Gay Emoji on the Rise

[caption id="attachment_166" align="alignright" width="300"] Friendly heart with rainbow flag in his hand. Free love. Funny cartoon character. Vector illustration on white background.[/caption]

It seems to have become a new trend, as more and more companies in the online industry are evidently building gay emoji into their programs and software. An emoji is a pictorial representation of a current mood or an object in a text, such as a text message or WhatsApp message. That way, the reader gets a sense of the mood the writer is in. Sometimes an emoji also shows a tangible depiction of an activity someone is currently doing. By now, more and more emoji have established themselves across all kinds of platforms. Over the years, the plain smiley faces were joined by various other depictions, such as families. A logical consequence was to give other forms of relationships a fitting emoji as well. Besides the simple gay emoji you can already see on your smartphone's software, there is now a wide selection of gay emoji.

A Google image search shows the variety of emoticons that has since emerged. Besides the symbols representing life together as a man and a man or a woman and a woman, there are also more unusual variants. Nearly every smartphone maker and various social networks offer these emoji to their users. In my opinion, gay emoji are a step in the right direction: on the one hand they convey the complete normality of same-sex relationships in our society, and on the other hand they can encourage all kinds of people to rethink. Another positive effect is that gay users can identify with the gay emoji and then use them appropriately in their everyday messages. In conclusion, it can be said that gay emoji are likely to appeal to many gay people, and it's also likely that they will be used often. It's also nice that gay men and lesbians are thus not socially excluded on social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.). So it's worth taking a look at the range of gay emoji.