Abstract
The social impact of the internet on the lives of gay men has been extensively explored in sociology and media studies (Johnson 2020; Farci and Scarcelli 2022). In this project, I contribute to established academic corpus an innovative, inter-generational perspective which aims to see the World Wide Web in its already decades-old historical development as a medium and locus for queer community-building. In an increasingly digitalized world, queer men increasingly find the vocabulary, the concepts and the connections necessary for their coming out process online: this is certain. However, what does "online" mean for different generations of these individuals? The internet, although often referred to as "new media", has existed for many years and is to be studied as the historical stratification of different media technologies. In pursuing this path, I include in my project accounts on queer media
and social forms that are not digital and which somewhat "predate" (although some keep their significance even today) digital media; it is crucial, in fact, to see digital modes of sociality in continuity to "physical" or "analog" media and spaces, as their potentials and affordances for queer discourse and identity is not unique to digitality and the lives of queer men in the 21st century are not either "online" and "offline" but are woven in a complex and multifaceted digital-analog fabric. The resulting overall project involves deep ethnographic engagement in the queer spaces of Milan, Italy, as well as qualitative interviews and Life History methods tackling different generations of queer men. Moreover, some key focal points have been selected to be studied with specificity as representations of wildly different modes of queer sociality each reaching their golden years at different times in recent media history and representing the preferred method of sociality of different generations of gays: urban sexual networks, magazines personals, online forums and dating apps.
Each of these four key media will be questioned using methods most appropriate for them: interviews, and observation will elucidate the social use of urban sexual networks, while archival work is best suited for studying magazines from the seventies and eighties. Content analysis and online ethnography will be used in tackling online forums, while dating apps are going to be studies with phone-walkthrough interviews. Oral history, surveys and interviews are going to provide general framework and commentary to these four key sites that this project is going to study to position each of them within a wider context and use each result in a cohesive whole.
The multidisciplinary nature of this projects, at the crossroads between anthropology, queer studies, media studies and history will be advantageous because of the wide amount of possible publishing avenues and scholarly collaboration. University of Antwerp provides, due to the wide breadth of its Communication Studies department, an excellent arena for the final phase of this project: data elaboration and publication.
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