Gender and Language

16      As the interfaces of cyberspace have become increasingly interactive, mostly taking place in the audio-visual form, the present gay personal advertisements have become polarized. Some sites exist mainly for people aiming to solicit sex, while others are more geared towards clients seeking relationships. According to Josh, who was a longstanding poster and has experienced the transition from print to digital media, "it is almost impossible to attract any respondent nowadays if you post an ad without featuring your photo." In contrast to the former gay "frontier" the gay personal ads in the mainstream media, such as Top-Fong, have become quite sexually explicit. Since many gay-related sites have become oriented towards a clientele seeking to solicit brief sexual encounters, gay men looking for long-term relationships have distanced themselves from these sites by creating a different space and re/negotiating their position. Some gay Taiwanese men have returned to the mainstream friend-seeking arena, reframing their interests and deemphasizing their sexual orientation to find a sincere soul-mate relationship. They gained inspiration from the days when personal ads were created for mainstream magazines, sending ambiguously poetic statements seeking feedback from both male and female respondents. Through these strategies, they managed to successfully distinguish their endeavor from that of sex personals.

17      With the rise of the Internet, sources for personal advertisements became increasingly diverse and fragmented. No longer did any one magazine or newspaper monopolize the market of gay personals, and neither did the former spatial constraint apply. Despite being the most frequently-researched source for analysis, the personal advertisements featured in Advocate, the American GLBT bi-weekly magazine, are far from representative of gay-personal advertisements since the emergence of their online counterparts.

18      A growing fashion which has been covered by many columnists in gay-themed online sources is that gay men seeking mates insist explicitly that their potential partners should be genuine and true to themselves (see Elmer). Observing this phenomenon in hundreds of gay personals, Elmer concluded that an identifiable expression of the ad writers' virtuousness, discernment, and value" (no pag.) in the competitive dating pool has also become a strong selling point in the gay community of the digital age, such as:

I want someone who is comfortable with who they are and who is stable sexually, mentally and emotionally. (Yahoo friend making site, 26 April 2005)

At the same time the use of abbreviation and jargons in personal advertisements is in sharp decline.

Conclusion

19     As seen from the transition of presentations of gay personals, my study maintains that gay personals display a wealth of cultural connotations and can serve as a particularly fertile terrain for the study of cultural construction and performance of sexuality. Studies of social change and homosexuality have given attention to how changes in institutions accommodate or disadvantage homosexual people (see Blasisus; Cohn & Gallagher; Jenness; MacNair et al.). The media are considered to be "the important forum for understanding cultural impact since they provide the major site in which contests over meaning must succeed politically" (Gamson 59). For Gamson, media are the critical gallery for discourses carried on in other forums. In the given context, I argue that gay personal advertisements lurking beneath the mainstream media can be regarded as evidence for how the collective correspondences to the dominant ideology have manifested themselves by negotiating a sphere where the fear of outing and the yearning for visibility collide. The production of a personal ad is not casual; rather, it actively responds to culture, sponsors connotative meanings and is a site where cultural values and norms are contested.

20      This study aimed to offer a different perspective on the examination of personal ads, arguing that the earlier content-based approach, dependent upon straightforward declarations, was de-contextualized and ignored the power of institutional discourses and structures. This study illustrated how gay personal ads emerged as ongoing multiple processes of interactive performances: internally, with individual rehearsed life scripts loosely related to his/her biological body; externally, their performativity is policed by social norms, and, in the event of personal positing, linguistic capacity and anticipated institutional requirement. As Felluga suggests in reference to Judith Butler, "our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies" (no pag.), and the transitions of performance and intertextuality of gay personal ads illustrating these multiply interactive processes. In addition, this paper is written from a conviction that emphasis should be put on the psycholinguistic dimension of gay subjectivity, with a focus on performativity and intertextuality. Stressing the impossibility of "proving" sex, sexuality, and gender by recourse to a prior, foundational biological body, this paper illustrates the process of how the gay male homosexuality in Taiwan has been rehearsed, much like a script, and how we, as the actors make this script a reality over and over again by performing these actions (see Butler 1993, 1997, 1999).