Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us tonight, so
before we begin, we would like to start with a land acknowledgement. So the campus of Lewis and
Clark College occupies the historic homelands of several indigenous groups. These groups
include bands of the Chinook speaking peoples, including the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas,
Tumwater, and Watalala [bands of the Chinook], as well as the Tualatin Kalapuya and the
Malala people in the Willamette valley. Today, the descendants of these
indigeno
us groups are primarily members of the grand Rond and the Silet's
confederated tribes with Chinook and other tribal relations at Warm Springs, Yakama and the
Chinook nation. There are also many indigenous groups that remain unrecognized by the federal
government and their stories still demand and deserve to be heard. Our institution chooses
to honor Lewis and Clark---two colonizers, instead of the many Indigenous peoples
that this land was taken from. We ask that you take some time to recogn
ize
whose land you are currently occupying, and the necessity to return native land,
strengthen indigenous sovereignty and heal relationships with native nations. With this
in mind we urge you to pick up a flyer from our table outside with information about Federal
recognition for the Chinook nation, thank you. Hi everybody! Thank you for coming
tonight, my name is Cameron Kalopsis, I use she/they pronouns and I'm a Sociology and
Anthropology major here; and welcome to our first keynote ev
ent of our 43rd annual Gender Studies
Symposium. This year's symposium "Being Online" explores the ways in which digital technologies,
internet platforms and online spaces shape and are shaped by our understandings and expressions
of gender and sexuality. The events this year explore the intersections of gender, sexuality
and digital technologies through conversation about work, leisure, sex, violence, family
privacy, activism, self-expression and much more. Good evening everyone! My name i
s August
van Nieuwenhuysen, I use he/they pronouns, I'm a Biology major, Gender Studies minor
and also one of this year's co-chairs. Tonight, alongside my co-chairs Cameron
and Molly Gibbons, we are overjoyed to present to you a keynote presentation by Dr. Avery
Dame-Griff, titled "When it Was Ours", a queer and trans counter-history of the internet. Before
the event begins, we have a few housekeeping announcements. We want to remind you that we
have a full schedule of events lined up for
both tomorrow and Friday, Make sure you check out
our website for details about all of the events including panels, workshops, readings, and more.
Please note that registration is required for the community dialogue session and the Art for Social
Change open studio, you can find registration links on our website. We'd also like to remind
you to visit our student-curated Art Exhibit in the Watzek Library Atrium. We'll host a reception
celebrating the Art Exhibit next week on Tuesday March 12
th at 3:30, and the exhibit will remain on
display until the end of the month. We also have a virtual gallery, which can be accessed via the
link on the symposium website, and our Instagram page. Speaking of, we encourage you to follow
our [Gender Studies] Symposium Instagram account, @lcgendersymp, where we'll be posting
photos from this year's events. This year, we are hosting a raffle drawing each day. For
each event you attend, you can submit one entry for a chance to win a copy of a bo
ok written by
one of our phenomenal keynote speakers. Tonight's prize is Avery Dame-Griff's book, "The Two Revolutions". If you still have a ticket to turn in, please raise your hand
and somebody can come collect your ticket and we'll come and draw the winner! Does
nobody have a ticket? Perfect, you guys are doing great! Okay, so the rule is you have to be here
to win, so if nobody claims it, we draw again. So we're going to announce the winner now, we ask
that you stay, you identify yourse
lf and you come speak with Kim over here, at the end of the
Q&A tonight to get your prize. Okay, I'm reading the number: 5958649. Okay, okay, no---well,
I'll give you all a second, my bad. I can read the name instead, if that's easier. Sophie Levine? Is Sophie Levine here? Okay, so come see Kim! Come see Kim at the end of
the Q&A to get your prize, thank you! Oh, also---sorry. If you
were not the winner, if you were not Sophie Levine, you can also---the book will be available
[for] purchase
at the reception foyer after the Q&A. Awesome, congratulations Sophie! Final reminder, please remember that
private recordings and photos of this event are not permitted. Photos from this year's
Gender Studies Symposium will be posted on on our social media platforms next week. This
keynote event is also being recorded, and will be made available on the Gender Studies
Symposium website as soon as possible, and there will be time for questions and
discussions following the conclusion of the
presentation. As you listen to the presentation,
we encourage you to write down notes, ideas or questions. Cameron and I, along with our
fellow co-chair Molly, are delighted to have Dr. Avery Dame-Griff joining us for this year's
Symposium. Dr Dame-Griff is a lecturer in women in sexuality studies at Gonzaga University
His interdisciplinary research considers the long-term impact digital technologies have on
social movement organizing and political activism. His first book the two revolution
s a history of
the transgender internet explores how the rise of the internet transformed transgender social
and political organizing, from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. That book will be available
for purchase, as we said in the reception, following the presentation. When considering who we wanted
to invite to the symposium, we were drawn to Dr. Avery Dame-Griff and his work, as it explores the
digital world in relation to gender, sexuality and community. Dr Dame-Griff's work highl
ights
this complex reciprocity of digital spaces. Like when he says in his book, "just as the current
trans movement wouldn't exist in its current form without the internet, the internet was
inescapably shaped by the presence of trans users". Similarly trans youths and adults who are
are coming out now, continue to face challenges online that echo earlier revolutionary struggles.
