Hi everyone! I am really excited about the podcast I created. Im going to go ahead and share the introduction to my essay that I feel will tell you why I chose this topic and what I discussed in my product.
During my initial research, I was confused as to where I would be directing my product. I thought I wanted to do a basic research paper with statistics and graphs but then I decided that is something I am too comfortable with. So, I decided to take a chance and I am creating a podcast discussing topics of the younger LGBTQ+ community and social media/media. I first just want to discuss the importance of this topic and why I chose to speak on the matter. I am someone who has struggled with my mental health for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, I was not fortunate enough to have a parent who understood or recognized mental health as a serious issue. During my whole youth growing up I had undiagnosed anxiety and depression (I am now diagnosed) and I never understood why. It wasn’t until 2 years ago, when I was 21-22 years old that I began to understand the lingering feelings of anxiety, and the small pokes of depression. It’s because I’m queer. Hiding who you are meant to be should not be something we are dealing with in 2023. Unfortunately for myself, my friends, and my partner; it was our reality. Burying who we are deeper and deeper down until we falsely convince ourselves we are someone we are not. Being gay or lesbian was a very “taboo” thing. It wasn’t spoken of much, well how I grew up, and you never really heard of many celebrities that were a part of this community. However, social media, media (movies, shows, apps, art), and social media influencers are now comfortably “out”. Younger queer are now exposed to a more open and accepting community thanks to social media/media and it’s something I want to shed light on. I never had role models growing up, I grew up watching Cinderella, Snow White, and Princess and the Frog. You name it, a woman was waiting for a man; their ‘prince’ to rescue her or kiss her. That is all I ever knew, I didn’t know that my true love’s kiss could be a princess and not a prince. I feel that resonates with a lot of the queer community whose birthday year is 2003 and lower. This is why this topic is so important to me and I think instead of allowing what I could have had fuel anger, I would rather talk about it. I want to show how social media/media can be a good thing for once.
Podcast: https://youtu.be/b_VRVLgKguU
Essentially, I had a great time creating this podcast. It was something I had never done before so I had a lot of fun creating it. My friends, partner and I had a nice conversation addressing the main topic of my project/essay. I realized that there was so much information out there that I could have drawn from, but I narrowed it down to only a few. I read a lot of articles on my topic and could have easily had an hour-long podcast. Just a pre-warning, the podcast is about 45 minutes long. There was just no way I could cut it down more as there were 6 of us speaking, so a lot of opinions and comments had to be made. The most challenging aspect of this project was editing the video, as I am not as tech-savvy as I’d like to be. There are aspects that I could have also edited out, but I really could not figure it out. Not only that I couldn’t figure it out, but I also didn’t want to pay for an app to edit a video. However, I tried my best with the free version of the app “Splice”. After a few frustrating moments, I did the best I could.
Here is the breakdown of what I discussed in my podcast:
Legalizing gay marriage in 2015.
A graphical statistic showing how not many people felt comfortable being openly queer until after 2017. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/03/upshot/up-lgbtq-teens.html)
YouTube as an LGBTQ platform and their 2015 coming out compilation video. link> #ProudToLove
An app called “Spaces” is a recent discovery. It holds a pledge that they believe should be recognized by all apps. The article was written on Forbes (link)
Recent year LGBTQ representation and what that means for young LGBTQ+ (all the words below are links):
Finding Dory (minute 1:02-1:10)
The “Don’t Say Gay” (link) bill
If any of this interests you, I suggest you look at the linked words in the document, if you are more of a listener than a reader then I will suggest listening my podcast. Thank you! I hope you enjoy 🙂