Queer Youth and Media Cultures

Christopher Pullen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137383556
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection explores the representation and performance of queer youth in media cultures, primarily examining TV, film and online new media. Specific themes of investigation include the context of queer youth suicide and educational strategies to avert this within online new media, and the significance of coming out videos produced online.

Part I

Performance and Culture

1

Stories like Mine: Coming Out Videos and Queer Identities on YouTube

Bryan Wuest

In a YouTube ‘coming out’ video, an eager young video maker tells us:

I decided to make this YouTube to find other people like me, people who are coming out, they’re in the process, people who have already came out and kind of have a story like mine, so that I can help them and they can help me. – jacobtubification, in ‘My First Video!/Coming Out’

(YouTube 2010)

Demonstrating cautious optimism about his sexual identity and his future, this video, similar to those discussed throughout this chapter, offers a marked contrast to the troubling position of queer youth within recent news reports. Billy Lucas, Cody Barker, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown and Raymond Chase – these six young people committed suicide during September 2010 as a result of anti-queer bullying.¹ Their schoolmates harassed these six teens to the point that they decided to take their own lives. Many young people who identify as queer, or are perceived as queer, are similarly at risk: the Trevor Project, an organization with the goal of preventing queer youth suicide, reports that gay, lesbian and bisexual youth are four times more likely than straight youth to attempt suicide, and that nearly 50% of transgender youth seriously consider suicide, with 25% actually attempting it (Trevor Project 2013).

Responding to these statistics and September’s increase in suicides, gay journalist and political figure Dan Savage created the It Gets Better Project (IGBP). This online repository of videos mainly produced by queer adults shares stories of bullying, homophobia and survival in high school while framing queer identity affirmation as the ability to overcome oppression. This project exceeded Savage’s expectations, getting widespread media coverage on outlets like the New York Times, the L.A. Times and CNN, and inspiring thousands of individuals and groups to make their own videos. This included many who did not identify as queer, but presented themselves as supports for queer youth. Notably in October 2010, President Barack Obama even recorded and uploaded his own It Gets Better video on the White House YouTube site, indicating the project’s place in mainstream liberal politics.

However, the popularity of the IGBP as a portal of online media is not without precedent; young queer people had already been using YouTube for years to post and watch thousands of coming out stories, learn about queer culture and in general connect with other queer people throughout the country and around the world. Videos from as early as 2007 include Chris Crocker’s humorous ‘Why I’m Gay’ (YouTube 2013c) and Matthew Lush’s serious ‘Coming Out’ (YouTube 2013b), which have both received over a million views. These are only two examples of the many pre-IGBP videos that have received hundreds of thousands or over a million views, suggesting the importance of examining these videos’ place within queer youth culture and experience.

This is unsurprising because, as Suzanne Walters (2001) explains in her study of queer visibility in the United States, ‘we [as queers] are largely born to and raised by those different from us, are not birthed into a ready-made identity, and must actively seek out and construct a community and identity whose existence is predicated on that seeking . . . .’ (pp. 28–29). In the same vein, Joseph Goodwin (1989) argues in his study of gay acculturation that

[b]ecause of its covert nature, the gay community lacks the formal institutions that usually assist in enculturation. The family, churches, schools, and social organizations all take part in teaching people how to operate in the straight culture . . . . Without comparable sources of instruction and support, gay people must rely primarily upon each other to learn how to function effectively within the gay world. (p. xiv)

When young people, most likely born to straight parents, begin to understand themselves as queer, they have no built-in support or education structure and may not have other visible queer people in their lives to act as examples or models. Additionally, a heterocentric culture that devalues queerness and deviation from societal gender norms has the effect of implicitly and sometimes explicitly discouraging youth from expressing their newfound self-understanding, either in words or actions.

I see queer youth using YouTube to overcome these obstacles and facilitate their own identity development through two important methods: visibility and acculturation. By ‘acculturation’, I mean queer youth receiving information about a shared culture and experience in order to better equip themselves to both interact within the queer community and to survive in mainstream culture. I mean ‘visibility’ in two ways: both viewers seeing varied representations of queerness, and vloggers deliberately making themselves visible and ‘real’. In another study of coming out videos, Jonathan Alexander and Elizabeth Losh argue that

in many coming out videos the performative quality of the speech act also reminds the viewer that an actual change of state takes place through the speaker’s rhetoric . . . the digital replication of this revelation [of sexual orientation] not only marks a life-changing rhetorical occasion but may actually constitute it.