In addition to his teaching and writing, Dr. Dame- Griff is the founder and primary curator
of the queer digital
history project, an independent community history project cataloging
and archiving pre-2010 LGBT+ spaces online The QDHP has many extensive ongoing projects,
such as the read-write memories oral history collection, dedicated to documenting queer oral
histories of the early digital age. In 2022, Dr. Dame-Griff was selected to be a public Humanities
fellow for Humanities Washington, developing a series of interactive online exhibits, teaching
guides and workshops about the history of LGBTQ+
communities and online spaces. We hope Dr.
Dame-Griff's talk places the poorly understood role of technology in queer and trans social
movements in a historical and ever relevant present political context. We invite you to
use this newfound understanding of the digital past to imagine ways our ever changing digital
worlds can be used to create a better reality for all users and all people, but most especially
those experiencing ongoing and shifting forms of digital oppression. Please join m
e in giving a
warm welcome to Dr. Avery Dame-Griff. Thank you for having me! If only my students were
this excited to see me at the front of a stage. So after that lovely introduction, I will
just go ahead and get us started. I want to say thank you to the organizers and Kim because I am amazed how well it runs---this seems to run like a well oiled machine, I'm
very impressed, it's an amazing amount of work! Because I know how much it is to get all these
pieces together, it's a lot of work,
so I'm really impressed. All right, so to begin this talk
before we kind of get into the meat of it, I'm going to begin with me. So when I grew up, there
were always two computers in our house. There was one for my father, which he used for his jobs as a
systems administrator; and all of his hand-me-downs, which are what I got, so you could see a photo
one of those from 1995 here. This is not exactly a top-of-the-line computer, but for a 7-year-old old
in 1995 this is a pretty nice setup.
And because of the nature of my father's job, we also had a home
internet connection much earlier than many of my peers. I have these memories of us sitting side
by side on weekend nights; he is working on an issue with a server for work, while I am chatting
with strangers online. So if you used enough early text chat, you become used to answering the
same question over, and over, and over. "ASL" or "Age, Sex, Location", now would more accurately be a
"AGL" for "Ag, Gender and Location", so
in my moment of answering this question over and over, I was like,
10 maybe? I experienced a new realization: I could lie! I never lied outright, because I was
nothing if not a constant rule follower as a kid, but the ability to lie by omission about my
gender was a practice I would engage in repeatedly throughout my early years online. I
would want people to assume I was male, even if I didn't identify that way in my offline life. And
looking back this practice fits with my larger trans ex
perience---using the internet as a way to
express masculinity outside of offline spaces where I didn't feel safe exploring it. And, so when
I came out in Alabama when I went to college in late 2006, I didn't know any trans people in my
daily life. Instead, I connected through trans specific groups online, and I relied on digital
guides to find local resources. So mine is just one anecdotal example, but it represents some of
the ways LGBT individuals benefited from digital communications. An
d though I didn't know it at the
time, LGBT individuals had been connecting via computer since since the early 1980s, long before
I was chatting away. They'd been building vibrant social networks, sharing resources and engaging
in digital activism; yet for folks who weren't active at the time these communities' names, like
the Mail Forum, Compu Who, Cross Connection or the Back Room, for example, they have no meaning, but
for members of these spaces they represent so much more. The first pl
ace they might have felt
comfort asking the question to themselves "am I gay?". Monthly meetups with lifelong friends now,
where you found the shoulder to cry on when yet another friend or lover passed away---and in many
cases, these were spaces wholly owned and operated by and for queer and trans folks. They were with
all of their many imperfections---ours. So, in this talk, I'm actually going to explore the history
of three such LGBT communities, from the early years of digital life. 28 Ba
rbery Lane, Multicom
4 and The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau, or GLIB. Going---and all of these go back even before
most Americans had heard of the internet. Each of these stories represents a road not taken. What
could have happened, but didn't? These communities don't easily fit into the popular narrative of the
internet, which emphasizes early government funded networks, and then the later dominance of venture
capital funded Silicon Valley corporations, both before and after ".com"
bubble of the late 1990s.
I'll note I don't tell these stories to idealize a different kind of past though. Much like a lot
of other digital spaces at the time, the population of LGBT digital spaces tended to be middle class,
male, and white. Yet, they're designers and users how they imagined what digital communications could do
and be as a new way to build community first and foremost, not extracting profit. that I think is
what we can take away from it so by redirecting our attention towar
d these seemingly forgotten
histories I argue we can identify a blueprint for how to get Beyond dominant ideology and you'll
hear this ter a couple times to imagine otherwise imagine a digital world that ensures those
community members who have the least access or are most often silenced have a voice now
for each of these histories for this one I'm actually ironically not going to begin online
but I'm going to start with an older medium so we'll begin with the story of Robin whose love
aff
air as she describes it with computers and online communities begins in an unexpected Place
Books uh so her first exposure to computers comes in 1986 an X's micro computer as she says a sort
of strange offbrand computer purchased by mail order I think uh that my ex never used and I only
tinkered around with a bit a few years later she acquired a TRS 80 which despite her best int
mentions uh did not prompt her to write as she says the the Great American novel uh instead it
just kind of sat t
here Gathering dust but then in 1991 she encounters a novel that would transform
how she thought about computers Sandra scopa T's detective novel everything you have is mine so
in it lesbian Pi Lauren lorano delves into the world of bulletin board systems to solve a string
of murders while Lano Begins the novel a total computer novice she quickly becomes an addict
staying up all hours to play games chat with other users and troll the straight computer dating
boards to flush out a killer Yes
those existed in the 80s in the process developing a permanent
case of what her girlfriend dubs modem hair uh also just to get a reference to the ' 80s when
we're talking about gifs this is what you think it is it's just they were not high quality in the
80s so scopa Ton's detailed descriptions of using bulletin board systems fascinated Robin but she
didn't have access to an adequate computer setup until 1992 when she convinced her then partner
it's a new partner to invest in a new desktop
computer in modem well was ostensibly to support
her ongoing job hunt cuz she'd been recently laid off she really had some less legitimate reasons
she really wanted to get onto a bulletin board system yet when it came time to pick one to
connect to from the list of hundreds in the Seattle area she didn't know how to choose until
she saw a name she recognized from another queer themed book she'd actually just finished reading
28 Barber Lane the address of the boarding house at the center of
armed mopin tales of the city
it was to her fate and she wasn't the only lgbtq individual to log on 28 Barber Elane or 28 BBL
uh as it was more commonly known was one of the most popular bbs's in Seattle by 1990 it had over
1,000 registered members and it regularly ranked in the industry magazine board watch's annual
reader Poll for overall best BBS as well as being voted the best bullets and board system or BBS
in Washington state which is a pretty impressive feat for G lesbian BBS howeve
r before we get into
this specifically I've used this term a lot I'm going to explain what exactly is a bulletin board
system so this is a photo of a very small BBS here as you can tell it's just you got one computer
you got a modem and you got some Associated equipment like external drives so bulletin board
systems or bbs's were some of the first publicly available ways folks communicated using a modem
in a computer so this graphic lays out the basic process using your modem you call the b
bs's phone
number it connects you to the bbs's modem located on the other end of that phone line and if it's
available you log in it's important to note here that given the technical realities of bbsing
most regular users of a bulletin board system lived within its immediate area code since
calling a BBS long distance could get quite pricey the longer you stayed on the line This is
an experience I suspect many of you have never had since you no longer have landlines so at its
core the BBS
is basically just a server that you can log into and has lots of different functions
you can chat you can send and receive email you can access files a host you can play games GES
basically in some ways it's the very first form of social media so this is a screen for modern
BBS that's run by a vintage Computing Enthusiast so 28 Barber Lane was founded in March 1985 by
sisap JD Brown who was inspired by his encounters using bulletin board systems which he'd initially
sought out as an alterna
tive to the local barene Brown who quite evocatively described his early
days using bbs's as better than an inflatable companion for sex he really said that hope to
create a space where other users could find resources and have a similarly positive experience
