I spent one Saturday morning late last year on my couch toggling back from Grindr to Scruff to Grindr to Scruff. I don’t remember what I was looking for; all I remember is that I was looking. At some point, I realized three hours had passed, and I still hadn’t moved from my couch or started my day. Even if I had, it undoubtedly would have been interrupted by a hook-up app, and/or a hook-up, though the latter was far less likely.

Last year, author Garth Greenwell suggested that Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life could be the great gay novel that contemporary culture was waiting for. A few months later, Greenwell produced his own contender for that title when his acclaimed What Belongs To Us was released. Around the same time, Alexander Chee’s novel Queen of the Night was released. Thatt’s another beloved book that’s widely regarded to be gay—if not in subject matter, then in sensibility.

“What a depressing state of affairs that making this web series about gay people is necessarily a political act. That’s so stupid,” says Adam Goldman, the creator/co-director/co-writer/star of The Outs, the cult web series that debuted in 2012 and returns today for Season 2 via Vimeo. Goldman says that he’s been asserting the inherent politics of making a show about a group of friends—many of them gay—in Brooklyn since its early days. What has changed in the past four years, though, is his comfort with labeling The Outs as a “gay show.” Goldman told The Atlantic in 2013:

If you care about gay culture and/or good writing, you need to read Garth Greenwell’s debut What Belongs To You. The slim novel, which chronicles a multi-year relationship between its narrator and a hustler named Mitko that he hires after meeting him in a bathroom under the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria, has been acclaimed by the likes of the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the New Republic, which called it “the Great Gay Novel of our times.” Since its January release, it’s gone on to become a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Depending on where and how you were looking, it was a terrific year for gay pop culture... or a rotten one. While representations of gay folk in media have never been more varied, they still aren't varied enough. They are still overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly affluent, overwhelmingly male*. Below are some quick summaries of the conclusions that I've drawn from some of the gay-oriented pop culture I consumed this year. When thinking about this post and why these representations matter at all, I used these words from bell hooks's intro to Black Looks as my guide: "It is only as we collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen."