An Ex-Drupal Community Member’s Take On “Drupal Drama”

I’ve watched the unfolding “drupaldrama” with great interest, as a person who was once fairly involved with Drupal for a long time. I have also “left” Drupal a few times due to sexism in that community. And finally left for good last year after one particularly egregious issue I will not get into here, but may write about later.

It was sad because I built my career on Drupal (though I have since moved on) and my first web development job out of college was doing Drupal. I continue to do Drupal sites occasionally, but am no longer really engaged with the community at all. I very rarely attend events or participate on Drupal.org. I haven’t logged into IRC in a long time.

Now I myself have been accused of defending a sexist by questioning this decision. Which is surreal because of my long history calling out sexism both privately and publicly in Drupal. This demonization of skeptics is not the sign of a healthy community.

I’m not going to get into Larry as a person or Gor*. I haven’t had many interactions with him, I’ve been irritated for a long time with his stances on various issues ranging from sexism in IRC to technical terminology. I think his comparison of his plight with the struggles of LGBT people and minorities is offensive.

I think it’s very much possible Larry is a sexist, and there are plenty of example you can find of him being terrible on Twitter. People have called this guy out for years and continue to do so.

The thing is, for years he didn’t care about that at all. And now no one really is sure why he got kicked out. I’ve heard a lot of speculation on the matter. Some people are insisting he must have harassed or abused someone in some way. Here is why I don’t believe that:

1. That would have violated the Code of Conduct. He was not found in violation of the Code of Conduct.

2. Dries factored in his devotion to the project. This is the official statement on that

Larry had indicated on several occasions that he was drawing down his involvement in the Drupal project, and that context helped inform Dries’ decision.

Are we supposed to believe that if he had harassed someone but had also been sufficiently devoted he would not have been removed?

Also is this even an appropriate reaction had he been harassing someone? If this guy is truly dangerous, removing him and not stating this is only going to allow him to continue being a menace in other OSS communities.

There is the excuse apologists for this decision have made, that they cannot release any information about the issue because of privacy concerns. I do not find this convincing in any way, you do not have to disclose things that would out a reporter or victim to disclose the nature of it.

What about the idea he was kicked out because he’s a sexist. We also have the issue that multiple people prominent in Drupal have been accused of sexism inside Drupal (at cons, camps, IRC, etc.) and there has been plenty of evidence to back it up. And they continue to be welcome in the community. What’s the difference here?

It is fascinating to me to see the official statements on the matter refuse to even mention the word “sexism.” Or “misogyny.” That jives with my experience in the community where the idea of systematic sexism is rejected and instead the idea is that sexism is the work of a few “bad apples.” Even a tongue in cheek reference to this systematic sexism is viciously attacked. Note to people who haven’t experienced sexism: it almost never comes from a stereotypical “pig” but from the “nice guy” who asserts he has X many female friends and hires X number of female.

It’s clear sexism is a problem. You don’t solve it with a 6-month process that involves trawling a guy’s private sex-related accounts. That probably could have gone on longer had he not written about it in public.

It’s not appropriate for an OSS leadership to trawl private sex-related sites to gather info about a member. It just isn’t. I don’t care if the guy is a sexist or not. You might hate me for being an SJW or a sexist-defender but I think at least most sane people might agree with that.

And then official statements go on about how this “was never meant to be about sexual practices or kinks, so it pains me that I unintentionally hurt you. I do support you and respect you as a key part of our community.” Nice crocodile tears, but if you respected the kink community you wouldn’t be making an account on whatever private site they went through just to invade someone’s privacy. The hilarious thing is they never would have had to do that if they had listened to the people calling Larry out, in public, in the first place.

To many complete outsiders this looks like them just kicking a guy out for being kinky, and that’s how the press coverage has read. Which is kind of funny if the reason they kicked him out was to prevent him harming their image. And apologists refuse to even acknowledge how this looks like to people outside of Drupal.

I know it hurts to hear someone not be all kumbaya about Drupal and its community, but think of all the people who are missing from this conversation. Members of the community from long ago that I remember, but you probably don’t. Ask yourself why they aren’t there anymore, particularly the women**.

Yes, by all means doing something about sexists, but do so with transparency and clear rules on the matter. OSS has always been about openness, it is totally understandable for people to be angry when that doesn’t happen.

* others have done that better. Gor is a fantasy roleplay thing, though it also appears Larry outside of that has some beliefs about the “natural” proclivities of women desiring submission as a reason they might be attracted to Gor, but this is all taken from some slideshow notes. Of course this is me also guessing, which a lot of people have been doing. And the stuff they’ve filled in the blanks with is really just tinfoil.

** a great example was the Drupalcon keynote from 2010 — it’s not easy to find (and not uploaded officially). It was plainly offensive, especially in light of what women in the community had been asking for at the time, which was to keep sexual content that wasn’t related to Drupal out of the Drupal community. And the people who pointed this out were almost uniformly told that they were too sensitive. A lot of these women no longer participate in Drupal anymore.