however in 1985 the BBS is still a relatively new technology and it could have a really steep
learning curve as brown knew from his own process so in a 1990 interview he admitted to
the Seattle gay news that he needed the help of a tec
hnologically savvy 15-year-old punk rocker
just to get 208 BBL up and running so the way he made this technology approachable was using the
frame of 28 Barber Lane from Tales of the city essentially as an analogy for how to transform
this flat digital file structure into a more comprehensible 3D space for new users Brown named
each of the board's forums after different spaces in moin's boarding house in the novel series as
well as a few others and without even knowing their contents which a
re in parentheses on this
list up here the titles roughly make each form's purpose clear so also with users reconfigured
existing Community terminology to reflect the different ways they were using their bodies uh
in the bedroom as you can see that is where you go cruising uh users looking for a good time
weren't engaging in SNM which was a bar scene term at the time for uh excuse my pose standing
and modeling but they called it sitting and moding and variants on this boarding house art
wo
uld welcome users to the board throughout its lifetime visually reinforcing the sense of
this bustling Active Home Where Mrs madreal who essentially ran the boarding house in the novel
where she's standing by to welcome you so this use of tales as a spatial framing device continues
even as the board expanded unsurprisingly 28 bbl's user base was male dominated at an estimated
ratio of seven members who identified as men uh for everyone who identified as a woman so
in 1990 uh the women wood
Forum was created as a women only space the forum's name was a
reference to a women only Festival modeled on the Michigan Women's Music Festival in moin's
1987 novel in the tale series significant others so as the ssop or systems operator
that's sort of the term they use you can substitute administrator for that uh so as sisp
brown was landl of the bulletin boarding house as the Seattle gay news put it so in this role
he welcomed new members he offered a safe ear he settled disputes amongst
tenants and did
the house cleaning needed to keep the system running adopting the Miss Madrigal username
or handle in BBS vocabulary allowed him to transpose the fictional characters ethos uh
which mopin at one point has a character in the novel describe her as quote a land lady
of almost Cosmic sensitivity he can transpose that onto himself and cultivating member trust
was particularly important given the board's topical Focus users who had as they put it
homosexual curiosity relied on t
he board's anonymity to protect their identity as siso
only Brown and those who would follow him in the role had access to not just every message
and interaction but members private information which could be used against them yet they felt
safe knowing only Madrigal could enter their room and once the homosexually curious
so to speak felt ready to expand their Horizons beyond the digital confines
of 28 BBL they could attend one of their regular meetups 28 bbl's ssops
sponsored for board m
embers where they could socialize they could meet face to
face could meet some hunks and Speedos apparently and Beyond just getting to know each
other these events were also sometimes fundraising opportunities for local lgbtq nonprofits like
at the time in 1993 hands off Washington which was an advocacy group dedicated to fighting
anti-lgbtq ballot initiatives in Washington state so by meeting in this physical space
28 BBL becomes a visible part of the local community though I haven't been
able to track
down photos there's record that an official contingent from the board marched in the 1993
Seattle Pride Parade it's worth knowing these meetups also shaped how regular users thought
about Their audience when posting it's one thing to get in a flame war on a digital Forum
but it's another when those who are burned by your insults might be attending an in-person
board event you might think about shouting at someone on the internet differently
when you're standing next to them a
t the bar on the flip side these off these online
connections could transition to offline friendships or even romance so these two listings
from the Seattle gay news are just two examples uh so in the only oral history I've done so far
with a 28 BBL regular she compared her relative Comfort calling up a friend she'd made via BBS
to hang out versus her experience in Facebook groups for queer women of color in Seattle where
she'd felt totally comfortable taking a 4-Hour car ride with someone
she'd only met via 28 BBL a
thing that appalled her non-computer using sister at the time she said she could never imagine
doing the same thing with someone she'd met via Facebook even with all this getting along conflict
between members was still inevitable as we can see from the quote here we now have all been
on the internet for a long time we know that people like to yell at each other and while some
