gay

This is a serial project in which Potts's own reporting, photography, and memory cast a parting look at his past life, growing up as the gay grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts: between September & January 2016, every other Sunday in 33-post "books," Potts posted a 300-post Instagram account of this story — 9 books of 33 Instagrams each . 

In Potts's words, his own originary story is tied to the rise of his grandfather Oral Roberts as the famed televangelist and charismatic Christian preacher: "At twelve, my grandfather climbed into his Prayer Tower and said he’d die if he didn’t get $8 million; I was a gay kid living on a Pentecostal compound with an autographed photo of Ronald Reagan on my desk. At eighteen I left most of that behind, rarely looking back."

Potts's story is a compelling, wonderful, and moving mix of comedy and tragedy, documenting the fragile beginnings of a life marked by abuse that nonetheless reveals hope and beauty as Potts moves on from the past.

anna anthropy’s The Hunt for the Gay Planet is a text-based Twine game that uses the medium of Twine to comment more broadly and bitingly on the status of queer representation in videogames. The work takes its premise from a mainstream online roleplaying game, Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which in 2013 announced they were expanding their romance options in-game to include homosexual options, but only on a single planet in the galaxy. anthropy satirizes this decision with this beautifully retro piece, in which the player is invited to gradually explore the galaxy (looking under rocks and in caves) in search of a lesbian romance. The game serves as a powerful example of Twine’s potential as a platform for commenting on and engaging with AAA gaming, as Twine builds on the traditions of hypertext to allow for complex decision management and choice-driven experience design. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

Partly based on Szilak's experiences as an HIV physician, Queerskins tells the story of Sebastian, a young gay physician from a rural Missouri Catholic family who dies at the beginning of the epidemic. Queerskins harnesses the odd intimacies afforded by the Internet (collaborations formed via Craig's List and access to strangers' personal images and videos from the Creative Commons) to explore the human urge for transcendence via love, religious faith, sexual ecstasy, storytelling, and technology itself. The interface consists of layers of sound (two hours of audio monologues from five characters), diaristic text (40,000 words), and more than a hundred banal, quotidian photos curated from Flickr Creative Commons and videos (downloaded from YouTube and the Internet Archive) as well as ephemeral Flip videos of life in L.A. (commissioned from Iris Prize nominated filmmaker Jarrah Gurrie) that users can navigate at random or experience as a series of multimedia collages.