(2010, p. 39)

Simply put, these videos may be recounting the occasion of the vlogger’s coming out process, or the vlogger may be first coming out in this video, performing this rhetorical act for the first time.

These rhetorical acts are important for their establishment of public and personal identity, a significant process for queer youth. Writing about identities, Jeffrey Weeks comments that ‘we search for them, claim them, assert and affirm them . . . . They provide a bedrock for our most fundamental being and most prized social belongings’ (2007, p. 43). Joshua Gamson connects this importance to gains in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights movement in recent decades by pointing out that the formation of a ‘public collective identity’ and ‘quasi-ethnicity’ has been an exceedingly efficient strategy (1995, p. 391). But he emphasizes that this is indeed a strategy, one that he calls an ‘ethnic/essentialist politic’. While acknowledging its significance, Weeks also comments on the overall fiction of sexual identity as it is often conceived today:

it is only over the past century or so . . . that distinctive homosexual ‘forms of existence’, with sexualized identities, communities and sexual political movements, have emerged . . . . Movements such as these are not simply expressing a pre-existing essence of social being. Identities and belongings are being constructed in the very process of organization itself.

(2000, pp. 184–185)

Consequently, when talking about identity this essay does not claim the concept as something essential that young viewers are able to uncover in the core of themselves by watching these videos; rather, I recognize the significance of the concept in current popular understandings of queerness in culture and society. Although it is a simplifying, essentializing discursive strategy, identity is important in practice, especially for social groups that require coherence and solidarity in order to work against institutional oppression. When writing about autobiographical videomaking on the internet and elsewhere, documentary scholar Michael Renov describes the self-representational non-fiction work by members of marginalized groups as ‘almost always affirmational of a self culturally specific and publicly defined. Public declarations of private selves have come to be defining acts of contemporary life, often imbued with great urgency’ (2004, p. xvii). In this essay I take this urgency seriously, temporarily putting aside critiques of identity politics in favour of analysing how these videos are valued by queer youth.

As I’ll discuss below, queer youth often highly value representations of queer people as they provide a framework whereby to understand and organize their burgeoning desires and feelings of difference. Visibility has of course long been held as a central aspect of the struggle for queer equality, and queer identities have begun to find much more media expression in the past two decades. Even in 2001, Walters describes television as ‘the most conspicuous and visible marker for this new era of lesbian and gay visibility [one that has] beamed gay life (or a televisual version of it) into millions of homes across this country and abroad’ (2001, p. 59).

Yet regardless of this need for queer youth to simply see evidence that other queers exist, both Walters and Mary Gray (in her 2009 study of queer visibility in rural America) argue that an increase in the number of queer representations does not necessarily correlate with viewers, queer or straight, gaining a better understanding of the experience of being queer. In Gray’s study of young rural queers, she observed that the subjects often reported finding more substantive or ‘authentic’ representations of queer identities in online forums such as PlanetOut.com and Gay.com (both now subsidiaries of Here Media, a large queer media conglomeration). On these sites, the youth she studied were able to read and post coming out stories on message boards and connect with other queer youth. Gray argues her subjects valued this venue for visibility over film and television because of the latter’s focus on queers in urban areas where ‘a critical mass of LGBT visibility is taken for granted’ (2009, p. 124). Through this online forum, with users from across the globe, queer youth were able to find people and stories that reflected their own specific situation more accurately than, for example, the characters of Will & Grace, Queer as Folk or The L Word.

