L-word: Tell me a little bit more about your website, www.ourfifteenminutes.com?

 

Tracy: Our website started out as a place solely to reach us and we had a lot of fan mail.

Stamie: And stay in touch.

 

Tracy: Yeah, during The Real L Word, but it quickly trended into something else. Instead of us telling them of our stories, which they know because they’ve seen it on television, we wanted to hear about their stories. It was fans sharing their stories, which then trended into mostly their coming out stories. It’s a place where they can feel safe sharing who they are with others that are just like them.

 

L-word: Are they writing their stories or sending videos?

 

Tracy: We’ve actually opened up to where they can send videos, as well but a lot of times the girls and the young guys want to be anonymous because they are not out where they live. There’s a live chat on there so they could talk to other people all over the world. There’s a map that shows who’s signed on and where they are. There’s a section that says, “I Choose Me” or “These Are My Stories” and cool thing about it is that anybody that’s on the site can reply to them publicly. It’s very uplifting. It’s very positive.

Stamie: And it’s started out as a place for us to blog and put my stand-up and put what Tracy’s doing in her career. We still want to keep doing that but the goal is to make it more of a social place and basically, just to have fun. We are going to be asking people whoever works with computers or web designers if they want to help us. Maya we’ve met through the show and then she emailed us. And there’s someone else who’s going to help us maintain it now.

 

Tracy: We plan to make it more of an international website where we get writers from all over the world where they can write what’s going on.

 

Stamie: Or write what they like. Each story could be a new blog entry to keep this site going. It’s all for free. We are all doing it to keep it alive and stay connected.

 

Tracy: It’s also women helping other women. There are guys on the site as well, we can’t exclude them, but everybody helping each other. We are building a small community. I feel like we are Sims without the characters.