LGBTQ+ Digital Publics and Counterpublics on Social Media
The ability to operate outside the public mainstream has been important to the LGBTQ+
rights movement for as long as it has existed. Because of the intense stigmatization,
and often outright criminalization, of their identities, the queer community has had to
create spaces for themselves in which to find each other, build community, and
organize for change. With physical, in-person queer spaces moving toward a sort of
neoliberal apoliticism as the twenty-first century has progressed, the ways in which
LGBTQ+ rights advocates engage in discourse have also changed dramatically, moving
from the back rooms of cafes and gay bars to the new online spaces brought forth by
the growth of the internet. This essay will examine how modern queer spaces across
different social media platforms serve as digital publics and counterpublics for the
LGBTQ+ community. First, the essay will analyze Tumblr’s emergence as a digital
counterpublic. Then, there will be a look at how the LGBTQ+ community’s presence on
Twitter and integration into the mainstream have created a more outward-facing digital
public as queer issues have entered the mainstream discourse. The essay will make
reference to both the LGBTQ+ community and the queer community. While the terms
“LGBTQ+” and “queer” do have functionally different definitions, they will be used
interchangeably.
Firstly, it’s important to understand how Hill explains the concept of the “digital
counterpublic”. The digital counterpublic is rooted in Nancy Frasers’s (1990, quoted in
Hill, 2018) idea of the subaltern counterpublic. Fraser’s work is itself a critique of the
sociological concept of the “public sphere”. In sociology, the public sphere is a collective
of public spaces, including restaurants, cafes, general stores, and community gathering
spaces, where private citizens can gather to share ideas, discuss problems, and air
grievances against the powers of the State. Fraser argues that the initial construction of
this concept does not acknowledge the ways in which marginalized groups have
historically been excluded from the public sphere, especially when viewed through the
lens of White, middle-class life. Additionally, the framework “presumes a level of
individual agency and collective self-identity” (Hill, 2018), which ignores how existing
power structures affect the social order. This is where the subaltern counterpublic
comes into play. As numerous scholars have pointed out, marginalized groups such as
women, the working class, the LGBTQ+ community, and Black people have created
counterpublics away from the gaze of the mainstream in order to build their own
interpretations of their identities, needs, and community interests. Hill takes Fraser’s
conception of counterpublics and expands upon it in a modern context. Specifically, he
argues that with the rise of digital media and communication and the growing ease of
access to smartphones, the established subaltern counterpublics have either extended
their reach or moved fully to online, digitally networked spaces, leading to the creation
of these “digital counterpublics”. The coffee shops and Black churches of the past have
largely given way to the public forums of the Internet.
Cavalcante’s (2018) analysis of queer users’ experiences on Tumblr discusses the
platform’s origins and appeal to LGBTQ+ users. Tumblr is an online blogging site
launched by David Karp in 2007. Karp was frustrated by the clunky, text-focused nature
of existing well-known blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and Wordpress and
wanted to create an alternative that was easier to use and allowed the incorporation of
other types of media. Tumblr’s early user base consisted of blogs on a wide variety of
topics, ranging from analysis and discussion of popular media to erotic writing and art.
The abundance of erotic and often pornographic content on the platform was a result of
extremely lax moderation policies and Tumblr’s “ethos of permissiveness.” Because of
the lack of content policing at the site’s inception, “Tumblr gained a reputation for
providing digital space to society’s mainstream, its fringe, and everything in between”
(Cavalcante, 2018). This, in addition to Tumblr’s option to open multiple blog pages on a
single account and the fact that users aren’t required to provide a “legal” name on signup, made the site very attractive to queer internet users, many of whose identities are
multifaceted and constantly shifting. Tumblr’s unique layout also gave users the chance
to express and explore their identities in ways that more text-heavy blogging and social
media platforms didn’t allow. As Cavalcante puts it,
“The site encourages… a “crafted identity”..., one that is characteristically
patchwork, dynamic, and evolving. Its design permits users to integrate text,
photos, links, and video on their pages, allowing for a multimedia expression of
self. Tumblr allows young LGBTQ+ users to mix and match visual imagery,
snippets of popular culture, poetry, and so on to express an emergent identity in
a way that sites such as Facebook and Twitter simply do not allow” (Cavalcante,
2018).
This ability for expression allowed users to create, explore, and discuss new, deeply
intersectional aspects of queer identity on the platform.
