Holiday shopping season is the worst. Traffic builds and stores crowd, with throngs of people flooding every corner of every store with not a parking spot in sight. Items grow scarce, fetching exorbitant prices on sites like eBay and, although sales are plentiful, people always end up spending more money than they hoped.
Luckily, retail clearinghouses like Amazon (www.amazon.com) allow shoppers to skip the long lines and save more than at any in-store special. Shipping is often free and there is usually greater selection than places that only carry one or two of a particular item. In addition, Amazon’s sister sites from countries like the U.K. and Japan sell local products, making it easy to put some international flavor under any tree.
But Amazon is much more than just an online shopping outlet. It’s also a place to discover new items, trends and people. I found my first gay films on the site, sparing myself the nervousness of having the video-store clerk rent them to me. I learned about Oscar Wilde through his book of fairy tales, and I even got to meet some very handsome men in the form of posters.
Back then, users had to search for products by name. If you didn’t know the name of your film, author or pin-up model, finding items posed quite a challenge. And doing a simple search for “gay” led to a hodgepodge of items with no rhyme or reason. Nowadays, it’s much easier and faster to find products to suit one’s tastes, through the use of Amazon’s “tag” system.
By tagging items, users can indicate which products have gay or LGBT themes, creators or followers. For example, if one looked up “Brokeback Mountain,” its various tags include “gay,” “gay romance” and, my personal favorite, “cowboys in love.” It’s similar to someone using different color tags at a clothing store to indicate different discounts, but with much more specificity.
Just like browsing through the red-tagged items at a sale, people can search products based on item tags. For instance, if a person didn’t know the exact name of the film, but knew it involved gay cowboys, s/he could search Amazon for all items tagged as “gay cowboys” and find Ennis and Jack atop the list.
Using tags, Amazon has created a defacto homepage for its gay products. Visitors of the gay tag site (www.amazon.com/tag/gay) will find 4,500 products users have tagged as gay. There are also discussion boards and recommendations detailing everything from “Great books to counter Evangelicals” to “The ’90s Camp” to my list of “Good Gay Films.”
The possibilities for discovery are endless with tagging. People can tag films or TV shows with “gay-friendly characters,” books with “gay subplots” in them or even products made by a “gay manufacturer.”
For those who have never tagged an item before, pressing the “T” key twice on any product’s Amazon page will bring up a small menu, and you can type in any word or phrase that comes to mind. If you think a film or book is fabulous, tag it. You’ll not only assist fellow shoppers who want to add a little bit of gay sparkle to their holiday shopping list, you might even find some new products of your own. See, giving and receiving can be done at the same time. Well, at least on the same Web page.
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