A gay man living in a rural area has recently come out of the closet and is looking for LGBTQ friends; a lesbian has moved to a new city where she hopes to find a local queer femme social group; a nonbinary person has started hormone replacement therapy and wants to share the changes they're undergoing with others.
For these individuals, LGBTQ-centered social media platforms can be a lifeline in terms of offering the types of community connections they're seeking — particularly if they involve safe, supportive interactions with community members and allies.
"It is so important for folks to be able to connect with each other safely and to not be subjected to hate and harassment or suppression of our content," noted Jenni Olson, GLAAD's senior director of its Social Media Safety Program, in a Zoom video chat with the Bay Area Reporter.
Two queer-founded and -focused apps, Lex and TRACE, have LGBTQ users in mind when it comes to their platforms' aims, features, and community guidelines.
"[Regarding] things that are coming from the community, it makes a lot of sense that that's going to be, generally speaking, a safer place for us," said Olson, a lesbian and longtime filmmaker who lives in the Bay Area.
"With Lex in particular, I think it's just really exciting to try to have our own spaces where there's the sense of safety and meeting everyone's needs," she added.
Lex, short for "lexicon," launched in December 2019. It has been a go-to, and growing, LGBTQ community hub ever since, reaching one million downloads as of the first week of July. It is free to download.
"Queer lexicon is so important, and the words that we use to describe ourselves are really important identifiers and really important for people to articulate themselves. So we just loved the focus on language, that more intentional connection," said co-founder and CEO Jennifer Rhiannon Lewis in a phone interview with the B.A.R.
Lex was initially more of a dating- and hookup-oriented app, with users writing and posting personal ads much like those in "On Our Backs," the lesbian erotica magazine in circulation from 1984 to 2006.
Lewis, who is queer, said, "On the back page of these magazines, they had personal ads that people would write in who they were and what they're looking for. And Kel [Rakowski], my co-founder, was really inspired by those."
In 2023, Lex raised $5.6 million in seed funding, as reported by TechCrunch.
The app has since undergone a design and features revamping, coupled with a transition into a more community-finding and -building space, including a "Group Explore" section, with categories such as "art," "social impact, "sports & gym" and "outdoors." Users can create posts and use the chat feature to connect with queer people and groups, with writing still being a key form of communication on the app.
On Lex's website, it states, "Explore what's happening in your local LGBTQ+ community. Join a queer trivia group, attend a T4T [trans for trans] tea party, or meet up with a new friend for a skate sesh. There's a thriving queer community all around you, and now you know where to find it."
"We talk about ourselves as being the social app for the LGBT community. ... Helping other people find the community is really the number one [aim] that we're trying to address," said Lewis.
While the goal, Lewis said, is "to very much build a tech app that we really want," she and the Lex team, remote but primarily based in New York City, seek for the app to have an effect that extends beyond smartphone and tablet screens.
"We believe in the idea of tech and social media to connect with the offline world. Our ideal user case is, someone goes on the app, they use it for less than 10 minutes, they find a connection, and they go out and meet someone in real life or they have a good, positive interaction. We don't want to keep people hooked to a digital space," she said.
While local queer bars are a typical meetup spot for the LGBTQ community, Lex supports its users' scheduling of social events in non-queer-specific locations, such as when getting together in-person for a sports game or practice.
"You could go to a basketball court and you could kind of queer that space just by showing up with members of the community. Our goal with Lex is to allow people to create those queer safe spaces wherever they are in the world through the power of community," said Lewis.
For users, Lex offers an opportunity to expand their queer circles and feel a sense of belonging.
"This app has brought me so much: new friends, great experiences I wouldn't have known about otherwise, even a bass player for my queer band!" wrote Lex user "Richelle.Gee" in an Apple App Store review of Lex.
"I like Lex because it makes me feel a little more connected to other LGBT people. I have never really felt at home in the gay community, so the app is a nice space where I can sort of begin to do so," wrote Lex user "medialover1979" in another review.
