The Pandemic Clears Media Pollution and Queers the Ecosystem
- The Pandemic Clears Media Pollution and Queers the Ecosystem
The virus spreads. Cities shut down. But nature rejoices. Carbon emissions fall as fast as the price of gas. Pollution disperses, clearing the air. Supply chains shut down, prompting calls to diversify how we cultivate our food and land.
The pandemic reshapes the US media environment, too. Media expands rapidly and organically. Like the virus, media spreads in close quarters, person-to-person, and deepening its hold with every moment of co-presence. Traffic on open-access platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok sharply increase within weeks as artists and entertainers broadcast live from home and, newly unemployed, spend hours crafting tightly scripted short videos to communicate joy, trauma, and wellness strategies.
Corporate TV contracts. Production on nearly all narrative media halts. Late night shows cut staff and live audiences, with hosts filming from iPhones. The rapid capitalist churn of constant production, the fast-food nature of "peak TV," slows. Instead, we entertain ourselves. Far from Neil Postman's dystopic ecological view of passive TV consumption at the height of its representational power, we become active as we burrow digital space for entertainment and information while we connect with loved ones on FaceTime and community on Zoom.
Media expands from the roots, drawing joy and pain. Queer communities1 experience an abrupt, perhaps temporary, shift away from what Kristen Warner called "plastic representation," where corporations cheaply package and globally distribute identities and stories as commodities, to something more organic, local, diverse, and, perhaps, sustainable.2 Artists and communities instinctually tap in to intimate and subversive media histories, especially of TV and video, [End Page 135] such as public access and public affairs, experimental music television, alternative video art, home movies, and local station programming. White supremacists and other defenders of hegemonic history encounter a similar environment but one more polluted with lies manufactured as memes or propaganda packaged as news entertainment.
Let's focus on the liberatory clearing of US corporate media pollution in the first months of the pandemic.
Pandemic queer media draws organically from whatever resources are available in small, discreet locations. Queers know something about making something from nothing. Drag queens storm Twitch in the wake of bar and club closings. I count 27 new Twitch channels in the first four months of the pandemic, from Black-focused shows by The Vixen (Black Girl Magic) and Bambi Banks-Couleé (Unfriendly Black Hotties), to the queer punk acid trips ToxicWasteFace and Lucifer's Slutty Dogs. We are invited into their homes, augmented with makeshift lighting, projectors, green screens, and fabric backdrops dripping in sequins. Big city artists have less space but more connections to producers and editors. Rural queens gain the upper hand in production design: the outdoors as canvas. San Francisco, long forgotten as the hub of avant-drag, becomes the eye of the storm with DragAlive's weekly show benefitting The Stud bar and Biqtch Puddin's three-hour weekly gender-and style-inclusive bonanza, featuring Dragula and Drag Race alums, drag kings, and newcomers from around the world.
Organic media production is more lo-fi, grounded and durational, recalling the golden age of public access.3 Millions watch some of the greatest music artists alive—most of them Black—play music on Instagram Live (@verzuz), streaming from phones with the lowest quality audio of their careers but still giving life to fans. Experimental Sound Studio streams regularly on Twitch, allowing sound artists to experiment with video. Chicago artists Damon Locks, Tomeka Reid, Nicole Mitchell, and Jeff Parker improvise a discordant tapestry of sound and video, imploring us to Keep Your Mind Free, transporting us to another dimension. If the music you desire is the cacophony of revolution, switch Twitch channels to Woke, a livestream of protests from around the world.
The spirit of being with each other, remotely, increases the power of the local, as long-distance travel grinds to a halt. On the precipice of summer and the promise of outdoor activities, Black people are killed, threatened and brutalized by police and vigilantes in cities across America—George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Dominique Rem'mie Fells, Ahmaud Arbery...
