20 Titles of Gay Papers I Want to Write One Day

I am an Academic. I write it with a capital A because I want you to realize exactly how pretentious I am trying to be when I call myself an Academic. Especially because all this means for me right now is that I go to school and grade the extra credit assignments of undergraduates who simultaneously think I have a PhD already and also think I’m incredibly unqualified if I don’t give them an A. Oh, and I also write papers. So many papers. I’ve probably written 600 pages this year alone? It’s bananas. It’s okay though, because I love writing papers. My favorite part of writing papers is coming up with a title, obviously. One year, I only used Kanye West lyrics to title my papers. I titled all my papers alphabetically another year. Writing can be soul-draining, even when I enjoy it, so it’s little things like titles that make it all feel worth it. Even if no one reads my papers except for my professors, at least the title is banging.

In my notes app on my phone, I keep an ongoing list titled “Titles of Papers I Might Write” because I live a life where this is the kind of thing that excites me. Here are 20 of my best gay/gay-adjacent ones.

1. “You Shoulda Never Called Me a Fatass Kelly Price”: Neoliberal Love on Catfish the TV Show
2. Re-imagining the (Fe)Male Gaze: Drake as a Postmodern Video Vixen
3. “God Isn’t A Man!”: Learning to Be Black and Queer from the Color Purple
4. Culture in Your Body: Queer People of Color’s Role in Popular Culture
5. Women Seeing Women: Why Moana is the Queer Feminist Film We Need
6. It All Falls Down: Social Difficulties Facing LGBTQ Youth of Color
7. Experiencing the Body’s Grace: The Importance of Gender Inclusive Wedding Liturgies
8. Not For You: Queer Porn as Queer Liberation
9. Today for You, Tomorrow for Me: Charitable Giving Patterns of Queer
10. Bobby, Baby: A Lesbian Feminist Reading of Stephen Sondheim’s Company
11. Queering Masculatinidad: Teatro Luna’s Machos
12. What’s a Dental Dam??: Observations on Teaching Queer Positive Sex Ed to Middle Schoolers
13. Bisexual Representation in Disney’s Mulan
14. Homophobia at its Finest: Meme Culture and Queer Undergraduates’ Experiences with Mental Health
15. Jean Jackets and Jorts: Community Building in Queer Normative Spaces
16. Heaven is a Place on Earth: 1980s Pop Music and Queer Utopias
17. “She, uh they”: Teaching as a Queer Non-Binary Person
18. Three Kids, Two Femmes, a Butch and a Cat: Visions of Queer Domesticity
19. Our Names Our Selves: the Importance of Chosen Names and Families in Queer Families
20. Bois will be Bois: Exploring Toxic Masculinity in Queer Women’s Communities

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