Since I was unable to speak to my teacher today, I decided that I will just do research on my target audience, seeing that all of my ideas for my documentary would pretty much all have the same target audience, which would be teenagers and young adults.
Specifically, I am going to be focusing my research on the niche of young queers, since there is not a lot of media specifically catered for this target audience. My two documentary ideas regarding queer youth as well as different forms of art would benefit from me having a deeper understanding of what these people are looking for.
There is not a lot of research specifically for documentaries catered towards this specific group, so I went with a more broad route and decided to find sources about every type of media.
In terms of queer young adult fiction, I learned that the genre has moved through periods of limiting focus on only men, of concentrating only on issues surrounding homophobia, and of eventually moving into telling a wide variety of more diverse stories from different cultural backgrounds and beliefs.
I personally find this to be very true, and I can understand that queer stories have evolved a tremendous amount in recent years, which is often why LGBTQ+ youth have higher standards for representation and media compared to older individuals. Representation is more often criticized when it is through a queer lens, because problematic characters are necessary for every form of representation, but oftentimes they can push harmful stereotypes. It's difficult to please everyone, but for the most part people just want to see real and genuine experiences, which is something that is very easy to do when you're working with real people in a documentary.
In America alone, there are nearly two million 13-17 year-olds who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. These individuals are more likely to attend a liberal arts school and engage in creative hobbies and activities.
https://archive.urop.uci.edu/journal/journal18/05-Seville.pdf
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-youth-pop-us/
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