Growing up in a world driven by social media makes expressing your feelings a lot easier. With different apps like twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr, people are able to instantly upload a picture of their dinner for everyone to see, take a quiz determining their personality based on their favorite Breaking Bad character, and even share videos of themselves coming out to anyone with access to the internet. I have noticed that lately more teenagers and young adults are confessing their true selves to their beloved YouTube audience. It almost seems like a trend, to come out of the closet via mass viewed videos. This worries me because identifying oneself in the LGBT community should not be considered the latest fad. Being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or queer is something that many people struggle with in their lives, and have for years. I personally know people that are so terrified to come out to their own parents for fear of rejection from the people that are supposed to offer unconditional love. However, with this internet trend, it seems like it is some kind of force that is pushing them out of the closet. This issue does not personally affect me, but I definitely see it as an issue. No one should feel like they are being forced to do something that they are not ready to do. 

In Ingrid Hu Dahl's "Youth Media is Coming Out," she focuses on the positive influence that the media has on people struggling with growing up queer. She states that being able to connect with other people on the internet about their similar issues helps people better understand themselves and feel more confident with how they identify. Hu Dahl mentions Myspace as her main social media platform. Today there are so many more platforms available to anyone with the means to put themselves on the internet. She also talks about how these online groups are what those individuals need. Dahl believes that for them, it provides a place of becoming and belonging, and bringing these social groups to life is what is helping keep them alive. According to the article, Ingrid Hu Dahl is the editor of Youth Media Reporter and program officer of youth media at the Academy for Educational Development. Dahl holds a Master's in Women's & Gender Studies and is a founding member of the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls. This gives her an enormous amount of bias considering this is a part of her job. This does make her a more credible source because he job is to build confidence for people who can be discriminated against for just being who they are.

In GLB Adolescent's "Coming Out" by Battina H. Riley, the focus is on the inclination of adolescents coming out during their youth, rather than waiting until they are older. Riley states from the results of a study, "1 in 20 American youths are estimated to be among the population of gay males, lesbians, or bisexual females or males (GLB)" (Riley 1). With some research Riley comes to the conclusion that more youth are coming out at an early age due to stress. In her article, Riley mentions several reasons why people decide not to come out and she also gives statistics of rejection between males and females of similar age ranges. She does this to show why coming out is such a difficult process to deal with in these people's' lives. This article comes from Journal of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing. It cites several different credible references such as psychology and other medical associations. 

In Rob Cover and Rosslyn Prosser's "MEMORIAL ACCOUNTS Queer Young Men, Identity and Contemporary Coming Out Narratives Online," the authors focus on the use of social networks as a way for people to tell their coming out stories. It states, "Through networks of dissemination, frameworks of youth-targeted guidance via storytelling and prerequisites for minority community belonging, they encourage a requirement that the young queer masculine subject re-frame or 'forget' the diverse complexity of the past and its disparate moments and flashes of affect" (Cover and Prosser 82). They believe that these social networks make it easier for people to come out, but that it is creating a trend. The article references to coming out narratives and how the process of coming out has changed throughout history. Cover is a professor at a school that specializes in cultural studies, while Prosser is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing.

In these three articles there are several different aspects discussed that I agree with such as the need for support for these youth going through a difficult transition in their lives. I do believe that social networks are inducing some type of trend for coming out stories. I do not completely agree with using the social networks as a crutch for coming out instead of coming out to the people you know. I think if someone is not comfortable with coming out to the people that are close to them, then they should not be comfortable coming out to strangers. However, this is not something that I deal with personally so I cannot account for these people's' feelings.

