Gay in the Digital Age Transcript

Podcast Episode: https://rss.com/podcasts/pittlgbtcommuseum/2717631/

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            Welcome folks! I’m Al and this is the podcast of the The Holiday Pride: A Pittsburgh LGBT+ Community Museum.

            The way we consume visual media has changed drastically in the last couple of decades. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and all the others have changed how we consume TV shows, movies, and educational films. From binging shows from beginning to end to having just about any movie we may want at our finger tips, rapidly eroding are the days spent going out to the movies and anxiously awaiting the weekly episode or your favorite shows.

            Streaming killed the movie renting business. Blockbusters have begun fading entirely from society’s collective memories. Taking renting a movie for one night only, a special event with the family with them. Going out to the local theatre and joining everyone there in seeing a film for the first or tenth time too. Yet, Streaming services aren’t the only thing changing our media consumption. The internet at large has fundamentally changed how we interact with media, the world, and each other. Youtube has created a new faction of fame while websites, blogsites, and the digital landscape has allowed the world to be more interconnected than ever before, but has also fundamentally changed how we as humans function.

            Gone are the days where one could meander the street—the world—without a phone in hand. Even more recently gone are the days where a picture could be trusted. With the release of AI, there have been more and more questions and less and less trust people take with the digital and even real world. And one of the groups of people most effected by all of these changes are those within the LGBT+ community.

            From feeling like the only person in the world with these strange feelings to being able to find someone just like you maybe across the world with just one device, the LGBT+ community has been more visible and interconnected than ever before. Queerness is invisible, no matter what stereotypes might tell you, there is no physical or visual way to tell if someone is LGBT+. Yet, discovering what is in someone’s pants or who they take to bed can garner just as violent reactions as other forms of bigotry. The internet and its ability to connect people who would have never met otherwise, has gifted LGBT+ folks the ability to find each other and be themselves without real life threats through the digital anonymity the internet is well known for. Meanwhile, Youtube gave millions of people a visual outlet for their lives, feelings, and hobbies. Rapidly, people gained followings and fans for being themselves and feeling almost within reach, unlike classic movie stars or actors.

            Youtube, blogs, and websites became a place where online personas could shine, gain followings, but also explore identity freely without danger or fear. People could be visibly queer, talk about their partners, gender discomfort, or sexual preferences without hesitation or fear. The internet and all of the ways we interact with it made queerness visible not only to those who experience it, but also everyone else who happened to stumble across it. Mixed with the hard work done in the real world by activists, being LGBT+ started to be normalized, welcomed, and even celebrated.

            Streaming, then, a byproduct of a world demanding things faster and faster, became an outlet for more than just big blockbuster movies and long running TV shows. It allowed other cultures to share their media. It allowed shows long archived to see the light of day again. But most importantly, it allowed people to experiment. Shows and movies created just for Streaming could be low budget and accessible. Those who may have never been given the chance before now had an outlet. Streaming wasn’t the big and booming film industry, but it also carried a bit more respect than Youtube productions.

            Now, we have reached a point where a show all about gay men, Heated Riverly, is nearly viciously popular. Media and the internet alone are not to thank for the way queerness is accepted and normalized today. There are many very prolific activists that have done a lot of the leg work to get us here, but normalizing queerness through the internet and streaming services has helped more than perhaps some people realize. Not only has the internet and Streaming changed the landscape of media consumption and the way shows and film are created, but they have also changed how the LGBT+ community found each other, gathered together, and are viewed in the world perhaps more than any other kind of media we’ve talked about in this season of the podcast.

            As you can probably tell, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this particular topic. As someone born in 1996, I grew up before the internet was an everyday necessity and yet also after it had been shaped into something more than a tool for a handful of people. Somewhere in the middle there, I grew up rewinding VHS tapes and playing around on MS paint, learning to type on a keyboard and taught a very aggressive form of internet stranger danger. I wasn’t on the internet as much as my peers, take my wife for example who had free rein to wonder onto Club Penguin and far less safe chat sites.

            It may seem strange, considering Youtube, the internet, and social media as a form of entertainment and therefore in the same category as TV, books, movies, and even streaming sites, but the creativity that goes into both the internet and social media entertains us. It’s been argued even in legal courts that social media has made itself to be addicting. How many of us have endlessly scrolled on the platform formerly known as twitter? Or Tik Tok? Or even let Youtube just play whatever it wanted for us and watched it like a train wreck? Oh how the world has changed…

            I remember the days when we would go to Blockbuster to rent a film but I also became deeply engrossed in internet fandom culture where queerness was flourishing in fan made writings and artwork. I can remember a much simpler internet, but also a much more complicated and scary one. Having essentially grown up along side the internet, remembering when Netflix was a way to rent physical movies. Seeing what has become of this digital world today, I think I’m entitled to having some rather deep thoughts about these modes of consuming entertainment.

