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Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Uncloseted Media, Spencer Macnaughton sits down with Hadley Stewart to discuss LGBTQ+ rights in the United States and how the platform hopes to break out of the queer media echo chamber.
When the Nickelodeon show that Spencer Macnaughton was working on was cancelled in February last year, it took him a mere week to cook up the idea for Uncloseted Media. The Emmy-nominated and Gracie Award-winning journalist and producer, who has the Wall Street Journal and ’60 Minutes’ on his resume, tells me that there was a gap in the media landscape for a news website that focuses on rigorous, non-partisan, LGBTQ+ investigative journalism in the United States. Launched in September, Uncloseted Media boasts over 4,600 subscribers and an editorial partnership with Gay Times that sees its journalism reach millions of consumers.
As we sit down for our interview, a month before Donald Trump is due to be sworn in as the next President of the United States of America, Macnaughton takes me back to 2016. It turns out, according to him, that the pill of a Trump presidency is easier to swallow second time around. Back in 2016, Macnaughton was in a war room with hundreds of other journalists at the Javits Center, in New York City. Hilary Clinton was due to walk out, a glass ceiling awaited her victory speech. “I think it was supposed to be like a metaphor for her breaking through the glass ceiling,” he recalls.
Then, the unexpected happened. The huge TV screens in the war room began showing the results of each state, quickly becoming apparent that Trump was the frontrunner to the White House. “It was just absolutely flabbergasting shock,” he tells me of that night. “Shell shock across all the hundreds of journalists’ faces, as we realised Trump is going to likely win.”
Macnaughton took to the streets once Trump’s victory was announced. “It must’ve been around two or three in the morning when I walked home, and it was actually like a feeling of being in an apocalypse,” he says. Putting aside Macnaughton’s own political views, he argues that Trump was never expected to win. “It was like an out of body experience for everyone, especially in New York City, right?”
This time around, Macnaughton spent election night with friends. As they watched on their TV that Trump was going to win again, he says that there was still a sense of shock, but to a much lesser extent. “I think we learned a lot about America in the 2016 election,” he tells me. “America is like 50 countries in one, in many different ways.” Macnaughton has, for instance, reported extensively on far right extremism in America. He has reported from various corners of the United States, having spent two weeks with the Klu Klux Klan, as well as covering various terrorist groups like Atomwaffen and The Base. “You can meet one hundred different people who are all nice, but they’re all, Trump, Trump, Trump!” he says. “So a lot of America really is, in many ways, MAGA.”
Canadian-born Macnaughton tells me he’s been outraged by injustice from an early age. It’s a quality that he admits can make him a stubborn person, yet arguably one that would prepare him for a career in journalism. During his undergraduate studies at McGill University in Canada, he lived in a houseshare with ten girls. One day, his housemate came home and confided in him that she’d been raped. The police, Macnaughton recalls, weren’t helpful and didn’t do their due diligence, according to his housemate.
At the time, he was helping out at his university’s TV station. She asked Macnaughton to interview her about her experience. “The interview went viral across Canadian media,” he says. “Every single Canadian news outlet picked it up. I think it was even used in Canadian law schools to teach about consent.” The experience left an imprint on him and drove him to apply to Columbia Journalism School in New York.
As both someone who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, and a journalist who reports on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States, Macnaughton doesn’t shy away from the fact that he is concerned about the rights of queer and trans people under the next Trump administration. When asked about Trump’s views on LGBTQ+ rights, he tells me that people can’t deny that Trump has been “spewing things that are unquestionably transphobic and hateful.” In his view, “there’s a really aggressive and violent rhetoric about some of the most marginalised populations in our society.” Moreover, he argues that a lot of the media are currently failing to hold Trump to account on these views. “There’s a normalisation effect of that rhetoric that almost translates and seeps into the media ecosystem,” he says.
There are also people, I venture, who might say that the media aren’t reporting on Trump fairly, especially given the fact that he’s described news organisations as “enemy of the people” during his first presidential campaign. Macnaughton says that he feels that some parts of the media are platforming transphobic and other offensive views under the guise of balanced reporting. “People think it’s normal to have two pundits hop onto cable news in prime time, and one of them is just transphobic, and that’s okay all of a sudden?” he replies. “The President Elect ran on a campaign of transphobia and attacking the non binary community, and large parts of the queer community.” He believes that some news outlets are selling out in an effort to have “sexy debates and crossfire fights” on television. Something which he believes is the antithesis of what it means to be a journalist.
