Gay White Men!

Growing up in a very liberal city I had many gay friends who I grew very close with. The first thing I did was I captured at least one post from all of my gay guy friends on Facebook. Since this does classify as social media I thought it would be fun to look at the differences. Wish I could include them all on here because they're all fairly hilarious.

FACEBOOK

These posts are from 4 different gay friends that I have on Facebook out of the many I collected. I then went on to study gay men and how they are portrayed in specially TV shows to see if it was in line with the Facebook posts.

TV SHOWS

Here is Nolan Ross from the show Revenge. 

And then of course who could forget the infamous Cam and Mitchell???

And lastly I will focus on gay men in the news. One famous one is the well known Anderson Copper from CNN news 

THE NEWS

First I will analyse the Facebook posts that I collected. Many of the posts that I see from gay men are either witty, clever, and sharp or over the top dramatic. They have a certain flair for the dramatic but most of them are intelligent people. Think about it. Most gay men that you have as friends on your Facebook account aren't usually the ones that go weeks and weeks without posting anything. If gay men have an opinion on something they usually let people know. This may be why in the media they portray gay men as very opinionated. It may be because they are the minority they feel the need to make it known that they have opinions and that they want to be heard and responded to. The main storyline for gay men that I have gathered from all of my artefacts are that they want to be treated equal in every sense and they feel they need to be a little dramatic BUT they are portrayed as sharp, witty, and clever. That is where I feel the trend if going. It doesn't apply to all but I feel in all aspects of social media they want to include at least one gay man to have that minority represented and because I think we as an audience enjoy watching them. 

Second is Cam and Mitchell from Modern Family and other gay men portrayed in TV. I feel Cam and Mitchell are the perfect balance because they support the storyline so well. Cam has the flair for the dramatic yet has a whole lot of street smarts and Mitchell is this extremely educated academically smart person. Either way, they are both clever. Nolan Ross is another example of a gay men who is also a billionaire and has enough wit to save the entire show. Perhaps TV trends are leaning this way because people may be tired of seeing the typical flamboyant gay that so many of us are used to seeing on TV and they have tried to mix in variety. This is also limiting though because I examine every gay friend I have on Facebook and they are all unique and different and very difficult to put them in "one storyline." In social media they like to have people labelled as the flamboyant one, or the funny one but in actuality not all gays are the same. Luckily though, I feel like the trend in TV is trying to represent those different sides but there is still the typical flamboyant gay.

Lastly, there is Anderson Cooper. It is interesting because Anderson Cooper didn't come out publicly to the world till much later on in his life because he wanted people, as he says in the video, to not see him as the "gay news reporter." Perhaps, like I mentioned earlier, we were so used to seeing this typical flamboyant gay that we loved to laugh at in the media because they are so darn funny that Cooper did not want to associated with that and be taken seriously. Anderson is just another example though of where the trend seems to be going in social media.  I think, if anything, gays want to be represented just as any other person with all unique character traits and not just as having one character trait. That is their number one goal- and that is being represented, treated, and judged equally.