users like uh reform school girl as her handle uh considered themselves quote verbal ex
hibitionists
uh who didn't mind healthy debate other member conflicts could really devolve into insults
and flaming necessitating the sisap to step in and moderate unlike a contemporary platform
though where moderation decisions can seem to be at the whim of an unnamed faceless Corporation
if they're even now made with a human in the loop at all the architecture of the BBS meant that the
ultimate Authority lay with the sisp who was far from faceless most members had some sense of who
the s
is up was uh from a passing familiarity to an ongoing social relationship so when issues amongst
members arose they had the ability to reach out to the sisap directly as implied in this example from
a 1992 Seattle news piece it wasn't unheard of for a board's sisp to pick up the their home phone
line only to immediately get an earful from an grieved BBS user in these interactions they can
try and persuade the sis up to change their mind that their behavior was justified or in the case
of Tr
uth Hurts bigots they can get inventive with their handle to indirectly chastise their critics
there's a lot of freedom and flexibility here in some ways and even though this isop is also
notably technically the ultimate authority of a BBS the number of interactions as a BBS grows they
require oversight that extends well beyond what one human can manage necessitating the appointment
of volunteer moderators so on 28 BBL one of the first fora to have a volunteer moderator appointed
was in wom
en wood in 1991 so the reasoning behind this move was twofold Jeff Thompson who had taken
over for Brown in 1990 he could no longer manage to moderate every form on 28 BBL but he was also
uncomfortable with the idea of a man as the final Authority in what was ostensibly a women only
space So the appointment of Bailey is the user who seps in to moderate appointment of Bailey
represents how the bbs's affordances they allow sis Ops to share governing power ensuring women
had the agency to both
moderate and set policy over their Forum it's also worth noting speaking
of policy the irony of a forum named after a fictional take on Michigan Women's Music Festival
debating the place of transexual lesbians in women only space in the early 1990s is definitely not
lost on me and I suspect they're very closely related given the timing as you can see we never
lose some things they always come back uh as we're thing the women identified users of 28 BBL use the
space of women food to also in
vent a novel form of offline protest to be enacted beyond the bounds
of the board The Tavern takeover so in mid 1991 uh women wood users were engaged in an ongoing
Community debate over whether local bars and taverns were welcoming to women uh they were also
had the seemingly Eternal concern that all of the lesbian bars kept closing for some reason so in
response to all of this a women would user vanilla Dyke she leveraged the bbs's reach to connect this
large network of queer women some of
whom likely had no social connection outside of 28 Barber
Lane to organize what she called operation Tavern storm a one night takeover of the local
gay nightclub neighbors so users focused on Neighbors in particular based on
the visual and textual rhetoric of their advertising as you can see here
you've got the language where men are free to be who they are uh an art evoking
the work of hypermasculine gay artist Tom of Finland uh I would not suggesting if you
don't know who that is don't
Google it just yet uh it's lovely just don't Google it anyway so
as a political tactic uh the Takeover represents a literal embodied argument by occupying Neighbors
with their bodies the participants of operation Tavern storm are saying we're here we're queer
we're ready to buy beer why won't you serve us too and in her article on the campaign and
this is quotes from that author Barbara S she draws clear parallels between other kinds
of embodied protest actions like Take Back the Night rall
ies with operation Tavern storm and
according to Sarah's coverage uh more than 100 women participated and an quote air of
sisterly joviality pervaded throughout the night and as she says the impact of
this as she saw it would be felt long after so this sense of safety and belonging
were also a defining aspect of the Rochester New york-based G lesbian BBS multicom 4 however
multicom 4 didn't actually begin life as a gay and lesbian BBS so m for founder Chaz Antonelli he
first launched his B
BS uh initially named Cactus 800 as you can see here in 1979 as an on an Atari
800 in his bedroom uh it was available from the moment he got home from Middle School uh to when
he went to bed so over time as he got older this evolved into multicom 1 which he ran throughout
the 1980s first out of the computer shop where he worked uh and in fact when he described it
to me it was sitting in the middle of the shop so PRP prospective Shoppers would come in and
as he said they'd look at this thing
humming away and they'd hear all the calls coming in and
it was just kind of [Music] attracted later on it would sort of become his unofficial roommate