            We must start with the catalyst for today’s digital landscape, the internet. Only about 40 years ago, did the internet truly begin to enter every person’s home and hands, but it’s far older than that. Computer Science as a field began mostly in the 1950s. Computing existed during World War II, there were code breakers and such, however computing and computers as we know them started to form in the 1950s where engineers in the US, England, and France were attempting to connect different computer networks together. For a long time, until the 70s, the idea of interconnecting all of these networks functionally into one…world, for a lack of a better term, was mostly theoretical. They had invented ways to transfer data across large spans of the world, but it wasn’t until the 70s that something more recognizable came into shape.

            At one point, there were multiple systems that could have created the internet of today, but it was the creation of The World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 that caught on the most. Since, the internet has been rapidly increasing and expanding much like our Universe. New systems, planets, and worlds popping up across the digital landscape.

            As the 90s, 2000s, 2010s, and now 2020s have rolled by, the internet has only gotten more complex. People my age remember long gone jokes, controversies, and social norms surrounding internet use. There are a few Youtube channels that dive into the way the internet used to be, how sex and fetish could be easily and widely found everywhere. How people had their own websites, blogs, and forums. Games like WeeWorld and Club Penguin—the internet had everything anyone could have ever wanted.

            It was also extremely dangerous. When I was in Middle School, so around 2008, I remember multiple class periods spent being told how to be safe on the internet. Terrifying videos and documentaries about how adults could pretend to be other kids, convince you that your parents were lying to you. Convince you to date them. Convince you to send them pictures of yourself. Even convince you to meet them and then disappear forever. I remember one particular documentary about a kid my exact age being kidnapped because she met in real life a ‘friend’ she made online and that she still hadn’t been found. It was rather horrifying.

            My parents told us to never use our real names, addresses, ages, or anything real about us at all. If we were going to use the internet, we needed to, essentially, have a secret identity. A username protected us from someone finding out who we were, and lying about our ages got us on websites we definitely shouldn’t have been on. While I remember mostly watching Youtube and reading manga on pirating websites which I had lied about my age to get on and therefore was reading things I definitely should not have been—cough—anyway—my wife was on WeeWorld, and other roleplaying/fetish-ish websites disguising themselves as kid friendly games. It was really easy to be in places where we shouldn’t have been, but at least we knew how to keep ourselves safe. For the most part, not everyone took those scary documentaries to heart.

            Social media was another thing entirely. Facebook was the first. I’m sure we all have a vague understanding of how Facebook came to be. It was the first of its kind, after all. There were other systems where you could enter chat rooms, there were emails of course. But Facebook billed itself as something different. As a way to connect with real people that you knew and share bits of your life with them even if they moved far away or you saw them every day. Youtube was another matter entirely, although in a similar vein. It was a video sharing platform that exploded into popularity, allowing relatively normal people make big names for themselves by talking at a camera or playing video games or coming up with theories about different forms of media.

            All of this freedom to explore this near wild west, lawless land led to many bad things I think none of us were prepared for. We weren’t prepared for social media to consume our lives and create some rather harmful views about ourselves. Yet…it’s always a bit more complicated than that.

            Queer people were finally able to find each other without danger. Because we were all taught and knew how to disguise our real selves online, that meant we all had a persona online and some of those personas were actually who we were. For queer people, there was finally an outlet and place where we could be queer and be perfectly safe. As long as we hid ourselves well and didn’t hint at anything that could lead someone to finding us, we could be as gay or transgender as we wanted. If we felt unsafe, we could just close the window, move to another chat room, or just turn the computer off entirely. In the end, we were able to be ourselves and most importantly, find others like us. We could find chatrooms and websites where we could learn more about us, about people like us, and about our history without putting ourselves into a lot of danger.

            That changed the world for us. It allowed us to gather safely and then organize and become activists. We could normalize our queerness with each other and whoever else came to see what we were doing or saying. The internet and the communities of LGBT+ people who found themselves online were able to make a real positive impact on the world because we were no longer alone. We could find each other, we could learn more about ourselves. It was such a wonderful thing for us.

            Of all of the bad things that we’re learning the internet and social media has created for us, there’s also so much good that the internet and social media could do for us. We can’t ignore this thing we’ve created and spent much of the last few decades building. There is something that can be done to protect those positive things and slowly eliminate the bad.

            Allow me to give an example of the conundrum we are currently in. I said that the internet allowed LGBT+ people to find each other, organize, and feel less lonely. That was true in the early years of the internet, what about right now? According to the Trevor Project, an organization that helps LGBT+ Youth with mental health issues; while many queer youth turn to the internet to find others as finding someone like themselves in-person is very difficult, there’s not an insignificant amount of those same young people being negatively impacted by social media and the mindset it creates in people. While these kids have greater access to information about safe transitioning, safe sex, and other LGBT+ topics, they are negatively impacted by aggressive cyberbullying. Yet, LGBT+ Youth continue to go to the internet because those digital spaces, even with cyberbullying, are more likely to be accepting than their real life situations. In their research, 7% of those they spoke to—mostly cisgender and transgender boys/men—reported that they didn’t feel safe anywhere on the internet. The remaining vast majority felt safe online and like they could truly be themselves unlike in real life. Despite finding community online, however, young LGBT+ kids still have increasing rates of anxiety and depression, thus turning more towards their safe online communities that may have a bad apple or two who commit cyberbullying in an almost self-perpetuating cycle.

