Social Networks

Dr. Eric Cervini is an authority on 1960s gay activism that opened his ‘Magic Closet’ to showcase his knowledge alongside looks online.

Facebook users who don’t fit any of the 58 gender identity options offered by the social media giant are now being given a rather big 59th option: fill in the blank.

NEW YORK — Facebook is apologizing to drag performers and the transgender community for deleting accounts that used drag names like Lil Miss Hot Mess rather than legal names such as Bob Smith. The world’s biggest online social network caught heat recently when it deleted several hundred accounts belonging to self-described drag queens…

For gay men in the dozens of countries that criminalize their sex lives, social networking can be a blessing or a curse. High-tech dating apps and social media have enabled countless men to expand their circles of friends and lovers in settings that are hostile to any overt trace of homosexuality. Yet the same technology that they gratefully embrace can expose…

A new study from Italy finds that social networking sites like Facebook have a negative impact on individuals’ mental well-being, as well as their levels of social trust, because of their exposure to hate speech and other offensive content. Researchers analyzed a wide representative sample of 50,000 Italian citizens, assessing how much they interacted with social media and how they…

Clicking those friendly blue “like” buttons strewn across the Web may be doing more than marking you as a fan of Coca-Cola or Lady Gaga. It could out you as gay. It might reveal how you vote. It might even suggest that you’re an unmarried introvert with a high IQ and a weakness for nicotine.

The outing of University of Texas-Austin students to their parents as a consequence of a little-known Facebook privacy glitch has reignited longstanding concerns over the social network’s treatment of its LGBT users’ private information.

EDMONTON, Alberta, Canada — The University of Alberta’s Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services in Edmonton has created a new Canadian social-media experiment that found millions of anti-gay slurs on Twitter within the past two months.

Today I accepted the Facebook friend request of someone I knew in high school. We haven’t spoken in more than thirty years … and God knows why she wants to befriend the scandalous queer who wore knee-high platform boots to the junior dance in our home town of Bossier City, Louisiana.

Facebook is becoming more LGBT-friendly. This week, the world’s largest online social networking website added two new options to its list of relationship statuses: “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership.”