TRACE
TRACE is another app geared toward the LGBTQ community — and specifically trans and nonbinary people. Founder Aydian Dowling, a trans man, was looking to make a dent — a positive and inclusive one — in a landscape ripe with transphobia.
"We were mostly inspired by the fact that it just felt like every day you'd wake up, go straight to your phone, and all you saw was anti-trans rhetoric and people being transphobic, and it was like, 'We need a place that doesn't have all of those things,'" said Dowling, TRACE's CEO, in a phone interview with the B.A.R.
The idea was to create an alternate social media platform where trans and nonbinary individuals could safely document their gender transition and share their experiences and milestones with a supportive community. Dowling and co-founders Elizabeth Rhodes, an ally, and Taylor Greene, a trans man, did just that, with the TRACE app officially launching in July 2022. Its investors include Gaingels, Hopelab, gener8tor, and a private angel funder.
TRACE is free to use. The new feature, TRACE+, costs $4.99 per month after a free two-week trial period.
"We're a startup and we have gone back and forth over the last four years of being full-time doing TRACE and then running out of money and being like, 'Okay, we have to go get jobs' and then going back, so I think just recognizing that this is something that's made by trans people, for trans people. And when you support the app that's supporting the community," Dowling said.
Like Lex, TRACE is remote-based, though Madison, Wisconsin is "kind of where everything started," explained Dowling. The app currently has somewhere around 12,000 users, many of whom are "Tracers," meaning that they are using the app to share information about, as well as celebrate, their transition via images, videos, and written content. Other TRACE users are "allies" — individuals who follow and support Tracers' transitions.
"When we made [the app], we really went back and forth, like, 'Do we have trans and nonbinary and gender diverse people only? Do we allow allies? But at the end of the day, what we really wanted to do was allow our allies to join in this journey for their transitioning loved one," said Dowling.
"If allies have a positive place to share and connect with each other about what they're going through and take some of that burden off of the trans person, we really felt that is going to benefit trans and nonbinary people as well in their transition," he added.
Dowling and the TRACE team released a new component in the app, TRACE+, in June. It offers voice and emotion tracking as well as incentives related to users' HRT (and other transition-related) reminders.
"There's some rewards after you have different streaks of completing reminders, as well as being able to document within each reminder," explained Dowling. "So, if you take estrogen every day, you can gauge emotionally, 'How do I feel today? Anything that I should keep track of for the day?' and then be able to kind of look back and notice trends for yourself and for your body, if there are any."
TRACE users — both Tracers and allies — are on board with the app's intentions and offerings.
"Been on this app since beta and I love it. There's dark times in the world and [in] America right now and we need community more than ever. I'm so glad I don't have to scroll for hours through Instagram anymore to find all my transition info!" wrote TRACE user "adhdalex" under "Ratings & Reviews" in Apple's App Store app.
"Joining this app has allowed me the opportunity to keep track of my friends' transitions as well as connect to the beautiful community of trans and nonbinary folks. Connecting with others around transition has taught me so much about my own allyship and the real experiences of those who transition. Would highly recommend for anyone who is looking for better ways to support their friends and loved ones," wrote TRACE user "erhodes87" in the App Store's Ratings & Reviews.
Social media safety
Apps like TRACE and Lex exist as alternatives to major social media platforms where anti-LGBTQ content and other issues that negatively impact queer people are widespread, continual, and unregulated.
GLAAD's Olson is all too familiar with the failures of the social media industry when it comes to LGBTQ safety and inclusion.
"It's interesting," said Olson. "With some of them, it's like, 'Do they have a prohibition against hate speech on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity?' Yes, they do. They all have that; they all get full credit on that. That's great. But then, do they have a policy against the targeted misgendering and deadnaming of trans folks or against conversion therapy content? Do they publicly state that they don't target people with ads on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity?"
"These are best practices and policies that they should have," Olson emphasized.
