Final Project

For the final project of my "Global Impact of New Communication Technologies" class through The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I have concentrated my efforts on researching the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender bloggers have had on the politics of the 2004 elections, specifically focusing on the outing of Rep. Ed Schrock, R-Va. The news first broke when Michael Rogers posted information on his site Blogactive.com about how it was believed that the ultra-conservative and powerful congressman had phoned a gay sex line. This outing ultimately caused Schrock to drop out of the race for re-election.

The title of my essay is "Gay Blogs and the Power of Outing - An Essay in the Politics of Sexuality." The essay contains a brief history of outing, a description of the issues that follow when outing is used as a political tool and the personal and wide-reaching consequences for performing such actions. The content of the essay displays both the positive and negative aspects of outing an individual of great influence and power and sets boundaries for dismantling the social stigmatism and constraints of the closet.

I explored this issue by combining my knowledge about historical and current LGBT issues along with the influence of the mainstream media. My main resources consisted of published books, news articles located on the Internet, along with the content of various political, activist and LGBT blogs.

The main thing that I took away from this research topic is that no one can say for sure what impact, if any, that bloggers had on the outcome of the elections with the exception of the outing of Schrock. My strongest recommendation about using blogs as a political tool is to determine what the intent behind outing someone really is, be it personal gain, punishment or to benefit the LGBT community.

You can access the full-text of my essay, by following this link: Gay Blogs and the Power of Outing: An Essay in the Politics of Sexuality.