As part of my methodology, in order to find what the creators making videos outside the context of the IGBP would say about their work, I created a YouTube account and contacted about two dozen vloggers, whom I selected by searching for coming out videos with the highest view counts. I also filmed and uploaded a video of myself explaining the project, and sought volunteers willing to answer questions about their coming out videos (YouTube 2014a). Contacting the vloggers of highly viewed videos created some dominant tendencies in my sample set; demographically the vloggers tended to be young (about 18–26 years old) white cismen who at the time of making the video were already out and were speaking from a place of authority and knowledge about the coming out experience.² Such a presence demands further research to question this phenomenon, involving examinations of vloggers who present lower view counts and who may be considered less ‘out’. Within my research several vloggers generously agreed to respond to my email survey; their videos all represent the higher range of popularity, and the surveys that I sent them were partly based on a general template and partly customized to their videos and situations. With these interviews³ and my own analysis of some case examples as well as the medium of YouTube itself, I examine how the creators and consumers of these videos use these texts for the purposes of visibility and acculturation as they explore queer identities.

Visibility and acculturation

The videos I watched before I came out myself helped me realize there were people who were like me out there. In my town there were no support groups or gay hang out places, and I had no gay friends, so I felt alone, and YouTube opened a world to me.

These comments by interviewee D.B. (see Note 3) emphasize how coming out videos operate as a site of visibility and representation for queer youth. D.B. made his own coming out video in response to requests from people who had viewed his other videos where he’d made reference to being gay without actually disclosing his coming out story; although he first resisted making a coming out video, feeling it was ‘cliché’, he eventually relented almost out of a feeling of obligation, affirming: ‘Since I used YouTube to find comfort myself, the least I could do was . . . contribute to something that I took advantage of in my time of need.’

As mentioned above, Gray notes that some queer youth find online resources to be a venue for more personally meaningful instances of queer representation, especially when their own circumstances do not match what they see in film and television’s queer characters. With increasing media literacy and continuing technological development, the ability and means to record and upload videos are more accessible, evident in laptops that often have built-in webcams and simple video editing software, alongside the fact that many youth have spent enough time consuming media to understand the basics of producing their own. YouTube’s usability and accessibility for users regardless of geography increases the volume and specificity of the representations available for consumption.

YouTube’s titles and tags can enable this specificity of representation and consumption, by more precisely communicating a video’s topic or intentions. Vloggers often choose generic titles and tags that are common to a majority of these videos: titles like ‘Coming Out’, ‘Coming Out Gay’, ‘Coming Out Story’, ‘My Coming Out Story’ and ‘Coming Out of the Closet’ represent but a fraction of the slight variations on the theme; tags like ‘gay’, ‘LGBT’, ‘GLBT’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘queer’ appear on many of the videos as well. However, some users build on this template by adding titles and tags reflecting specific religious affiliations, locations or other details that locate the video’s story in a particular situation. Titles of this variety include ‘Out in West Texas’, ‘Coming Out as a GAY TEEN’, ‘Coming Out to my Parents Story’, ‘Coming Out and Christian’, ‘Coming Out to my parents their denial’, ‘coming out as a gay mormon’, while sample tags include ‘closeted’, ‘mormon’, ‘acceptance’, ‘parents’, ‘boy scout’, ‘teen’, ‘advice’ and ‘help’. A viewer could search for ‘coming out texas’ and see the video ‘Out in West Texas’, which could reflect the viewer’s own experience and context more accurately than a video about coming out in West Hollywood, California, or a viewer could search for ‘coming out advice’ and find videos tagged with ‘advice’ that offer specific tips on coming out instead of more general personal narratives. While one goal of coming out videos seems to be establishing a shared, universal rite of passage among young queers, these vloggers use titles and tags to situate their videos in much more specific contexts, suggesting that their location, age or situation adds a unique aspect to their coming out experience. These specificities allow viewers to more narrowly search for certain types of videos (e.g. a YouTube search for ‘help coming out to parents’ returns pages of videos specifically about that) without eliminating the videos from more general searches. This works to help viewers find exactly what they are looking for (and in turn garners the vlogger more hits). In the manner that Jeffrey Weeks states that people ‘search for [identities], claim them, assert and affirm them’ (2007, p. 43), this directly relates the use of a personal identity, or relationship to wider social identities, to ‘make sense of individual experiences’ (p. 49). This may be connected to the particular val...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Performance and Culture
• Part II: Histories and Commodity
• Part III: Transnational Intersections
• Index