October 2020

Celeste Headlee is giving pointers to a crowd on how to better communicate with people by listening and working on the way they speak to one another. Every job requires communicating but due to technology speaking directly face to face isn’t really necessary and has caused some people who rely heavily on technology to lack in their communication skills. A point that I find useful is when I don’t know something I should probably let it be known that I don’t know. The only reason I don’t do this sometimes is because I feel like what I’m going to ask is something that everybody else already knows and then I’ll look like Boo Boo the Fool. Another piece of advice that I should use is trying not to repeat myself because when I’m talking about something I actually am interested in I end up rambling a lot and saying my same point over and over. 

JD @imjdollaz Caption: “are you masc or fem?” nigga i’m a grown ass gay man.

The social media post that I’ve chosen to analyze the rhetoric of is by the openly homosexual African American sex worker, JD, and his tweet regarding the societal stigma placed on gay men to group themselves in boxes to further more emphasize their identities. We can tell that JD’s first sentence is a rhetorical question because it is in quotation marks and that the second is his response to it. At first glance his statement may seem like not much of an argument but to his eleven thousand followers mostly composed of other Black gay men, this could interpreted as slightly controversial. JD seems to not like the terms “masc” or “fem” when asked to describe himself because he is a man nevertheless his sexuality and shouldn’t have to confine himself to any category. This may be a reach but the tweet could be an ethos driven rhetoric, he’s indirectly stating his belief and is using that to appeal to others that might feel the same way he does. The author’s use of AAVE and other slang words lets the reader know in the most blunt and simple way possible how he feels. The way he says it may be considered informal or even inappropriate to some people but the message is delivered all the same. It may not look like it but the text actually is a perfectly structured declarative sentence if you disregard everything being in lowercase form which was more than likely just for aesthetic purposes. The initial impact of reading his tweet caught my attention because it works as a doorway to a more complex conversation of stereotypes surrounding the gay community and toxic masculinity. The deeper impact his tweet left with me is why is it that in our society being gay is thought as being less of a man? Straight men aren’t asked to label themselves as masculine or feminine so why do that to gay men? If a man walks into a room rainbowed down head to toe wearing a forty inch wig he is just as much of a man as Jason Mamoa or The Rock. Despite what so many have been led to believe throughout history, being tough, aggressive and hairy doesn’t mean masculine, only being a man does. And there’s no right or wrong way of being a man.