            Cyberbullying is far more than just saying mean things in a text chat, although there is a lot of that as well. It could be spreading rumors about a person and falsifying text chats to prove those rumors, thus turning a community entirely against a single person. There’s creating or somehow acquiring inappropriate pictures of the person and spreading them. There’s leaking where they live and their full government name so that their physical home is no longer safe. These are really damaging and terrifying things a cyberbully could do to someone, have done to people. Recent studies and court cases have researched how social media has created increasing anxiety, depression, and eating disorders in children because social media has purposefully fed them harmful videos that perpetuate these issues because it keeps young people addicted to their app or website. Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, they all make money through watch time, the longer someone spends on their sites, the more ad revenue they get from companies paying to have their advertisements on their site. And, humans have a tendency to get addicted to things, especially things that aren’t very good for us.

            Not to mention the misinformation that can be spread widely on the internet. Just because we could have all of the information in the world at our fingertips, doesn’t mean that information is safe and true. Generally speaking, we’re not taught to seek out more information about a fact someone gives us on the internet. I do it, but that’s because I’m a historian and I was trained to do that. The average person doesn’t have the time to fact check the sheer amount of overwhelming information a website presents to us second to second. There are some really harmful ‘facts’ about medical procedures for transgender people that is spread on the internet, to the point that I’m still uncovering the facts about hormone therapy as things happen to me while I’m on testosterone.

            There have been many calls for more protections for LGBT+ youth, more education on how to be online safely. But there is, of course, a lot of older people in charge of governments who have absolutely no idea how the internet works and how the cultures of the digital world have real impacts and dangers for the real world. Other than as a method of control, most governmental bodies don’t understand what the internet actually does for people…and what it does to people. There are people who have thrived and made their lives from the internet now doing some governmental work to create a better internet, but it will probably be some time before we see any real effective change. Mostly because, due to the nature of a digital world that doesn’t truly exist, much of the dangers, history, and proof of the internet culture disappear without most people realizing.      

            We lose about 90% of the world’s material every year. There’s so much about the world that we’ve completely lost because no one had the forethought to save it. The internet is no different. Most have probably heard of the Internet Archive or the Way Back Machine. Some people thought that the best thing they could do was to start capturing frozen moments in the history of the internet. Websites, blogs, posts, images, and even books have been saved on this website. There are entire websites that are no longer accessible at all outside of the archive saved as little pieces of time. Even websites that are still active have instances of their existence saved periodically. It’s an incredibly endeavor that I’ve used a number of times.

            I have grips as an archivist myself about the ethics they use when it comes to some artifacts that they’ve saved. Context matters a lot when saving something born from bigotry and hatred, but the Internet Archive does little to give that context. I know that there will always be bad actors that will find a way no matter what we do, nor should we hide away these bad things and never talk about them again. We can only do the best we can to stop bad actors and provide context. The more context the better.

            Regardless, the Internet Archive is what allows us to do so much research about how important it is to understand our digital past. More research should be done with the resources the Internet Archive provides. More research in general needs to be done about the internet. Many older folks, especially in academia or in older forms of media, see the internet as an unserious and uninteresting topic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more the internet and social media shape us and the world, the more we need to study it’s past so we can form it’s future into something safe for everyone.

            Streaming came into being because of the internet’s ability to give us exactly what we wanted the moment we wanted it. It’s made producing shows and movies all about views and money and significantly less about passion and creativity. The faster Netflix can crank out a show that creates hype which gets them more money, the better. That’s how really good shows get canceled, not enough eyes, or going on for far too long, Stranger Things for example. This leads to many new creatives getting the possibility to make the next big thing, but also leads to queer centered shows that don’t get a raving fandom getting canceled after one season. This pattern of behavior can be studied and changed for the better, if everyone listens to what’s discovered.

            This intangible thing has come to rule many of the parts of our lives. It’s how we get jobs and get paid for those jobs. It’s how we learn and it’s how we entertain ourselves. Fundamentally, how we view the world has changed because of the internet and social media. In some truly amazing ways, allowing us to connect with each other widely and easily. To find others like us to talk to and get along with. In many ways, our loneliness as individuals has ended but also increased. Many people spend more time physically alone with only digital connections to sustain them. The world in these hard drives and servers does very little to effectively reflect the real world. Now, it’s hard to know if those digital connections are another human or if they’re another robot talking endlessly with other robots. There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad when it comes to such a powerful tool like the internet, just like a lot of things in the world.

            It’s always worth being cautious and it’s always worth seeing the good in things while also knowing that there are bad things. Nuance is an acquired skill that is as difficult to teach as it is to learn. The best way is to lead with empathy and kindness but remain sure in your own morals and conviction. Everyone has something going on which can contribute to the cruelty of the world, real and digital. It’s best to keep yourself safe while also giving others some level of understanding. That’s not easy, but these lessons in empathy, normalization, and kindness that media of all kinds teach us can help us along the way towards a better, kinder world. Looking backwards to move forwards starts with a little bit of self-reflection.

            That was Gay in the Digital Age by the Holiday Pride. Thank you for listening and thank you for sticking around.