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Let me try and define the aesthetic 30+, beefy, muscled, hairy, gruff, scruff, rugby types and always, importantly it seems, white. This sparked a long conversation with whose Instagram feed boasts 1,710+ images and 302k followers. I took a chance and reached out to one of the guys featured on multiple accounts and he told me, “They feature me for free!” Armed with that knowledge, I went back to a few of the pages. Are they really paying to be featured each time and on each account? Given I was told anywhere between $25-$50, one would rack up quite a bill. When pressed on that I was told that ‘they don’t want to be on gay pages’.Īcross 25 accounts of men deemed ‘hot’ by anonymous curators, the same men appear multiple times. There were two consistent replies: the first being that guys pay to be featured the second that men of colour ‘do not like to be featured’. I sent variations of that message to 25 Instagram pages, and all either replied or blocked me. Why do you not post pictures featuring men of colour?” I was blocked.
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I reached out to the page, with a polite, “Hi There great page, I have a question, I hope you don’t mind. There were no BAME men that I could see, and I scrolled as far back as 2017. As I scrolled down, I was reminded of #HoscosGate: a sea of beautiful, stunning white men, clearly targeted towards gay men. Why are so many of these ‘Hot Guy’ Instagram feeds that are not only all white but all cisgender and all buff? What does it say about standards of beauty in the gay community?Īs so often happens, a friend forwarded me a picture of your typical hot, white, cisgender, muscled, light-eyed Instagram hunk featured on a ‘Hot Guys’ page. I won’t repeat the comments from three years ago, as there is now a clear consideration, and importantly, an understanding of the responsibility of a platform that claims to speak to and represent our communities. Since then, the bodies and faces of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic men (BAME) have been featured. It did, though, change Hoscos’ approach to representation on its feed. It’s been three years since the popular gay Instagram feed Hoscos made some vivid statements when it was questioned about its stylised and whitewashed celebration of men, targeted at gay men.Īt the time the account had around 315k followers, and the ensuing media storm only increased its follower count.