South Korea’s gay community received heightened public attention in May 2020 when a
news agency reported that a COVID-19 patient had visited several gay clubs in the
multicultural district Itaewon, Seoul. Following this announcement, a plethora of news
content was published across various online media platforms. Through a case study of
how the news on the Itaewon outbreak spread from online news to YouTube, we
investigate the modalities of homophobic discourse and its circulation across different
online media outlets. By examining the interplay between the Korean online news
media (derogatorily called girregi journalism) and YouTube news channels in spreading
the Itaewon story, we discuss how the nationwide homophobic call-outs against the gay
community were instigated within an attention ecology. We argue that news media and
YouTube news channels work together as affective mechanisms that define the
dominant feeling rules about nonnormative subjects as a way of engaging with the
pandemic crisis, through the accumulation of affect and attention toward gay bodies