Too sexy for the printed page

The Ryerson Review of Journalism has an interesting piece on the evils of the "hyper-sexualized" major gay media in Canada. There are some interesting things here, but this piece could have been so much more... it actually ends up sounding rather prissy and right-wing, instead of approaching the topic in a way that's more truly engaged with the community. But I'm biased: I was interviewed for the piece, and my comments not judged to be useful enough to be included (grin). I do have concerns about representation in the gay media (and longtime readers will have already checked out this analysis, written for Press Pass Q -- click on the "commentary" section; this analysis is based not on the idea that sex or sexy is bad, but that internalized homophobia might be skewing visual portraits away from real intimacy).

Ryerson reporter Maya Saibil writes: "I became aware of how obsessed gay media are with sex when a salacious headline was tacked on to a profile I wrote for Xtra this past October. The story was about an Aboriginal woman and the challenges she had overcome in her life. The headline was 'I'm a slut.' And while my subject did say that and I included it in my story, her sluttiness was not the focus of the piece."

A few thoughts: racism has completely desexualized Native people, and to play on the fact of a Native woman's sexual nature might well be a good thing that smashed a stereotype. And another: boring headlines make many community newspapers the most tedious reads of all time. I've just read too many headlines like "Activist has worked hard" and "Lesbian speaks out."

What do regular readers of the queer media think of the quality of what's out there?


ADDENDUM 10:35 am: Okay, the sentence about the de-sexualization of Natives was a smart ass point, but it avoids the reporter's thesis. Sigh. "Hypersexualized" gay papers do it to everyone. Should black men be hypersexualized when racism has turned them into being perceived as mindless sex machines? I'd say yes, because the alternative is to sexualize everyone but black men -- which is just as awful (no sex for you!).