following him from apartment to apartment while he finished his undergraduate degree uh and like
most roommates it often failed to pay for its part of the electric bill and it kept antelli up at
night working through its various issues however his dedication to it never wavered as Antonelli
tells it the bbs's evolution mirrored his own comi
ng out so he first opened a private gay and
lesbian sub BBS City Cy so CI T Ys i s on what had now become multicom 2 in 1985 it attracted
about 70 users which was good for the time but not great so a year and one major software
upgrade later though Antonelli had transformed the board's identity overnight regular callers
were greeted with a new name multicom 3 and a login screen with an upside down triangle and a
new tagline Rochester's first gay bulletin board system in fact antino thinks i
t was probably the
first in Upstate New New York and you can see an ad for it over here down on the right so the
board would eventually evolve into its final form multicom 4 throughout its life multicom
4 offered a variety of forums uh from active chat rooms and spaces to safely come out to
sponsored forums for local community groups such as AIDS Rochester or a forum for Deaf lgbtq
folks the text n nature the sorry text based nature of the board was particularly meaningful
in Rochester whi
ch also happens to be the home for the technical National Technical Institute
for the deaf it's attached to the Rochester Institute of Technology so through the BBS deaf
gay and lesbian folks in Rochester who' struggled to make connections to the local community were
able to build longlasting friendships through the BPS and also notably one of the big attractions
to the BBS was the ability to play games online against other BBS users these were often Simple
Text based Affairs but folks coul
d get hooked uh even Antonelli was ins SP as he tells it one of
his lovers had become addicted to playing this game Galactic Empire I know now it looks very
exciting uh where players are basically they're competing to maintain the largest space Empire
so he tells me this story when he's talking to me one night at 3:00 his lover at the time he
runs into the bedroom he's like [ __ ] shaking Antonelli awake and she's just shouting in his
face you have to delete Gumby 2 right now he keeps beati
ng me and when Antonelli refuses
and so he cites his responsibility to treat all members impartially he's like I can't do that
I can't just delete someone cuz you're losing his lover did not take it well uh he packed up
his stuff and left that was the end of that relationship so as you can guess from these
anecdotes the most distinctive aspect of multicom 4 were its members they were in Antonelli's
telling a dedicated group they consistently attended the board's annual parties and barbecues
which served to strengthen their local connections and shared sense of community uh at one barbecue
a member donated a limousine Hood they'd spray painted with the board's distinctive logo which
is pictured here over on the right with all ticket proceeds going going to support the BBS
so in Antonelli's recounting uh and he showed me a photo of this when we were talking he didn't
really think the hood was that much of a prize but apparently the competition to win it got actually
really fie
rce in fact as you can sort of see over here on the left after the board closed former
members continued to have a weekly in-person meeting at a local Rochester coffee cup for most
of the 2000s so throughout multicom for history antino resisted ever commercializing the board
and multicom 4 fully incorporated as an official 501c3 509a nonprofit under the name multicom data
services in the 1990s so Antonelli really thought of it as excuse me using a member centered model
similar to public bro
adcasting in the US framing it as as first and foremost a community resource
all callers who called into the BBS had a set amount of free time and folks paid in extra time
via donations like members and in fact he always used the term members to refer to users because
to him it was these folks on the board who really kept multicom for running also as head of multicom
data service Services anoi also accepted donated computer equipment which here volunteers would
repair and at times redistrib
ute for free to those who couldn't afford to purchase a computer
system and whenever members would run out of free hours and if they couldn't afford to donate to
pay for more they could earn more by serving as on call volunteer tech support for other folks using
this custom touchone phone system Antonelli had rigged up notably also multicom 4 maintained
free public terminals in locations in both Rochester and Buffalo New York where prospective
members could access areas of the board for fre
e and given a couple of these were in bars frankly
they also kind of used it for pre grinder hookups so as the board enters its late 1990s Antonelli
was surprised to find the proportion of non-lgbt folks using multicom 4 was steadily increasing
but it wasn't because of Any increased political awareness or allyship though no it was because mc4
