Crying in the bathroom of the club over a broken heart? He's lurking in the stall next to you. Selling your body on the streets for a quick buck? He's around the corner with a camera. Posting a changed Facebook relationship status with your sugar daddy? You'd better bet it'll be on his blog within the hour.
Philly's now infamous gay "celebrity" blogger Kyle Shemelia has become somewhat of an anomaly in Philly's gay scene. He's the first of the city's gossipy gays to actually lay the hidden cards of the rumor-prone on the table with absolutely no desire to apologize for any harsh criticisms, public exposes, or Facebook creeping that some might consider borderline disturbing.
Shemelia's popular blog "Gossip Gay," which began as an experiment last June, has garnered more than 157,000 page views since its virtual conception and amassed a whopping 232 individual blog posts, some of which have been written by a selection of guest writers, but have mostly been written by Shemelia himself. To say it has been a runaway success might be an understatement.
"The night that I posted [my first post], I woke up to 8,000 views the next day," Shemelia says.
The blogger, who isn't afraid to label Lindsay Lohan as his role model and names television cult hit "Gossip Girl" and the trash-tastic "Burn Book" from the movie "Mean Girls" as his inspiration for the blog, seems to find success with the exact things critics pan his blog for.
A quick chat with some of the blog's readers instantly draws forth harsh descriptors like "filth" and "despicable," but Shemelia remains unfazed by his so-called "haters."
"They secretly want to be on there; they just want to make a big deal about it," he says. "They like the attention."
Shemelia says he receives as many as 25 to 30 emails per day, some of which provide "scoops" and others which (as might be expected) provide commentary on the ethics of the blog.
"I find insults about me to be... I mean, I don't like them, but I don't cry or get upset about them," Shemelia says. "I guess The Burn Book was pretty mean about me, at first."
The Burn Book, a copycat blog which arose as Gossip Gay's direct competitor and has since been removed, notoriously crossed a controversial ethical line that, to date, Shemelia has not: the posting of nude photos of local gay men intended to be private.
"I didn't like it," says Shemelia, declaring his own set of moral boundaries. "I asked him to take them down; I don't like to use naked pictures of people."
All the same, Shemelia admits to having his own set of favorite gays to pick at with scandalous pictures and write verse-like posts about, likening his blog to an ongoing local soap opera.
"I love posting about Tyler [Michael]," he says. "Gossip Gay, at this point, kind of has characters... everyone else in the show is an extra."
Shemelia cites his Facebook news feed as his primary source of information, expressing frustration in response to critics who condemn his posts as invasive.
"Everyone talks about everyone anyway; sometimes you just see something on your news feed and think it's funny," he says. "Quotes that I use... I don't just make this stuff up."
Despite negative feedback, Shemelia wears his blogger identity with pride, but not without the occasional hesitance of moving forward.
"I've shut it down [before], and I've gone through times where I haven't posted about anything," Shemelia says, additionally confirming that the blog is currently on hiatus. "I've thought about getting rid of it, but I like having it; it's my baby."
To be sure, Shemelia is a thick-skinned blogger not unlike the Web's reigning "gossip queen" Perez Hilton, who has faced similar attempts to have his blog fumigated by those discontent with his site's material. He posts with not only the same Mean Girl malice he references as his inspiration, but with the same amount of tactful calculation that keeps him on top as Philadelphia's own Regina George.
"It's hot," Shemelia says of his blog, in an attempt to sum it up in one word. "It's all what I see, hear, and what people [say when] they call in to me."
And asked whether he would expand his creeper-turned-researcher blog to a Perez Hilton-level platform given the opportunity, Shemelia had only one word to say:
"Definitely."
Have questions or feedback? Brotherly Lover Brandon Baker can be reached at brandon.baker@temple.edu
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