At about two in the morning a few days ago, I received a series of instant messages from a friend who eagerly told me about a new gossip site, Juicy Campus, which has been making a big splash at Georgetown and elsewhere. Basically, he explained, it is a place for people to post salacious rumors about each other without having to register or be identified in any way. It was the kind of thing that seemed perfectly tailored to his interests (which include talking about others and judging people) until he found himself mentioned.
He was too panicked to tell me where this post was, but I quickly found it myself under a thread called "Hottest Gays." That didn't seem so bad, until I saw the sub-thread - a slightly less complimentary section about gay men who, well, are all but too eager to play catch with other guys.
This may not seem like the biggest of deals, especially for someone who is actively looking for hookups seven nights a week and who, much to my dismay, can only see the world in terms of tops and bottoms. But that did not mean that he wanted it to be on a gossip site for the whole world to see and comment on and discuss.
I've been poking around on the site for a few days now, worried more and more about the effect things like this might have on college campuses. The site is getting more and more popular, and expanding to a greater number of universities, all the time. And a lot of the posts have to do with queer students - who the closeted guys on the crew team are, which gay and bi women are the hottest, who is quickest to give it up on a Saturday night, etc. There seems to be a huge potential for outing people who are not completely comfortable with their orientation being public or who are not even out in their own minds yet; in fact, there's a whole section for doing this. And at a school which has had its share of recent gay hate crimes, located within a city that has had even more, having lists ready to copy-and-paste of all the queer students on campus does not give me a huge feeling of security.
Speaking of hate, the site provides another kind of forum, and that is for people who need an outlet for their homophobia but prefer for it to be anonymous. One thread complains about gays "taking over this site," "bitching," and making "life hell for the rest of the world." Several topics use the word "gay" as an insult, proving that there's still a place for language most people stopped using in kindergarten. And there are plenty of stereotypes used and abused, and bad language hurled around, and all of the things that many people can't really get away with saying in public but still have on their minds.
It seems to me that this is another sign of the tension in our society right now, where we are open enough to be able to talk about people being gay, but not open enough to do it in a respectful way; where people can come out and probably still have friends supporting them, but may not be able to come out on their own terms; where we can on the one hand joke about listing queer students on a stupid gossip website, and on the other find one of those students assaulted on their way home from class the following week. Maybe the moral of the story is that people should mind their own business, be who they are, and live their own lives - but I guess that's not as "juicy" of a world to live in.