offered the fastest and most consistent internet connection in the region the demand for internet
had become so overwhelming that by 1999 mc4 had func
tionally shifted from being primarily a BBS
to serving as a small community internet service provider as an ISP multicom data services used
their services for the community offering free web hosting and server space to local organizations
who didn't already have access to these Services n mc4 wasn't the only BBS to shift its focus toward
the internet this was also the case for Glib the gay and lesbian information Bureau so John lar
Moore founded glib in Washington DC in 1986 following his o
wn explorations of other bulletin
board systems like multicom for GB was maintained by an incorporated nonprofit Community Educational
Services Foundation from the beginning laramore emphasized the BBS as an Information clearing
house a common space where folks could connect to other community groups in the Washington DC Metro
Area lib also maintained public terminals in two different G lesbian bookstores in Washington DC
and so Lara Moore had these great ideas that he would be providing al
l this information again the
idea is the name is the information Bureau but as humans what folks really loved about the board
he found was the social aspects what he called the electronic cocktail party and this is what
was attracting members much like with 28 BBL and multicom 4 the online and offline also blurred
when members met for parties at lar Mo's house and they had a regular Friday night happy hour in fact
laramore tells this story that they were have this happy hour and they would
have it at different
bars for a year and then almost immediately after they stopped the bar would close he's like we
basically have killed three bars in the DC area by having our happy hour and so beyond just kind
of having all these social connections it's worth knowing members could be politically involved in
1993 President Clinton sent a letter of thanks to glibs members for their work helping process
constituent letters sent to the new Administration which in 1992 had received more mail
than the
entire tenure of the previous presidential Administration as Clinton said at the time
members quote computer expertise and dedication to ser and Devotion to service were quote making
a real contribution to the future of this nation very presidential stuff uh so that same year
glib ranked number five in board watch's top 100 boards poll which is a really rare feed given
the prominence of non-c community specific boards within the field mostly the stuff that ranked were
the places
that you could find possibly IL legal software and it would climb the ranks in 1994 and
then the height it would reach number three yet member's Devotion to service wasn't just for the
nation but to glib laramore and fellow members uh glibs maintenance was funded through donations
and fundraisers which could be so successful that laramore found himself with excess donations which
he turned around and then donated to other local gay lesbian organizations but the most remarkable
I think in my
case uh of members devotion came in 1994 when lamore's partner John [ __ ] passed away
from complications related to Cushing's disease known by his honorary titles wicked stepmother
and Mrs ssop uh [ __ ] had been a key figure in the bbs's history ofering serving as its de facto
party planner for their events uh even as [ __ ] joked that lar Moore spent more time with his
extramarital mistress glib then with him [ __ ] was [ __ ] steadfastly supported Lara Moore's work
following moroni's i
nitial hospitalization members were quick to offer their support to laramore
as well as to send cards and other gifts to the hospital even though [ __ ] couldn't access a
computer laramore made sure to take quote a print out of all the kind thoughts sent his way on glib
which laramore said really brightened his evening that be [ __ ] and [ __ ] had asked me to thank
you all for your supportive good wishes [ __ ] would pass away 5 days later in his announcement
post we've lost Mrs siso laram
ore shared both the details of his memorial service and moroni's final
wish to be surrounded by quote a sea of flowers as laramore described it in an interview with Jason
Scott in 2002 members sent so many flowers you could hardly get in the room for the viewing in
response to lamore's post members also took the opportunity to reflect on what glib meant to
them as in this post from user Jeff who saw the BBS as quote the Basking glow to which many
gay folk and myself have turned many times t
o warm ourselves against the chili world out there
and regular gber Allison gliber was the term they sort of used for themselves as did many others
emphasized in their notes to John laramore that glib was more than just a digital Community but a
chosen family in her view glib stood as a living Memorial to laramore and moroni's yearslong work
creating a space where members could find their chosen family when they had nowhere else to go and
for laramore not just glib itself but as he says her
e the people who are glib had quote literally
