problems that Prism pointed out, and I'd like to add a few comments of my own.

Although I do think an amnesty would be a positive gesture, I'm not sure how much of a tangible impact it would have. I'm not sure that many of those posters would even accept it at this point, because the situation was so mishandled that the pain, grief, and anger were never able to be resolved. It is my hope that *this* discussion can be the first step towards that resolution, but for some of us, it's already too late.

When you take all of the hurts and offenses that were listed in your OP's timeline, and combine them with the "purging" of the gay community, you can see that, at least from a gay perspective, the Admins appeared to be validating all of the horrible things that the other "side" was saying about us. To us, it was like you were saying "Yep, those people were right. You're all a bunch of worthless malcontents, and you are SO unimportant to our community that you're not even worth the effort of an attempt at reconciliation. You're worthy of nothing but the ban hammer." This was especially in evidence when sundog was tombstoned for posting the number "7".

Sundog is actually something we should talk about a little more thoroughly. Now, I hardly know sundog. He wasn't a close, personal friend. But I personally witnessed what happened on the boards that day. Gay DU'ers were being tombstoned--not only for attacking a moderator (which is how your OP makes it sound) but also for publicly grieving (like sundog) and/or protesting about the lack of an explanation for what was happening, and for the way it was being handled. Sundog didn't attack a moderator. He was tombstoned for posting the number "7" as a grief-stricken memorial to the number of posters we had lost at that point in the purge. Imagine how horrifying it is to see members of your minority community being banned, and then MORE of them being banned just for *talking* about the fact that the banning was taking place. We were all grieving, outraged, and horror-struck at what was going on. The enforced silence about the topic was more upsetting than I can even express.

For quite a while afterward, any mention of the gay purge was deleted. Not locked--*deleted*. Surely you can see how that decision contributed to the understandable paranoia, grief, and anger in our community over what happened? When we couldn't even talk about it, couldn't even acknowledge that it *happened*, how can anyone be surprised that people would assume the absolute worst of you?

And to add yet another wound, we couldn't even defend ourselves when the other "side" came around to laugh, mock, and belittle us. More than one of those people claimed that the "gay purge" never happened, and we weren't allowed to refute that, or even link to another site where explanation was permitted. It was like our friends and community members never existed. Some have referred to that phenomenon as people being "tossed down the memory hole" and "disappeared". Some of our community truly felt that the whole situation was an Orwellian level of creepy.

And again--this enforced silence was (and still is) probably the biggest contributing factor to the long-term problems we've had. To those of us who didn't even *see* the moderator-attacking posts (much less participate in them), all we knew is that our community had been gouged out, and we weren't even permitted to talk about it. That is NOT ordinary operating procedure here. We've had mass bannings before, but I've never seen another situation where discussion of the bannings was forbidden. Sometimes the mods will eventually lock a discussion thread like that after a while, but the thread is still *there*. It can be linked to. Other people can read it and gain some understanding of what happened. That was not the case with the purge.

People need to talk in order to grieve. Talk is necessary for misunderstandings to be corrected and for wounds to be healed. Beyond the purge itself, I think the worst mistake you made was to delete all discussion of it. If not for that, I think a lot of people who ended up banned would not have been. I think if the "purge" had been confined to the few people who were directly involved in the original offense, and the threads discussing it had been locked rather than deleted, we would not be here today having this discussion. People could have grieved, and then things could have gotten back to some semblance of normal. Instead, the pain of the whole situation got drawn-out for years--years in which it had time to fester, and for new grievances to be stacked on top of the unresolved old ones.