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The main way I’ve been able to protect my peace during Pride Month is remembering that a majority of the online discourse generated in LGBTQ+ corners of the Internet can be explained with at least one of three maxims:
These are teenagers.
These are people with no strong queer community in real life, giving them a distorted view of what’s important.
The Internet platforms rage-bait content regardless of how many people actually believe it sincerely, leaving people with a disproportionate sense of public opinion.
Never have these tools been more useful than during the meteoric rise of lesbian pop star Chappell Roan. Roan has been an impressive force in both the music industry and culture at large, perhaps because of her sheer authenticity and understanding of queer history. One look at her Tiny Desk Concert, for example, leaves you refreshed by her references to drag culture and ostentatious femininity. In an era where labels force their artists to film their own TikTok videos for promotion (instead of taking on the work of promotion themselves, which is supposed to be the point of having a label), thereby ruining the audience-performer relationship and by extension the mystique of the art, fans have especially resonated with Roan’s old-fashioned approach of relentless touring and catching on by word-of-mouth; videos of her performing Pink Pony Club to an audience of next to no one in 2021 stitched with footage of her performing the same song to a stadium full of cheering fans regularly go viral to highlight her gradual rise to fame in an era of Internet ephemerality.
Needless to say, I’m a big fan!
Naturally, all celebrities are held under more scrutiny than the average person, and queer celebrities are under even more scrutiny than that. In a period of immense anti-LGBTQ+ backlash, our community is more paranoid than ever about negative representation; whenever one of our own gets famous for any reason, we all collectively hold our breath and think “Please don’t fuck this up for us.” One person’s visibility impacts all of our safety, an impossible position that bigots place us in. That tension puts us on edge and causes us to lash out. Sometimes it even forces the most online among us to seek out things to become mad about even when the target has been fairly consistent in their principles. Even among queer people, queer people aren’t allowed to be human.
For this week’s paid post, I’d like to cover three pieces of online discourse about Chappell Roan and what that tells us about the impact of technology on queer culture. Let’s start with the most inane…
Take #1: Chappell Roan is actually bisexual, not a lesbian
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