Sitting on an outbound train to my hometown, my phone lights up. Being hard of hearing, I notice my phone lighting up easier than I would hear a buzz or a ding. When it lights up, I never know what it is. A text, an email, a Twitter notification. This instance, it was the latter. It was someone who follows me on Twitter messaging me, compliment my demeanor and asking how I’m single, etc. (The answer is by choice-single but bitter about it. Call me!) Interactions like these I feel are far more frequent amongst gay men on Twitter, or really any online platform that entails messaging back and forth without actually meeting. These types of interactions can be dangerous-you feel like you know these people, talking about the intimate elements of your lives and sharing them with a complete stranger. I am guilty of creating these parasocial relationships with people I interact with on Twitter. I know I do not know them, and they don’t know me, but you feel like the best of friends. It is intense, weird, and something that is not going to go away anytime soon. It is something engrained in the generations of internet users, and those yet to come even. You can virtually make friends with anywhere, anytime.

It is the opposite of anything I have ever heard Olivia Benson say on Law & Order: SVU, her constant dishing of advice about trusting strangers on the Internet is advice we should ALL be listening too. I mean, she is Olivia fucking Benson. You never really know who someone is online-all it takes is some mild intelligence and you can portray yourself to be anyone you want. If I really wanted, I could be the next version of the Cash Me Outside girl…or I could be a Rhodes Scholar. That is the beauty of the internet and social media, social apps, etc. Your image is what you decide it is going to be. If you’re anything like me, portraying yourself to be something you’re not sounds exhausting so you do not bother. My sense of humor, my demeanor, is almost identical online vs. in person. The major difference, I would say, is that in person I am louder than you may expect given I have a hearing loss. I come off stronger in person because of this, in combination with my height and build. You don’t sense these things on the internet all the time. Why would you? You look at the carefully chosen profile picture that person selected to establish a baseline for what you are going to build this person to be like in your mind.

In this particular instance, he and I started in detail talking about not necessarily why I’m single (thankfully I derailed that conversation), but how the LGBT community (specifically gay men throughout the rest of this piece), can be shallow. We can be conceited, we can be bitchy, we can be a wide array of emotions seen on reality shows by E!, Logo, Bravo, etc. We can be brash, we can bold, we can be arrogant. So can heterosexuals mind you, but there just seems to be an indescribable trait amongst gay men and descriptors used about us, collectively as a community. I can be a bitchy queen sometimes, but it is a quality I find less than attractive about myself. Have I been one of those men at times? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. I’d be lying if I said that I’ve never tried to be a type of man that I’m not within the gay community. But being someone you are not never works out-it is a huge reason why we come out of the closet to begin with. We want to authentically be ourselves in a world that is encouraging us to be someone else. The basis of this conversation that really captured me is how gay men look for specific things in other men romantically, namely, height, abs, weight, hair color, etc. I’ve never fit the mold of anything in my life, and though I try to actively take care of myself now, I do it for me. Not for someone else, which I think is important to note here.

I’m not here to shame other men in the gay community for who they are, but I’m here to encourage them to think about their behaviors, how they act within friend groups and outside of it. Logo recently premiered a trailer for their gay version of Jersey Shore, called Fire Island. It features a group of gay men, all fit and tan and traditionally “sexy”, sharing a house with alcohol seemingly in every shot. The men range in body type and race, but they’re all what can be considered “traditionally attractive” men. The show itself has been criticized, and for fair reason. ABC, a primetime network, just aired recently a mini-series on civil rights within the LGBT community called When We Rise. It calls for action, togetherness, and solidarity amongst the LGBT community in a fight for equal rights. This show Fire Island, almost represents the opposite of that. It perpetuates stereotypes and clichés about gay man, that we all look X way and behave Y way with resulting in Z with our friends. I do not harbor hard feelings of negativity towards these men individually. I do not know them and cannot attest to whom they are personally, but I criticize the choice they are making to be on this show. As someone who always feels like an outsider in a community that strives to be accepted by their heterosexual and cis gendered peers…we do a wonderful job of creature a culture where our peers of gay men often feel like they are not accepted. A show like Fire Island just creates more of those feelings already because visually speaking, that is what represents the LGBT community on television. It only portrays one thing, one type of gay man, rather than the unicorn magic of an entire community of men, all with varied values and interest as people. No one wants to watch and even worse, no one wants to produce a show about a group of men with various backgrounds, cultures, body types, religions, etc. because it is not sexy (again, men of different ethnicities are featured, and I am curious as to how they are portrayed in the show). It is not what a community of men seen as sexy or attractive, and it negates the cliché that sex sells. If you do not own a gym membership, if you do not eat Kale and forgo a cheeseburger every time the option for one exists…you are not the person who is going to feel represented by this show at its premise. If Logo wants to produce a show about a hearing impaired gay man who works in Higher Education and struggles with his self-image, then they can contact me via email. I’m not afraid to admit that I yearn at times to be one of the Fire Island men, but I don’t desire it. I don’t obsess over it. I work out to stay healthy physically, but more so mentally. I play sports actively because I love them, they bring a healthier sense of community in some ways for me and that is what I know is important.

No fems. No fats. No Blacks, Asian, or Latino. Nothing shorter than 5’10. No bottoms, power bottom ONLY. Religious men need not apply. All of these are phrases of consistency you can find on any app such as Grindr, Scruff, Tinder, etc. They make it clear that you, as a user, are not searching for things you have no “interest” in, things that you do not find a sexual attraction too or people you say no to based off stereotypes. It shuts down the possibility that a man of color is sexy, that an Asian man is something more than good at math or less than endowed. It perpetuates the myth that men under a certain height are not sexy and therefore, cannot possibly be of interest to you. It discriminates, it promotes the idea that only a certain subsection of LGBT men are hot, and sexy. A six foot man with a six pack (traditionally a white male at times, but it can definitely vary) who goes to the gym 6 days a week and eats Kale over a bed of weight loss supplements is the only thing left for there to find sexy based on the types of discrimination you see in online profiles. In groups of gay men on Instagram posting pictures, you often see 6 or 7 carbon copies standing next to each other in flat out ugly fucking swim trunks (if they’re wearing clothes at all). I’m tired of feeling than less because others disagree with how I decide to look (in all senses of the word), of how I sound. Anything that contributes to the diminishing of my value as a human being, I’m not fucking standing for it anymore.

The truth of the matter is, none of us should have been standing for it all.