The building of a young gay identity in the site e-jovem.com

Abstract

In this article I investigate if the texts presented in the section Tema at the website e-jovem.com, addressed to young gay men, represent the socio-historical identities of its readers in stereotypical ways or not. Based on linguistic and socio-cultural aspects, I endeavor to describe and categorize the lexical decisions that evince the type of relationship the site author’s establishes with the internet user and the choices that show the kind of image of gay youth the site wants to build. The corpus includes five texts, signed by Deco Ribeiro, executive editor of the site, accessed on June 7th 2006. The analysis of the data indicates that the editor of the site makes lexical choices that tend to prescribe and proscribe what the young gay reader must or must not do.