Grammys And Gay Twitter Wars

A couple of Grammy comments before we get to...the War of the Gays on Twitter!

I am not a big fan of the Grammys. It's bad enough that this awards show is mostly full of performances instead of actual award presentations. Only ten Grammys were actually given out during the 3 hour, 30 minute show. And I don't know how they decide which ones (besides the obvious majors, Record/Song/Album of the Year, Best New Artist) make the cut. Besides the big four, we saw two Pop, two Country, one Rock and one Rap presented. The entire R&B genre, among others, was ignored. Of those 10 awards, all but one went to someone who performed on the show. (Fortunately, that one was given to Train for that awful "Hey, Soul Sister" thing.) And to have Arcade Fire perform both before and after winning Album of the Year just screams out, "FIX!!!"

(By the way, the Grammys need a host. The awkward ending of the show, with the one Arcade Fire member saying "we have to go perform another song...everyone leave to this song" or something really points out the need for a host, even a bad one.)

I don't respect the Grammys as an award or as an awards show. It's mostly performances. Had it not been for Lady Gaga, I probably wouldn't have watched at all. She was a lot less over-the-top in her performance, by Gaga standards, despite being inside an egg from the time she arrived at the show until the time the egg "hatched" on stage at the start of her performance of "Born This Way." So it was good, but not outrageously so -- like the song itself, although it is growing on me. It was a solid performance but I think she's been better.

Now, on to the War of the Gays!
As with many wars, it had its genesis in an unrelated event -- in this case, the Super Bowl. We're now so into social networking that every time there's a major event, whether unplanned (bad weather, world events) or planned (big games, awards shows), we rush to Facebook, Twitter, etc. to talk about it. In the Twitterverse it's known as "live-tweeting." It's not just us ordinary people doing this. It's also reporters, bloggers, newspapers, etc. So during the Super Bowl a week ago, one of the sites doing live-tweeting was AfterElton.com, which calls itself "the pop culture site that plays for your team."

Unfortunately, while they can talk about playing for a team, they're not really into events involving actual teams. You know, like the Super Bowl. Their tweets that night were all given the hashtag of #GayBowl. Maybe they don't know it, but there already is a Gay Bowl: it's the championship tournament of the National Gay Flag Football League involving teams from around the country. They've held it for 10 years now. The 11th Gay Bowl will be in Houston this year. But to AfterElton, because they're tweeting about it they seem to automatically want to give it a gay label. Thus, #GayBowl. That in itself annoyed me. Worse, except for the commercials and the halftime show, the one time they mentioned something that happened during the game they came up with this (after Green Bay scored a touchdown):

Ugh. Here is my reply, which got no response:

Fast-forward to tonight. AfterElton was live-tweeting the Grammys...no, wait. They were live-tweeting #GayGrammys. And thus, the War of the Gays began in earnest:

 

I had the thought at this point that they decided I was an anti-gay troll...

Now I was sure they figured I was an anti-gay troll. Here's the rest of the conversation...

And so an uneasy truce settled upon the land...

That last sentence doesn't surprise me a bit, of course. Get ready for the #GayOscars and #GayEmmys and so on. I wonder how they'd feel if, say, Entertainment Weekly live-tweeted the GLAAD Media Awards and used a hashtag like #StraightOnGLAAD and tweeted something like "WTF? Who is Big Freedia?" (Big Freedia is a GLAAD nominee for Outstanding Music Artist, by the way.)

It's sad, because I like some of the articles on their website. It's just a shame they don't seem to want to be better than those who perpetuate stereotypes.