ABSTRACT
The world of popular culture—from Lady Gaga's music to the It Gets Better campaign on YouTube—gave Jamey Rodemeyer the tools to leave the closet behind at a very young age. But the world of popular culture also provided Jamey's tormentors with the tools that they needed to keep rebuilding that closet, if not around Jamey, then around their own notions of sexuality. Even with a growing emergence of gay characters in film and television, gay popular culture is still pressed into a closet in many ways. Gay visibility is allowed only to a few, who are oft en white, male, and economically privileged. Gay musicians continue to turn away from mainstream music to find accepting and eager audiences. With shows like Brown Girls, Two Queens in a Kitchen, and You're So Talented, OpenTV is modeling what it looks like for queer artists to form communities and do the hard work of building a radically post-closet and fully queer world.
