Gay Content Research Articles

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

THE EFFECT OF LGBT’S CONTENT IN TIK TOK ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF LGBT BY COLLEGE STUDENTS IN A CAMPUS ENVIRONMENT

As a platform, TikTok is more open to people positing queer content. For example, seeing two men embracing each other, doing make-up on a trans person, or else. Although there are questions about censorship of LGBTQ content, the videos in that space are supportive and sometimes surprisingly confessional.The present study aims to describe the effects of gay content on TikTok social media on students’ acceptance about the presence of gays in the campus environment. The research method used is descriptive quantitative to explain a causal relationship of two variables by collecting data that has been distributed from 100 respondents who were randomly selected using a multistage random sampling. The results of present research show that despite feeling anxious about the existence of gay contents in TikTok social media, the participants accept the existence of gays due to several factors such as the existing culture in those places and peer groups. In addition, there is a relationship between the influence of social media content and the level of self-acceptance with the direction of the relationship being unidirectional because the correlation is positive. Furthermore, the level of influence of social media content correlates with the level of acceptance of gay identity among students.

Together they are Troy and Chase: Who supports demonetization of gay content on YouTube?

Together they are Troy and Chase: Who supports demonetization of gay content on YouTube?

Deconstructing Concealed Gayness Text in The Film Negeri van Oranje: Critical Discourse Analysis

As one of the most popular creative cultural products, film sometimes speaks beyond what it presents. It is not always produced merely for entertainment purposes, but also to spread a certain ideology and represent a particular culture. Anchored in queer theory, this research looks at the Indonesian film, Negeri Van Oranje, which was chosen purposely to be analyzed using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis model with an aim to deconstruct the concealed gayness text in the film. From the analysis, it was found that the gay scenes in the film try to tell its audience about the positions, feelings, challenges, and rejections that Indonesian gay people experience living amongst heteronormative surroundings. Some new notions about gay people’s life in Indonesia are extracted based on the analysis of the gay scenes in the film. The strategy of inserting gay content into a film nationally released in Indonesia is also revealed. The results of the analysis could be used to create a picture of what gay life looks like in Indonesia, a multicultural country that is well-known as the place in which the world’s largest Muslim population dwells.

Overcoming the Stigma: The Queer Denial of Indiewood

sex sells, except when it comes to Indiewood films with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) content. This is significantly evident when looking at the two trailers that were released for Tom Ford's A Single Man, film detailing day in the life of depressed gay British professor. Although neither trailer presents the film's basic narrative or emphasizes that the film is an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, both present few key shots accompanied by the film's score. Tom Ford's initial trailer for the Toronto International Film Festival illustrates the film's gay content alongside other elements of the film's narrative. We have the shot of Colin Firth and Matthew Goode kissing, shot of Firth looking into Nicholas Hoult's eyes, and ultimately an equal pairing of Firth interacting with male characters as he does with female, particularly Julianne Moore. The film was then sold to the Weinstein Company, whose subsequent trailer tells markedly different story: Goode's and Hoult's names are removed from the final moments of the trailer; the gay kiss is removed; and there is conspicuously unsubtle attempt at pushing both Firth and Moore for Academy Awards-we even get quote from Playboy describing the film as a movie of beauty, mystery, visual dazzle, and emotional resistance. If one had not heard anything else about this film, one could easily assume from the Weinstein trailer that this is semiindependent film detailing the relationship between Firth and Moore. This stark difference led Indiewire film critic Peter Knegt to claim that this was the heterosexualization of gay film: In with the Oscar buzz, out with the gayness. It seems the Weinstein Company doesn't want to take any chances with all those homophobic Academy members (A Tale of Two Trailers). This approach is indicative of many LGBT films in that there is distinct downplay of content to favor the quality characteristics of the films, which in this case is perhaps most notable in the conscious decision to replace scene of Firth and Goode kissing with claims of the Oscar buzz surrounding Firth and Moore.The intention of this article is to identify how this differentiation between queer and quality content occurs within the LGBT films of Indiewood. Indiewood films are marketed as an art-house alternative to Hollywood but in fact are distributed by specialty divisions of major distribution companies. Brokeback Mountain and The Kids Are All Right, for instance, were distributed by Focus Features, which is subsidiary of Universal Pictures, which is subsidiary of NBC Universal, which in turn is division of the Comcast Corporation. A political-economic critique of this corporate formation questions how explicitly narratives are marketed to mass public with the sole purpose of making financial profit. Existing scholarship shows that quality features traditionally associated with cultural capital are highlighted in the promotion of these Indiewood films, perhaps most notably in the literary-adapted films distributed by Miramax (Collins 142). Highly celebrated literary figures dull the stigma associated with the commodification of films within Hollywood. This article argues that promotion of LGBT Indiewood films follows this same strategic approach. These films are surrounded by paratexts that distinctly emphasize quality cultural capital while downplaying any content. As Indiewire critic Peter Knegt has identified with the trailers for A Single Man, these are films that these subsidiary companies, alongside the private Weinstein Company, want to promote to mass public beyond niche audiences. Within this process, queerness becomes the very liability for these films to overcome.IndiewoodAbove all else, Indiewood is an economic trend. The Indiewood, or semi-independent, film signals shift in the production, distribution, and exhibition of many independent films, where specialty divisions owned by major media conglomerates distribute independently produced films (King 1; McDonald 354). …

A Phallic Dog, a Stuffed Coyote, and the Boy Who Won’t Come Out: Revisiting Queer Visibility in John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.

John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip., first published in 1969 and recently reissued in a fortieth anniversary edition, is widely hailed as the first North American young adult novel with gay content. Contemporary critics tend to characterize the novel as outdated, stereotypical, and potentially harmful to young readers given the unresolved way that Davy, Donovan’s young protagonist, navigates his same-sex attraction. This article, however, argues that the novel’s omissions, invisibilities, and queer relations—in particular, Davy’s relationship with his dog—are much more relevant to contemporary notions of sexuality and queerness than many critics suggest.

Accentuating the Queer

Much research has looked at the framing of political issues and events in the mainstream media. Little work, however, has focused on the framing of these issues in alternative media; and no study to date has examined political framing in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) publications. This study explores the framing of political content through a distinctively queer lens. A thematic analysis was conducted on articles from three online LGBT news outlets to investigate how the queer news media framed the 2012 presidential election. The following four distinctive themes emerged: the creation of a gay angle without obvious gay content, the idea of 2012 being a historic election year for LGBT people, a sense of community between journalist and readers, and a focus on marriage equality above all else. A uniquely queer frame was identified as being central to the coverage of the election, the candidates, and all things political.

An update to "among the missing: lesbian and gay content in social work journals".

The needs of lesbians and gay men appear to be minimally represented in social work literature. This study applied content analysis to four major social work journals published between 1998 and 2012, and it served to update the work of Van Voorhis and Wagner that examined content in the same four journals between 1988 and 1997. Of the 2,335 articles published in Child Welfare, Families in Society, Social Service Review, and Social Work during the 15-year period, 55 met the criteria for inclusion. Results reflect a significant decrease in the quantity of articles when compared with the previous report, with the largest decrease noticed in articles that addressed HIV/AIDS. The need to expand the type and amount of content related to this population continues.

Gay Content in Newspaper Comics

During last thirty years, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) characters have been appearing with increasing regularity most media genres, from television sitcoms to comic books (Becker; Waldman). However, newspaper comic characters continue to be overwhelmingly heterosexual. In strip after strip, married heterosexual couples bicker over forgotten anniversaries, young men try feeble pick-up lines on women, young women endure endless dates with losers, and children and family pets pursue hapless heterosexual romances. Heteronormativity, ideological insistence that heterosexual desire and behavior are universal human experience (Warner xiv; Nielsen, Waiden, & Kunkel 285), is promoted so loudly and incessantly that one finds no gay lead characters at all, and fewer gay minor characters than even most timid of children's picture books.However, inclusion of specifically identified LGBT characters is only one strategy of representing same-sex desire, behavior, romance, and identity. Hennessy decries the heteronormative tyranny of empirical, presumption that gayness exists only phrase I am gay, so absence of self-declaration, all characters, statements, situations, and themes are to be taken as heterosexual (31). Artists working venues where identifying characters as gay is risky or prohibited often depend on subtext, relationships, and references presumably opaque to general consumer, but obvious to those in know, or supratext, situations so outrageous that they lose any element of veracity and therefore cannot challenge consumer's heteronormative presumptions (Johnson).Queering, locating representations of same-sex desire, behavior, romance, or identity that appear independently of specifically identified gay characters (Doty 10), has been successfully applied to several genres of mass culture, including novels, popular movies, cartoons, and even children's television (Sedgwick; Dennis). This study will apply it to newspaper comics, investigating frequency with which heteronormative ideology is disrupted through several different types of gay content. It will demonstrate that gay content appears newspaper comics with some regularity, spite of near-absence of gay characters. It further investigates role of cartoonist's gender, age of title, and strip genre facilitating or prohibiting various types of gay content.Gay Content Newspaper ComicsCharacters who exhibited homophobic stereotypes were once commonplace comic strips. Heer reproduces a Mickey Mouse strip from 1930s which Mickey demonstrates his masculinity by assaulting a lisping, mincing pansy, and Applegate reports that during World War II, adventure strip Terry and Pirates regularly featured stereotypic gay and lesbian villains. During 1940s and 1950s, however, comic strips began to adhere to postwar clampdown on nonconformity general, and especially on depictions of same-sex desire, behavior, romance, and identity (Mann 121). Even stereotyped characters became vanishingly rare, and there were no references to same-sex desire or behavior, except occasionally heavily coded jokes or situations. For instance, a 1976 Wizard of Id strip, medieval knight Rodney is assigned to fight Fierce. What a drag! he exclaims. The king admonishes, That's kind of talk that made Bruce fierce!During decades after Stonewall, organizations, such as GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) strongly advocated for increased representation media, and LGBT characters began to appear movies, television programs, popular fiction, and comic books. However, advocacy had little impact on newspaper comic strip. Between 1950 and 2000, only three specifically identified gay characters appeared.In a 1976, continuity Gary Trudeau's political Doonesbury strip, law student Joanie Caucus makes romantic overtures to classmate Andy Lippincott, only to be rejected because he is gay (Are they sure? …

