ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on political discussions in an LGTBQ community online. Today at least 100 million people regularly participate in online communities (Kozinets, 2011). LGBTQs were particularly quick to embrace the internet and its affordance of time-space compression and anonymity (Szulc & Dhoest, 2013). Young LGBTQs, often feeling geographically and emotionally isolated, turned to the internet as a somewhat safe space to explore their sexual identities among supportive and like-minded others. Hence researchers have underlined the potential of establishing online spaces of belonging for people identifying as L, G, B, T or Q (see, e.g., Campbell, 2004; Wakeford, 1997). Community, spatiality, identity, structure and agency issues have been discussed in academia (see O’Riordan & Phillips’s 2007 anthology Queer Online), but also surveillance, gay-bashing, flaming and hate speech (Campbell, 2004; Kuntsman, 2007).1 Nevertheless, Karl (2007) argues that new media studies show a lack of engagement with non-normative identities. This chapter, and indeed this whole section of the volume, addresses this perceived lack.