In the years following Tumblr’s creation, it became a bastion of queer expression and
community online. Tumblr’s user algorithm and extensive tagging system meant users
were connected with others based on shared interests or identities, rather than
connecting with people they knew offline as they would on sites such as MySpace,
Facebook, or Twitter. This, along with the features already described, meant that
Tumblr became a relatively safe place for young LGBTQ+ people to meet others who
shared their experiences without the fear of being “outed” to those outside of the
community. The result was a strong social network of queer users that could be joined
without the risk that came with joining similar communities on other platforms
(Cavalcante, 2018).
It was within this community that many queer youth took their first “baby steps” into
activism. Tumblr provided a space where LGBTQ+ people of different identities and
backgrounds could come together and discuss issues affecting both the community at
large and them more specifically. These ranged from issues already relevant in the
cultural zeitgeist, such as marriage equality and employment discrimination, to
movements that sprung up wholesale on the platform itself. The most infamous of these
involved discourse surrounding queer microlabels, known more commonly as the
MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex) movement.
The goal of many within the MOGAI movement was largely to create new labels for
every possible experience of gender, sexuality, or the lack thereof. Because of an
emphasis on language in these new online spaces, many very young users felt that it
was important to have language to describe as many different experiences as possible
in order to validate all queer experiences. However, the movement never gained
traction in the cultural mainstream, or even in the wider queer community. This is
because discourse surrounding MOGAI skewed incredibly young, with many in the
movement being pre-teens or early teenagers. Because of this, “most of the MOGAI
community doesn’t navigate queer life offline” (Lily Alexandre, 2021, 16:48). Discourse
surrounding neolabels almost always centered around the politics of validation rather
than the structural oppression that comes from actually living with these identities. While
young queer people often haven’t yet dealt with the effects of said oppression, “chances
are they have dealt with invalidation and shame at a personal level” (Lily Alexandre,
2021, 17:30). Their view of what constitutes oppression is therefore wildly different from
that of a queer adult who has experienced these effects. This results in a disconnect
between the changes this movement pushes for and the needs of adult LGBTQ+ people
who actually engage with queer life offline. While the movement itself didn’t gain much
traction outside of Tumblr, its members certainly gained a reputation across the
mainstream internet, becoming one of the inspirations for the popular “Tumblr SJW”
stereotypes commonly seen in conservative media.
While Tumblr doesn’t have a great track record as a launchpad for activism, it has done
a great job of connecting people to existing causes. For many young prospective
activists, Tumblr has served as a “gateway drug to activism” (Safronova, 2014). As
discussed above, the site’s design means that users are connected by shared interests
more than any other factor. As a result, anyone with a passing interest in activism can
find others who are passionate about the same issues with the click of a few buttons.
“...if you type in #marriageequality in the search bar you’ll find posts that show
people who are in support of it. Those are the people I would follow. You collect
them” (Wargo, 2017, p. 22).
The tagging system on Tumblr creates a convenient system for drawing users with
passions about similar issues together, as well as providing a fairly in-depth archive of
discourse about said issues that take place in these spaces.
Tumblr may be slightly different from Hill’s intended definition of the digital counterpublic
largely because there wasn’t exactly a real-world equivalent before the advent of the
internet. In his discussion, digital counterpublics form as more traditional subaltern
counterpublics transition into existing in online spaces. Tumblr’s queer community,
however, initially formed on the internet. Because of a lack of physical spaces for queer
youth to safely gather and interact, Tumblr was the first interaction that many of its very
young users had with the LGBTQ+ community. However, the lack of an origin in the
physical world doesn’t discount all of the characteristics of a digital counterspace
present in Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ user base. Tumblr has given queer people a space to
develop community identity, engage in discourse with other like-minded individuals
about issues affecting the community, and discover and explore aspects of their own
queer identity in a relatively low-risk way in a space which, thanks to Tumblr’s slightly
more obscure status when compared to other popular sites, is removed from the
mainstream discourse of the Internet.
Before moving to the ways in which “Gay Twitter” functions as a networked public, it’s
important to have an understanding of what exactly a networked public is. A networked
public extends the concept of the public sphere, which was briefly discussed on the first
page of this paper. Similarly to the relationship between counterpublics and digital
counterpublics, a networked public is a public whose existence and dynamics have
been changed by the advent of networked media. Boyd (2010) discusses the dynamics
that differentiate networked publics from traditional publics. Most notably, the audience
isn’t always visible when contributing to discourse in a networked public, and the lack of
barriers of space and time that exist in physical spaces make it difficult to ensure that
whatever contributions are made remain situated in their specific context. The increased
visibility and lack of spatial limitations on the number of participants offered by
networked media have drastically changed the ways in which individuals interact with
publics. Some of the most prolific mediums in the creation of these networked publics
are, obviously, social media platforms such as Twitter.
One of the larger and more well-known networked publics on Twitter is its LGBTQ+
community, known more colloquially as “Gay Twitter”. As Zulier (2021, p. 101) points
out, Gay Twitter isn’t a concrete community, but rather an “arbitrary construct with a
sense of a particular community, safety, support and escapism from heteronormativity
among queer identities” (p.101). Gay Twitter is admittedly only a subculture of the wider
LGBTQ+ community on Twitter. Other sub-spheres of the wider queer cyberspace also
exist on the platform, such as Trans Twitter, which engages in its own discourse about
issues especially relevant to the community, such as the realities of transition and
transphobia. For many queer individuals, Gay Twitter serves as a virtual alternative to
the social third spaces that are so quickly either disappearing entirely from public life or
being placed behind monetary barriers. Instead of the earrings and handkerchiefs that
have often been used to signal queerness in bars and nightclubs, “users on Twitter
communicate coded content using self-evidential language, subcultural vernacular,
emojis in their profiles, or visuals to symbolize their queerness to others” (p. 104).
Among all this coding and community building, however, the LGBTQ+ community on
Twitter still experiences much more scrutiny and visibility from the mainstream than a
platform such as Tumblr due to the platform’s wider reach.
However, this level of visibility does paradoxically limit many queer people from being
able to engage in this space. Queer youth of color from the United States are often
unable to safely engage with Gay Twitter without having to take the risk of being outed
to potentially homophobic friends and family who also use the platform. Because
publicness is the default on Twitter, the downside becomes that there’s always a
chance of being outed because somebody who didn’t need to know found your Twitter.
For this reason, many prefer the seclusion of a platform like Tumblr, where it’s much
easier to conceal their identity and they are able to safely express their thoughts about
their politics and their experience of queerness without the fear of the damage it might
cause to their lives and their relationship with their family (Cho, 2017).
In direct contrast with this experience, young LGBTQ+ people in non-Western countries
often flock to Twitter as a safe place for them to disclose and explore their queerness. In
a study of young queer Malaysian Twitter users (Mohamad Tuah and Mazlan, 2020),
many respondents used Twitter for a variety of reason relating to their queer identities.
Some used to platform as a way to disseminate knowledge about their own
experiences, as well as to gain new information about both their own identities and the
identities of other users. For example, one respondent, a pansexual trans man, wanted
to use Twitter to educate others about lesser-known identities under the queer umbrella,
including his own pansexual identity. Another common answer was that users disclosed
their queer identities on Twitter in an attempt to find community and further the LGBTQ+
rights movement. Many felt that it was important to show the larger Malaysian public
“that we are humans, that their negative ideas might be wrong, that the whole surface of
being LGBTQ is love, and no one can take that from us” (Mohamad Tuah and Mazlan,
2020, p. 441). In addition to fighting bigotry and negative stereotypes, respondents
often stated that they were hoping to find some sense of belonging through their
disclosure. They hoped that by being openly queer on the platform, they would find
other queer people, or at least LGBTQ+-friendly groups, that shared similar interests.
But what exactly is it about the queer community’s presence on Twitter that
differentiates it from digital counterpublics like Tumblr’s queer users? The answer lies in
Gay Twitter’s engagement with mainstream discourse. Unlike Tumblr’s more secluded,
insular community of queer users, queer users on Twitter experience a far greater level
of visibility. Unlike Tumblr, whose structure encourages the formation of small
communities based on shared interests that don’t necessarily interact very often, Twitter
thrives on high-visibility posts and public one-to-one conversations. Therefore, there
isn’t nearly the same level of concealment of discussions of queerness and queer
issues on Twitter as there is on Tumblr. This means that Twitter’s queer community
lives in the public eye in a way that makes it impossible for them to move away from the
gaze of the public mainstream. Therefore, it’s not possible to categorize Gay Twitter as
a digital counterpublic in the same way that Tumblr is categorized as one. Instead, its
increased prominence and constant interaction with the mainstream discourse on
Twitter means that Gay Twitter moves past the digital counterpublic and becomes a part
of the public sphere, therefore making Twitter’s queer community a networked public
and thrusting its issues into mainstream consciousness.
Social media has become an incredibly important part of the way that queer people
navigate the world and society in the years since its creation. While Twitter and Tumblr
exist in different contexts and serve different purposes for the larger queer community,
both play a part in the way that LGBTQ+ community discuss the issues that affect the
community as a whole and the individuals within it. Tumblr creates a place where users
can discuss these issues in a more anonymous way, away from the public eye. Then,
once there’s been a chance to flesh out the community’s thoughts and needs, they can
be brought to the far more visible, outspoken community on Twitter and have the
potential to enter the public sphere.
Word Count: 2714
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