Streaming services are a popular way to watch LGBTQ movies and TV shows. Many mainstream platforms, such as Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, and Paramount Plus, feature LGBTQ content in their catalog.
But there are also more niche streaming services that specialize in queer content. For example, Revry is an LGBTQ-specific streaming service that has a variety of LGBTQ titles and 24/7 streaming channels.
Affective intensities
Like its parent app Grindr, China’s first homegrown gay live stream app – Blued – features a mobile live streaming technology that combines the latest in audiovisual and mobile technologies to create a highly immersive virtual world. In this regard, the app stands out from its competition for a variety of reasons.
In particular, the app’s ominous mobile video chat has produced some of the most compelling and interactive same-sex encounters seen anywhere. From the gay streamer’s perspective, the app enables him to connect with hundreds of thousands of affluent heterosexually married men in his quest for elusive same-sex partner, while also providing a platform to showcase his many talents as a top-notch entertainer.
Although a number of apps and platforms have been lauded as the best of the rest, few have managed to capture the imaginations of their users in the same way as this one does. In short, it has shaped the social, sexual and economic lives of its 40 million plus users in the most memorable ways imaginable.
Homonormativity
Heteronormativity, which prescribes heterosexual sex as “natural,” and homonormativity, which champions same-sex relations as a form of domestic consumerism and middle-class respectability (Ferguson and Hong 1057; Elia and Yep 879), both shape LGBT identities and politics in ways that bind them to the hegemonic structures of Western (and especially Westernized) society.
Homonormativity, then, enables mainstream society to overlook the sexual, social and cultural differences among marginalized groups that make their lives distinct from the “standard” ones (Becker 43; Warner 81-148). It enacts “assimilationist” values on gay men and other members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, policing sexual and romantic orientations and gender identities/expressions for political inclusion.
In neoliberal South Africa, the proliferation of homonormative gayness, and its associated forms of violence, reinforces hegemony by reinscribing culturally acceptable forms of same-sex – and sometimes heteronormative – sexuality that render their associations with whiteness, maleness, and (US-influenced) middle-class status invisible and unproblematic. This is a critical issue for queer and trans people in South Africa, who are increasingly disadvantaged in terms of access to health care, education and employment.
Gift-giving
Gift-giving on Blued is a way of directing viewers’ attention toward gay streamers, and amplifying the affective intensity that these viewers feel. Viewers buy gifts with beans – the app’s digital currency.
Despite the economic underpinnings of same-sex intimacy on live streaming, gift-giving distances gay streamers’ work from sex-related labor (Nayar, 2017; Zelizer, 2005) and the transactions involved in their monetary exchange. Moreover, gift-giving disenchants paying viewers from a transactional mindset (Nayar, 2017; Zelizer, 2008), which reduces the intimacy they feel from live streamers’ performances.
To monetize their affective labor, live streamers must earn virtual gifts by gaining the trust and favor of viewers. This requires gay streamers to engage in covert and overt sexual insinuation to attract viewers, and to elicit virtual gifts from viewers through the power of their affective signs.
Monetization
Blued monetizes its users’ performative labor in two ways. First, it pays gay live streamers for their performances (including emotional affects and sexually imaginative behaviors).
Second, Blued collects viewers’ data and transforms it into a data structure. This data production generates economic rewards for gay streamers in the form of beans, the digital currency on the platform.
Streamers can use their beans to buy gifts for paying viewers. These virtual gifts are often accompanied by personal messages from the gay streamer.
The gifts accentuate both the affective intensities and the heteronormativity of intimate relationships. Moreover, gifts decouple same-sex intimacy from its economic and sexual underpinnings, which make it less confronting for paying viewers.