Fag Men: Mad Men, Homosexuality and Televisual Style

Among the many retro-fittings achieved by Mad Men—Matthew Weinerʼs still unfurling television series set in the advertising world of the early 1960s—is the representation of the homosexual closet as a thing of the past. This essay approaches Mad Men’s account of the homophobic past in order to think about sexuality and televisual style. A landmark programme coterminous with American television transferring from analogue to digital signal, Mad Men allegorizes another moment in television history when the medium was defined not by convergence and time-shifting but by liveness, scheduling flow, mass-market demographics and synchronous viewing. Though it confines its gay content to minor characters and narrative arcs that phase in and out in relation to open-ended long-form needs, the programme’s representation of homophobia as a thing of the past provides a useful lens on the complex temporal co-ordinates of contemporary television.

Interview with Michael Wilke

Pushing the Envelope toward Gays and Lesbians: William Mazzarella interviews Michael Wilke William Mazzarella and Michael Wilke Abstract William Mazzarella (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago) interviews Michael Wilke (journalist-activist and proprietor of www.commercialcloset.org) about gay themes in contemporary consumer goods advertising. The conversation covers the following main topics: 1) Commercial Closet’s mission and aims; 2) the politics of gay stereotyping in advertising and other media; 3) the rise of gay-friendly media formats; 4) the progressive potential of advertising as compared with other kinds of media; 5) lesbians and gays in the business world, and 6) the evolution and future of Wilke’s project. In addition, the interview considers—and includes links to—several particularly notable advertisements from Wilke’s collection. Editorial Note Although A&SR usually publishes only commercials and print ads which we have digitized and placed on our own site, we have in this instance followed Michael Wilke's desire for readers to link directly to www.commericalcloset.org. The rationale for our usual procedure lies in wishing to avoid "dead sites" in the future, thereby altering the completeness of the articles we publish. I believe that Wilke's site is sufficiently important to expect that it will continue indefinitely or will be incorporated archivally elsewhere. However, sufficient information is contained in the discussion here to locate the specific commericals mentioned in the event that the site should discontinue. Since late 1996, journalist-activist Michael Wilke has been on a singular mission: to educate the public, and in particular the mainstream business world, about gay content and representations in consumer goods advertising. Since January 2001, a great part of this work has been carried out through his website, www.commercialcloset.org, a path breaking, compelling assemblage that intersperses almost 1000 gay-themed ads with Wilke’s own topical columns. But Wilke is also a road warrior. These days he is giving upward of 25 video’ assisted lectures a year at universities, corporate conventions and gay events. I met Wilke twice – once in April 2002, when he was presenting his video lecture to a riotous crowd at a conference for lesbian and gay businesspeople in Chicago, and once, in a more leisurely setting a couple of months later, in my office at the University of Chicago. Having recently completed a book on the cultural politics of advertising production in India, I was especially curious to find out Wilke’s thoughts on stereotyping, globalization, and the potential political costs of commercial co-optation. As the text that follows shows, our conversations yielded a rich array of examples and particulars. And yet our encounters were also characterized by a persistent tension: between an activist’s necessary optimism and a critical theorist’s habitual pessimism about the liberatory potential of the commercial media. We enter the conversation as Wilke is explaining the overall significance of his work with Commercial Closet. [Editor’s Note: MAZ will be used to refer to William Mazzarella, and WIL to refer to Michael Wilke.] WIL: Something that I’d like to address is the idea of getting the mainstream business world and beyond to pay attention and to care about this. This is really the goal of my project. Because while I enjoy preaching to the choir, as it were, and educating the gay community, the more important audience—from the point of view of my project—is marketers and agencies themselves. The challenge in this is multifold. Part of it is that companies—even if they’ve not yet opposed anything that I’ve posted on the web site or that I’ve presented informationally—remain very uncertain about this subject and about how I’m positioning it. There’s a certain level of fear of upsetting the gay community and our allies, as it were. As much as there is a fear of provoking the right wing as well. Up until the last few years, not provoking the right wing was the stronger of the two and now I think we’ve reached a balance. But companies aren’t very often yet at a point of comfort to actively want to represent the gay community as...

