Once a year, I pay you guys $100 and another couple of times a year make smaller donations, particularly when you have to cry crisis and that extra donation from each of us is timely.

It is only fair to pay people for their work (tho our 'donations' only add up to probably less than minimum wage for you guys and dolls). It is certainly necessary to pay for the things we want/need in the world - they will be gone if we don't.

Big Closet is much more important than only the fiction posted here (tho BC would not exist without the stories and their authors). The human contact and communication we each need with other individuals who have the same, rather unique, likes and needs that those of here have is not found anywhere else except the small to medium sized labor-of-love and very special achievement that our favorite, TG, Web site gives us. The huge sites like FM and GayCafe are also necessary for us as individuals, a community, society, culture, and art, but cannot possibly give us what only our Favorite Wonderful Web Site (FWWS) gives each of us.

If you are like me, your life would have a terribly lonely and even painful hole in it without this home we can come to for sharing or just quietly being with our T family and friends. In the mid 90s, the online explosion started, and some of us remember the terrible isolation the T parts of ourselves were trapped in before then. By the early 2000s, the new 'problem' of being lost in a massive, impersonal crowd of of our sister, brother, and whatever T people out there was almost re-creating that isolation, but at least was still was giving us the gift of the stories themselves, together with the big crowd's comments.

That is when BC came forward (and a few other, also always cash-strapped, sites with similar missions) and started giving us the special community, friends, family we each need - without the faceless crowds, with the bonuses of a far higher quality of writing overall, and real, two-way communicating with the authors.

The forums, the blogs, the chat, the comment threads after each story, won't be replaced if you (we) will not or cannot pay for it. They will become dead, silent artifacts that we can stare at on The Wayback Machine, like in a museum, wishing we had something like that now to be a part of.

The median age in the U.S. is 37 (most of BC is in U.S., I guess?), so many of us won't remember life as a T person before we had a genuine gathering place online. Trust Auntie Annie, you would not have liked it.

Please pay BC fair pay for fair value, if you can afford it. Of course there are more than a few of us who really cannot afford much, or afford anything. That is understandable and it happens, especially in a society so often repressive and cruel to T persons and where needed medical care is only available to those who had a way to get the money for it, before they got sick and weren't prevented from getting jobs because of discrimination. Please give, but please do not give 'til it hurts. That does not really help us in the long run, and it _hurts_ you.

(I have collected donations for good causes many times and it always works out that the individuals with the smallest incomes give the most generously, often to a fault, while those with tons of disposable income give little and spend it on more "stuff", as the great Great George Carlin dubbed it. If _everyone_ here who thinks little of buying fast food regularly paid, say, the equivalent of two Starbucks a month, would that boost BC's revenue to something sustainable? Bet it would. That said, I do not know what the numbers are, only what we all see in the Hatbox total. From various forum comments, it seems to me that we can be proud of the number of us who make a big and conscientious effort to give. I admire you. Seriously. :-)

[Anne puts soapbox away and thanks everyone for your time]

please add another 100 to the kitty, with thanks again for all your hard work!
Hugs,
Miriam