Gender-Neutral Media

'Gay' is a word that has evolved so rapidly in the last few decades. While originating solely as an adjective for 'happy' perhaps, it became understood as an 'alternate' sexuality, for those who are attracted to those of the same gender or were born with a homonormative view. Now, though, when you look at its usage in the media, it's usually when referring to a male - the dictionary even places 'especially a male' next to its secondary definition.

Fairly recently, virtual blogs have come into existence that feature gender-neutral coverage of gay, as its socially primitive definition once understood it as, covering it as just another sexuality and its community. News involving gay individuals has been such a controversial and exploited issue recently and what these internet zines achieve to do is present the stories stripped of its sensationalist tactics of the mainstream media and try to raise awareness for the center problem of the news story.



One of these blogs, The New Gay, while distinctly says they are not trying to present themselves as just one voice, say that the mainstream media definition of 'gay' is not only a sexual orientation, but of 'a white male culture defined by consumerism, superficiality and anti-intellectualism' and that they're trying not to invent a new type of 'gay' but rather present the alternatives to the 'mainstream gay'

While the gay community may be a complete mystery to many, what The New Gay does is create an accessibility in the articles, avoiding the familiarized media-created stereotypes of homosexuals and finding a more common ground to lay out for straight readers, and according to Danae Clark in 'Commodity Lesbianism', accessibility helps create profit, even if that targeted profit isn't largely economic, it creates a profit of awareness, which is highly significant to these websites publishing articles containing issues that aren't so publicized in mainstream news outlets.

In "The Rachel Papers" the writer talks about how Rachel Maddow is so popular and lovable because she's kind of familiar, she's so 'middlesex' that she is relatable and that her androgynous appearance and the gender-bending isn't minded so much, that she has this mainstream platform to speak about these yet 'taboo' issues. So what happens when the reporter speaks out about these issues without an identity - not even a gender to "bend"?



The news blog 'Queety' delivers gay-friendly periodicals and encourages commenting and debating, but the speaker of the article is never actually unmasked or identified. The articles are written in a slight bias, but the deliver is a mystery. In fact, the website's layout is a bit of a mystery in itself. There's not much to it, but a logo of two couples - one female, one male hugging QUEERTY in bolded letters, underlined by 'Free of an agenda". Though that may be stated, it's quite obvious that there's an agenda to create an awareness for all the queer issues that are being published.

Ultimately, these blogs are trying to create an alternate news source for queer issues, those which might be unexposed or those which might be exploited in mainstream media platforms. More importantly, they're trying to deconstruct the gender ideal that comes with reporting news and base its significance on the words being spoken, rather than the one speaking those words. As seen in the rise of the female anchor articles, a female coming into a "position of power" as presenting the news to a large audience was so controversial, then how about gender-neutral deliveries? Even more controversy? Controversy creates attention and awareness and that's just what these blogs are looking for, as agenda-less as they say.