Stuff Gay People Like: Starting blogs

We’ve long argued gay people are on the forefronts of art, technology, and hot trends. Additionally, gay people are really good at talking openly about shit that should be private, mainly because the world itself is obsessed with talking openly about gay peoples’ private shit. All these roads lead to one fact: a blog is a gay man’s perfect outlet of expression.

Every bar conversation a “creative” gay man gets in will involve someone at some point planning to “start a blog about that.” Roughly 10 percent of those bar conversations – so one per week – lead one of them actually getting on WordPress and starting a blog, which will receive no more than three updates before he forgets the password and moves on with his life.

SGPL itself was a blog before being printed, so yes, we’re getting meta. When SGPL began in January 2010 we thought it was a pretty cool idea, only to find out after few months that about a dozen other gay people had already started similar blogs, discoverable using Google. Over the two years since SGPL began, another half a dozen additional “Stuff Gay Men Like” or “Things Gays Love” titles appeared, but nobody – coming before us or after us – bothered to keep writing for more than 10 topics.

Meanwhile yours truly has been at it for more than 70 articles rounding two years, so this is the most developed “SGPL” column in existence! The only reason that’s noteworthy is we’re pretty sure it means nobody can sue us for copyright infringement, except maybe Christian Lander.

When it comes to blogs, there are six distinct kinds. First is the “theme” blog, a category that includes SGPL and requires a high level of regularity and consistency, which means the vast majority are abandoned early. Next is the political blog, where every single news event is explained, through a labyrinthine rational process, to support a writer’s existing ideological worldview. For example, in a libertarian’s blog, the observation “it was cold today,” is used to argue global warming is a myth, therefore Cap-and-Trade is useless, the free market shall reign supreme for all time and “kindness” is a character flaw. (Also, libertarians think evil Stewie from the older episodes of Family Guy was more fun than colorful gay Stewie from the newer seasons, even though everybody who is not a sociopath takes the opposite view).

Third is the lazy blog, which is about linking to random stuff all over the internet, mainly in the form of music videos from YouTube. There will also be funny pictures and every now and then, actual text, like a press release, or the titles of other articles. This type of blog takes about 30 seconds a day to maintain, so is the best way to build a name for yourself without doing any actual work.

Next is the personal diary, also understood as “yesterday I had a piece of cheesecake” blog, where people talk about their ex boyfriends. It is filled with the most annoying shit ever – especially those stupid “which type of gay guy are you” or “what’s your animal spirit” online quizzes, which actually got more popular as the blog concept itself was gradually supplanted by Facebook.

Next is the Avant Garde art blog, which people click on and they don’t know what they are seeing. It’s either poetry, digitally-altered pictures or prose written in an obnoxious font that nobody but the author can read without getting a headache.

Finally is the photo blog, which gay men are once again pretty good at, because it is usually porn. It will be something like screenshots of nude scenes from movies, or “shirtless Jewish guys” or something like that, but in any case you will be horrified when it appears on your screen at work and you were trying to find something completely different.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a regular column. Visit the Facebook Page or view the whole list.

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