Olson oversees GLAAD's Social Media Safety Index, or SMSI, a comprehensive annual report on the current climate in social media platforms for the LGBTQ community. The SMSI, the first of which was published in 2021, provides insight into aspects such as LGBTQ discrimination and harassment, restrictions on self-expression and privacy issues on six major social media outlets — TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, YouTube, and X — and rates them using a "platform scorecard." The aim of the SMSI is to assess the platforms' policies and provide recommendations for improvement.
Olson noted that the SMSI examines the policies themselves — their existence or the lack thereof — and best practices, as opposed to the platforms' own policy enforcement.
In the "2024 Social Media Safety Index," released in March, five out of the six social media platforms evaluated received the platform scorecard rating of "F;" one fared better, but only slightly, with a D+ (TikTok). It's a report card that no student would want to take home to show their parents.
Olson said that the platforms had made some improvements since last year's report, but not enough to raise the low scores.
"I try to have some optimism that it is possible that they can be better. We just have to maintain the pressure on them. And it's a very big job and it can seem very hopeless at times. But that is what we do, and it's what GLAAD historically has done in all these other realms as well," said Olson, noting the organization's similar work in television and journalism.
Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Ph.D., wrote an essay on the harmful effects of social media on youth, calling for a social media health warning label similar to those carried on tobacco products.
(Congress would have to pass legislation for any such label to be implemented, but Murthy's statements have started a conversation. Citing the dangers of social media for children, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country, recently adopted a policy banning cellphones on campuses, for example.)
Olson said that while the warning label idea is "gesturing toward the problem" at hand, its framing as "for youth" is an issue. "There needs to be regulatory oversight of these companies to make their products safe for everyone, not just for young people. ... You can't overstate the importance of that, and there is absolutely no reason that that should not be what we're trying to make happen," she said.
She noted that the label could have negative consequences, in particular, for LGBTQ youth.
"The whole thing has this quality of a moral panic about it — that somehow we have to keep young people safe by restricting their access to things in ways that just don't bode well for LGBTQ youth," Olson said. "It's just not the right tool for the problem. The tool, or the solution, should be things that make the platforms safer for everyone, like stronger data privacy. I share the frustration of the surgeon general and everyone that it should not be like this, but I don't think that that's the right approach."
Guidelines are key
For Dowling and Lewis, having clear, accessible community guidelines in place for users is essential for LGBTQ safety.
"We try to call out our guidelines within the signup process, and then we have it repeated within the 'About' [section]," said Dowling.
He said that the majority of TRACE users adhere to the guidelines.
"I think that the spirit of TRACE is, people know why they're there. They're looking to either document and share their milestones of their transition and/or connect with other trans or nonbinary folks or allies to get support throughout their personal journey. And we find that 99% of the time, people are doing exactly that," Dowling commented.
Lewis explained that users of the Lex app are encouraged to read through its community guidelines to understand user expectations and help foster a sense of community wherein people are "able to express themselves."
The guidelines are ever-evolving based on users' self-submitted reports and the Lex team's daily review of posts, content, and other data.
"The community guidelines are really important to us. [They're] certainly something that we spend a lot of time and energy on to ensure that we can build a space where everyone can be supported," said Lewis.
When they do come across an instance of a community guideline breach, they directly reach out to the user and explain which guideline they've crossed, seeking to educate them and prevent further guideline breaches rather than outright ban the person. But, if the person continues to disregard the guidelines, the account is removed to "protect the safety of the whole community."
"It can be very emotional work sometimes," shared Lewis. "But we have a set language and guidelines of how we deal with them and a lot of set responses."
"Our approach is that we do not want to just penalize people, but help create the community that we want to exist, and we believe that we do that by having a conversation," she said.
For more information about Lex, go to lex.lgbt; for information about TRACE, go to thetrace.app. For information about GLAAD's latest Social Media Safety Index, go to glaad.org/smsi/social-media-safety-index-2024/.
This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.
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