All the heterosexual nonsense we were forced to endure over MARCH

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Happy trans day of visibility to my trans friends. You’re so visible, you’re like cyclists in fluro vests gathered around a cafe in the early morning light looking like bowlegged birds pecking for worms. But in a positive way! I see you. Sometimes when I close my eyes I can’t stop seeing you.

Who can believe the wonderful month of March has passed already. As my friend Shakespeare once said “beware the ides of march”. Ides are a kind of sharp-toothed fish, I believe. It’s been a big month for us - you should have noticed just how much MORE delicious content you are getting, and I hope you have enjoyed it.

The rest of this newsletter is for our paid subscriber community, which will include my editorial letter, some gossip, some recommendations, etc. If you are a free subscriber, thank you, your contribution is deeply thanked - but also, The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project will be going to TWO paywalled articles out of four over the month, so if you want to read all the nice stuff, learn some things, stick it to the man, then now is the time to go to the next tier of the cult, um, subscriberdom.

Letter from the editor

Look, I feel like I was too hasty in changing the title of this newsletter from “All The Heterosexual Nonsense” to just “nonsense” - because one thing I’ve found trying to grow a new, independent, QUEER FOCUSED media publication in 2024 is that there is SO much hidden heterosexual nonsense absolutely trying to bone me.

So, I’ll put it bluntly - I have a certain amount of goals I have to reach with this newsletter to validate the grant from The Walkley Foundation/ Meta. This includes reaching certain content quotas, which there’s absolutely no issue with - but also includes growing our paid and free subscriber numbers.

And this is where the heterosexual nonsense is absolutely boning me, because our new Instagram account was 1. a primary way I planned to reach new people and 2. seemed a good bet because Instagram is owned by Meta, and therefore they like people using their product.

Let’s go through all the nonsense that I am enduring:

• Did you know that you can’t advertise on Instagram and Facebook to a specifically queer audience? When you’re boosting or creating running ads, which is one of the only ways to grow a completely new account, you can usually target those ads to specific interests or communities or demographics. ANYTHING that is LGBTQIA+ focused is simply not available, meaning it’s much harder to do. This is nonsense.

• Did you know that queer content is considered “political” inherently on Instagram, and is therefore often hidden or de-prioritised, let alone impossible to boost? I’m not talking just about queer politics or tales of trauma and horror - literally anything that uses words or terminology could get you fucked. This is nonsense.

• Meta’s Instagram and Threads apps are “slowly” rolling out a change that will no longer recommend political content by default. The company defines political content broadly as being “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics”. Guess what queer people are seen as? A social topic.

  Users who follow accounts that post political content will still see such content in the normal, algorithmically sorted ways. But by default, users will not see any political content in their feeds, stories or other places where new content is recommended to them. This is nonsense and will absolutely bugger my entire project’s ability to reach new readers.

• Substack, the medium we are on now has recently decided to be absolutely spineless and shit about having nazis on their platform. Unfortunately I am contractually tied to Substack for the next year, so I can’t leave. I also think that the internet in general has an issue with far-right amplification, and boycotting each program is a good start, but also is mostly punishing the writers, and not making much difference to the nazis - and I’d prefer to put pressure on Substack as a user, rather than flee to another competitor. Fix your shit, or I will leave within a year, Substack? Ok? But not being firm about Nazi content feels like INCREDIBLE nonsense.

There’s something very interesting that connects all these woes, apart from the fact that each of them makes me sit bolt upright in bed at night, panicking because I’ll have my grant money taken away from me - the inherent censorship of queer issues.

Nonsense started as a publication because I was frustrated as both a writer and an editor about the way that queer people are used by the media, both in terms of what sorts of things we’re commissioned to write about, and also how we’re utilised as pawns in the culture wars for clicks. I wanted to let queer people call the shots for once, to boost marginalised voices, to write from a queer perspective for queers and allies. I wanted to also provide a scope of topics - I call this a queer culture and issues publication because I don’t want to be limited to just LGBTQIA+ politics.

Of course, the extension of that, and what I’m being shown here by my list of woes, is that simply being an LGBTQIA+ person is an inherently political act. You can see it with the way that trans people existing in physical spaces - bathrooms, sports teams, on magazines - are being policed and censured. You can see it in the renewed fervour against pride flags, against pride marches and rallies. The LGBTQIA+ community is seen as a point of political defiance, just by being alive - doesn’t matter if you don’t want to be political, if you want to just be left alone or even assimilate in broader straight culture - you don’t get a say in it.

I am primarily an arts and culture journalist, and nowhere is this more evident than in queer culture, such as TV and films. The amount of times I was called a “groomer” for writing positively about the cute teen romance Heartstopper is indicative of how a show that gently prioritises queer romance is seen as having an “agenda”. The fact that all the teen stars have also been accused of being groomers and paedophiles, the fact that conservative mouthpieces feel emboldened enough to call David Tennant a pedophile and a groomer because of a Doctor Who plot… shows us that queer identity is synonymous with activism.

It shouldn’t be. I admire activists and advocates and people working in that space, but I don’t think everyone should inherently be cast in that role purely because of their gender or sexuality. I don’t believe anyone can exist outside of politics, but I do think we should be able to choose what manner and why we engage with how our society is run.

As frustrating and worrying as this experience has been - it also reaffirms why I believe nonsense and specifically The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is necessary. There’s so much going on behind the scenes - small acts of censorship, hidden hurdles, unseen traps - specifically aimed at the queer community, that we need to make sure our stories are prioritised and boosted and celebrated in retaliation. I don’t want subscribing to my newsletter, full of weird reality tv recaps, and long essays about Buffy, and silly christmas rom-com reviews, to be a political act. I don’t want supporting and reading and subscribing to queer writers to be an act of resistance. But I guess Meta has decided it is, so I guess that’s how we’ll have to treat it.

So, I guess, please subscribe to this newsletter and feel good about getting involved in politics. Subscribing is the equivalent to RuPaul getting his girls to hold a “go vote” sign on the runway.