Having reported on attacks on LGBTQ+ freedoms in the United States, Macnaughton began thinking about setting up an LGBTQ-specific news organisation to tackle some of the biggest issues affecting queer and trans people in America. In his view, the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights has gone unchecked by the media for too long. “They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing,” he says of anti-LGBTQ+ rights groups and those who are lobbying for anti-LGBTQ+ policies. “They’re Ivy League educated, they come dressed in suits, and have massive amounts of money. Their goals are to erase most of the LGBTQ population from mainstream society.”
Macnaughton argues that by starting a platform that investigates America’s anti-LGBTQ landscape, he’ll never run out of stories, “Anytime you can document evil and expose evil, it’s a sign that you’re doing something right as a journalist. And the amount of uncovered evil in this anti-LGBTQ+ ecosystem is a mountain.”
One of the main things he hopes to achieve with Uncloseted Media is to “peel the onion back on this anti-LGBTQ+ ecosystem in America” as a means of exposing the money, power and people in this space. “Because they’re not just coming for trans folks, they’re coming for the whole community. And they have been doing this for decades.”
Yet starting a news organisation in the current media landscape is challenging to say the least. Many outlets are cutting down their staff significantly or folding altogether. It’s something that Macnaughton had to carefully consider when he was crafting the idea for Uncloseted Media. “I knew that a for-profit LGBTQ+ investigative journalism model just wouldn’t work,” he tells me. So he set up a non-profit instead, and began fundraising in February of last year, as well as recruiting interns from the LGBTQ+ journalism course he teaches at New York University. Stories are published on the outlet’s Substack page, with readers having the option to pay for a subscription, or read articles for free. One could argue that the business model resembles that of the Guardian, whereby readers can contribute a voluntary donation to a charitable trust to support its journalism.
He views Uncloseted Media as one of the first media outlets to break out of the queer echo chamber. So who is he trying to target, I ask. Uncloseted Media isn’t necessarily aimed at primary LGBTQ+ people, although he acknowledges that most readers will be from the community. “I’m thinking about, say, a Midwestern mom who doesn’t know any gay or trans people, but isn’t inherently homophobic or transphobic. How do we reach her?”
Ultimately he sees Uncloseted Media taking a closer look at topics that people care about, be that politics, religion or healthcare, through an LGBTQ+ lens. “I think having deeper dive pieces on topics that are already on everyone’s lips is a smart strategy, because people want to be informed,” he explains, adding that oftentimes people might only get as far as reading tiles on Instagram to get their news updates. Although he’s keen to acknowledge the important role social media plays in reaching outside of the so called queer media echo chamber. “We want to give them more detailed pieces that are rooted in rigorous journalism, rather than just another quick headline.”
Alongside social media, partnerships have also played a pivotal part in Uncloseted Media’s success. I was particularly intrigued in hearing about Uncloseted Media’s partnership with Gay Times, I tell Macnaughton. It’s something that he describes as a “perfect marriage” between the two media outlets. “We realised that by working together, rather than rivalling each other, we’re all stronger,” he explains. Macnaughton and Tag Warner, CEO of Gay Times, realised that Gay Times had a gap in its US political reporting, coupled with Uncloseted Media’s need for a wider audience. “We’re giving something to each other that we’re both benefiting from,” adds Macnaughton. The partnership sees Uncloseted Media’s journalism published across its own platform, alongside Gay Times’ website and social media channels.
Macnaughton is undeniably passionate about the future of Uncloseted Media. When I ask him about where he sees the platform’s place in the future of the media landscape, he tells me he wants Uncloseted Media to be the 60 Minutes of LGBTQ+ journalism. “I’d say that, if you marry that with the edginess and the willingness to go there that Vice had in its heyday, that’s what I want for us,” he says.
The platform’s focus will be to get LGBTQ+ reporting in front of audiences that don’t usually engage with queer media. The next four years of the latest Trump administration will doubtlessly keep Uncloseted Media busy. In fact, Macnaughton is eager to reach audiences in all 50 states, naming the Bible Belt in the Midwest, alongside Republican-leaning and rural states, as places he’s focusing on. “For example, New York City versus the middle of Mississippi. They’re two very different worlds for LGBTQ+ people, but it’s super important that we get our stories, not only to the former, but most, even even more critically, to the latter.”
Spencer Macnaughton is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Uncloseted Media. Main image by Alex Wohl.
