Empowering people through storytelling
Giving the LGBTQ community a voice in the digital age
We have set out in this document the proposal for our online Final Major Project detailing the story concept, sources and online treatment. The common theme of media convergence in LGBTQ storytelling is inspired by Professor Seamus Simpson’s lecture during Journalism and Politics module in semester one of year three.
The group of people we will specifically focus on is the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community (LGBT) to discover how they have and will become better connected and empowered through the opportunities technology offers.
For several decades there has been a growing trend to use the word queer to define the LGBT community, as it is a single word not an acronym that is inclusive of any sexuality and gender identity outside the norm of heterosexuality. So in this proposal we will use the word queer as a non-offensive inclusive word for the LGBTQ community.
We have kept the Queer Media blog going that was created on WordPress as part of our Digital Journalism module in our first year at university. So we are very familiar with their Dashboard plus we also bought the web address queermedia.org.uk and successfully mapped it to the blog. Therefore our stories would be published to this established platform.
The 2015 VICE documentary Chemsex also contributed to inspiring these investigations so the target audience would be the VICE magazine readership and anyone who identifies on the LGBT/queer spectrum.
“Vulnerable gay men with issues around sex, new drugs that tapped into that problem rather well, and changing technology. What they call the perfect storm.” David Stuart, (Chemsex trailer, 2015)
The idea is that these three stories would run as a series of feature stories during LGBT History Month, which is an annual national celebration of the LGBTQ community in the UK since 2005 held every February, with an international appeal not just UK focused.
The three main topics our project examined are:
