Introduction

The hybrid media ecosystem has provided LGBTQ+ individuals and communities with new knowledge creation and networking opportunities for organizing (Corey 2019). This ongoing integration of the social and the digital allows citizens and consumers to quickly organize, assemble and vocalize support or express dissent through digital platforms (Armano 2017) to combat the stigmatic legacies and current realities of LGBTQ+ criminalization and pathologization.

That shift has generated new rituals of LGBTQ+ organizing through hashtag activism, crowdfunding advocacy through ecommerce, and philanthropy through non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Underscoring this digital connectivity are decades of LGBTQ+ organizing through protest and law reform, and in the US in particular, adversarial legalism, to secure relationship, conduct and expression rights. Central to those forms of organizing are protest-turned-pride events that drive economic enfranchisement of LGBTQ+ cultural representation through tourism within the growing annual public relations calendar of LGBTQ+ days and weeks of significance.

Amid the growth of online queer LGBTQ+ activism, advocacy and allyship, the gay bar as an organizing centre that enabled gay liberation movements and agendas (Lin 2021) – visibility, equal rights and protections under the law, equal access to healthcare, employment and consumer services – can now be found in Facebook threads, TikTok videos, WhatsApp groups, and to a lesser extent, awareness-raising campaigns and fundraising through dating apps.

Digital media platforms and their inadequate governance are a constant catalyst for LGBTQ+ organizing against representational harms, given the range of vulnerabilities LGBTQ+ communities face, calls for accountability, and an understanding of advocates’ contributions to policy development (Gen and Wright 2013). Integral to those calls is identifying the extent to which effective advocacy is the result of a strong enough lobby with sufficient resources for campaigning (Solanke 2017).

This chapter synthesizes practitioner and academic literature on digital LGBTQ+ organizing. In doing so, the chapter analyses the ways that activists, advocates, and allies can ‘queer it up’ through policy and participatory advocacy against challenges to diverse LGBTQ+ expression through hybrid media. This is reflected in how sexual minorities have sought to define LGBTQ+ normative modes of embodiment, risk and disposability (Kafer and Grinberg 2019) on, and in, their own terms, through knowledge production processes from the late 1960s and subsequent decades to the present.