My favorite blog (other than the ones that I’m in) is Joe.My.God. (www.joemygod.com), an online digest of LGBTQ and other news told with a decidedly progressive slant. Joe Jervis, who created Joe.My.God. in 2004, is still at the helm of what is perhaps the most popular personal blog about LGBTQ issues in the world.
Joe.My.God. has received countless media awards, including the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism in 2011. When not working on Joe.My.God. (a full-time job in itself), Jervis is National Advertising Sales Director for Pride Magazine at Full Media.
In a 2009 interview with Rex Wockner in the Windy City Times, Jervis revealed the origin of his blog’s unusual title.
“Originally, when I was brainstorming the name with my friend who helped me set up the original template, I told him that I wanted the name to have my name in it, my first name, and have some sort of punny blog title as well. I really can’t recall now how we settled on Joe.My.God., but it was meant to be, obviously, a play on “Oh my God.” And it was because my English Mancunian boss at work was always using the expression when she had something for me: ‘Joe, my God! You’ve got to do this for me.’ That was her way of letting me know that the project was urgent. And so it grew from there. The punctuation grew out of a blog that I quite admired at the time which was written by Ernie Hsiung out of California, that kind of amused me, so I used the same elliptical punctuation in mine.”
Joe.My.God. began with a blog of personal stories but eventually evolved into a political digest. Though produced by a gay man for a mostly LGBTQ readership, Joe.My.God. expanded to include stories from outside our community. With no pretense at impartiality, Joe.My.God. details the crimes, follies and misfortunes of the religious right, political conservatives and now the MAGA movement. Jervis doesn’t say much; he just quotes his victims at great length, while reminding us of their previous follies. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump is the dubious “star” of Joe.My.God. but there are others who make frequent cringeworthy appearances, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Florida Congressman Randy Fine. Each entry is followed by hundreds of readers’ comments, which provide more entertaining reading.
Those of you who belong to the Log Cabin Republicans would do well to avoid Joe.My.God. The rest of you will find Joe Jervis’s blog entertaining and informative. At a time when Trump and his cronies are doing their best to take our country back a century or two, Joe.My.God. tells us what’s going on and inspires us to do something about it. Joe.My.God. takes up so much of Jervis’s time that he complains that he can’t go on vacation without taking two laptops with him. I hope Jervis gets his rest. We need his blog during the next few perilous years.