Exploring the Effectiveness of Teaching Techniques with Lesbian and Gay Content in the Social Work Curriculum

This study investigated the levels of homophobia before and after a single lecture on the topic in one undergraduate and two graduate social work classes. Using the Index of Attitudes Towards Homosexuals (IAH), pretest levels of homophobia were found to exceed the cutting point of 50 for 75% of the students in the undergraduate class. Although pretest-posttest mean scores were not found to be statistically significant, the percentage of students exceeding the IAH cutting score decreased in all three courses following a single lecture. The effect of two additional teaching units in the undergraduate course is discussed as well as recommendations for future research.

First Contact: Queer Theory, Sexual Identity, and “Mainstream” Film

This paper begins by raising questions about the role of queer theory in media critique, centering on a discussion of four recent “mainstream” mass-circulation films with significant lesbian and/or gay content. It is asserted that these films operate within accepted discourses on sexuality that require both the notions of public self-disclosure and of the “truth” of the hetero/homo binary. The methods used by media productions to disseminate that discourse from a lesbian/gay point of view are discussed in terms of the implications of such mass-circulation films being for many persons a “first contact” point with that discourse.

Perfectly Normal: Queer Opera in Canada

In the 1991 movie Perfectly Normal, a quiet, opera-loving Italian-Canadian named Renzo works in a beer factory by day and drives his father’s cab by night. For fun, he plays goal for a hockey team. One night he picks up Alonzo Turner, chef and entrepreneur, as a cab fare, and subsequently the two enter into a business arrangement. Alonzo opens a theme restaurant: servers dress as opera characters, and Renzo, in drag, sings the role of Bellini’s Norma in a quavering falsetto. Renzo rushes from rink to stage, shedding goalie pads for Druid gear. Two kinds of performance overlap in Perfectly Normal: athletic and operatic. This film has no specifically gay content, but the collision of unlikely spheres of cultural activity is campy and comic. Hockey may just be opera on ice. Opera, like hockey, requires highly skilled physical feats executed on demand in front of attentive, ticket-buying audiences in large venues. Opera, like hockey, is a form of performed theatre, with star turns, teamwork, rehearsals, curtain calls. Opera, like hockey, inspires in its fans Herculean labours of statistical memory: debut season, best repertory, highest high notes, nights of unforgettable excellence, grandiosity. Nevertheless, similarities between hockey and opera should not screen the enormous differences between these undertakings, especially their encoding of gender stereotypes. Hockey is “rough-and-tumble”; opera is “effeminate.” To speak of “queer” opera may seem redundant to hockey-sweater-wearing Canadians. At the end of the day, a locker room is not a green room; Siegfried’s sword is not a hockey stick.

Transgression in Jewish Literature

Jewish library collection policies as they relate to Jewish gay and lesbian issues are discussed. Questions considered are whether a book about gay Jews or a book written by a Jewish gay author should be included in Judaica collections. The issue is placed within a historical Jewish literary tradition which includes authors such as Grade, Ozick, Miller, Roth and Rukeyser-who write about such transgressive themes as sexuality, assimilation, self-loathing, agnostic rabbis, etc. Through personal examples drawn from her collection of Jewish short stories, Hot Chicken Wings, the author makes a case for including books with Jewish lesbian content. Also considered are the consequences of excluding such works and the ultimate arbitrariness of banning works with gay content from the Jewish library shelf.
 The author also comments on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, written by a gay Jewish man, Tony Kushner. Even though Angels is being touted as an AIDS play, it is replete with Jewish characters, questions about assimilation, and Jewish self-loathing as exhibited by the lead character Roy Cohn. The play derives from a long tradition of Jewish avant-garde writing dealing with the nature of Jewish identity. For this reason, the author uses Angels to make a case against censoring gay themes in Judaica collections. Jewish literature throughout the ages has had a transgressive bent, and gay themes must be read in this context and viewed by Jews as legitimate literary material worthy of reading by Jewish communities.