Columnist Brandon Baker shuns new gossip website.
Like most other people with an awareness instinct, I find myself occasionally engrossed in the latest issue of “People Magazine” or browsing TMZ.com for the most up-to-date celebrity scandals. But when it’s all said and done, I eventually ditch my ‘trash-a-zines’ and revert back to my sensible readings of world news and political commentary.
But it took me by surprise when I one day stumbled upon a relatively new Philadelphia blog start-up, “Gossip Gay,” which essentially encompasses and relies on judgments of the city’s most popular–or at least that’s how they’re framed–gays around town. To avoid legal drama, the boys’ (I say “boys” because I’ve never seen anyone on the site who isn’t a twink) real names are abbreviated or shortened and any personal information taken from their Facebook or Twitter profiles are given the blur treatment.
Now, to be fair, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the site took down posts that were not pre-approved by their subjects or targets, however I still must take issue with the site’s claim in rebuttal to critics that it’s only posting “Facebook creeping with a storyline.”
It’s difficult for me to say that anything posted on a Facebook profile is actually private, but I must argue the means in which information from Facebook is retrieved. Surely, if I added some random person from Facebook and later found that they were posting all of my personal photos and status updates from my profile on a gossip blog, my nostrils would probably be flaring with rainbow steam. They call it “creeping” for a reason–it’s creepy.
Gossip Gay takes everything that was satirically entertaining about “Mean Girls” and turns into something downright appalling–and not in a good way. I daresay that some of the content almost makes Regina George look like Mother Theresa by comparison.
The site points the conversation of Philadelphia’s gay scene in a direction that likens the community to an ongoing soap opera. And as much as I love my soaps, I resent the idea of reading about the possibility of Richard L’s evil twin brother and their twisted sex scandal as “news.” This isn’t news any more than the viral story of Lindsay Lohan having stained teeth on her latest red carpet appearance. That’s not news, that’s a load of crap.
One must remind the elusive content creator of Gossip Gay that page views do not equate to page quality. Any queen with a computer and a Blogger account can make a caddy blog dissing their fellow gays, but what long-term benefits are to be had from commenting on the relationship status of “Jonathan P” or whether “Andrew S” actually has a sugar daddy?
Read my lips: I don’t care. And, from this columnist’s point of view, anyone who does needs to hop on the Perez Hilton Express to California and get out of my otherwise beautiful city of “gaydom.” This is the City of Brotherly Love, folks, not hate.
How about we prove to the world that gay men are in fact capable of raising children by first proving that we can treat our own community members with the same values of respect we’d hope to instill in our offspring? Call me old-fashioned or prudish if you’d like, but this guy isn’t digging the tawdry filth Gossip Gay is trying to mask as journalism.
Brandon Baker can be reached at brandon.baker@temple.edu.
Thank you, for writing this article. & thank you, sir, for the last paragraph specifically. Thank you.