kept me together during the past month following maron's death it was quote all the other wonderful
and very special people on glib who made it more than just quote a piece of software running out
an impersonal piece of hardware in fact laramore was so touched that he publicly archived much of
the correspondence around moroni's death on his website both as a memorial to [ __ ] and as quote
an inspiration to others who lose their loved ones so gl
ibs Peak membership came around 1995 as more
and more individuals we're starting to seek out a new more graphical medium the internet so in
1996 laramore shifted Focus to a new Venture a nonprofit internet service provider zap I don't
know how to pronounce it with the exclamation point so for first 1995 or 9.95 and eventually $
12.95 a month uh subscribers got not just access to the internet but access to email web hosting
and a bunch of other similar Associated Services by 1997 the funds f
rom zap uh had become the
primary vehicle for both funding Community Educational Services found foundation and glib one
of zap's most unique features though was its one for 10 program so for each 10 paying subscribers
zap offered a free subscription to quote those in our community who suffer serious chronic
health issues Financial constraints or other personal challenges precluding even the modest
zap monthly subscription fee so this commitment to Community Support was in laram Mo's view a
found found ational aspect of the zap customer as you can see from this list from this page
on their site who not only quote believes in supporting nonprofit Community Services but also
in helping your neighbor who's less fortunate and while there's no clear documentation on how
many or what kind of individuals took advantage of the one for10 program given both glib and
the community Educational Services Foundation focus on gay and lesbian issues it's likely that
one of the ser ious chroni
c health issues at the Forefront of lamore's mind with people living
with AIDS For Whom the internet might be one of the few ways they could access information and
support from home in this testimony of forck which is the only current docum documentation
I have for someone who used this program is an example of what free internet access
could mean for those with chronic health conditions so as we review these three histories
there are some key them that emerge first the importance of commun
ity all of these bulletin
board systems would be nothing without their committed core users second there's strong local
connections even though the BBS was a digital space the board's culture was deeply informed
and connected to its geographic location and lastly being for people not for profit all three
of these bullettin W systems were either formally incorporated or informally acted as Community
engaged nonprofits first and foremost so I've spent about the last half hour talking about
b
ulletin board systems but I'm curious so I'm going to I'm going to take a little poll real
quick uh satisfy my curiosity maybe how many of you before today had ever heard of a bulletin
board system raise your hands oh that's more than I thought now my next question would be how many
of you have read my book okay not as many so but if you hadn't it doesn't surprise me because
the question comes with this why hadn't you heard of them what happened to them quite simply
the worldwide web happen
ed and transformed how folks communicated via computer I love the cover
of this book it's the most aggressively like late 90s thing on the planet that cool backwards
baseball cap and he's surfing on a keyboard anyway so websites didn't have the same
limitations as a bulletin board system and they totally upended the economics of
digital Communications bbs's were always more focused on social communication and
community building and it was notoriously impossible to really make a living off
running a BBS uh the folks who did did it in the oldest way you ever make money off the
internet and I'm going to leave that up to your imagination so as you can see here in this chart
from Kevin Driscoll's book the modem World which is a history of the bulletin board system that
came out last year uh the number of active bbs's begin to decline sharply in 1995 and this trend
accelerates throughout the end of the 1990s 28 Barber Lane held on for a few more years but it
appears to have closed
sometime in 1997 to 1998 so in contrast to bulletin board system
websites and the early web seemed like nothing but one money-making opportunity after
another commerce was the driving force behind adoption of the internet once the visual web
browser became accessible to a wide audience with the release of Netscape which you can see
a screenshot of one of the earlier versions here in 1994 and this emphasis on the internet as a
primarily transactional space only increases after the crash in
2000 the bullet board systems that
did stay active supported their existence by as we've seen transitioning from primarily being
a bulletin board system to being an internet service provider or ISP that just happened to
also have a BBS kind of grafted onto it this was the route as we saw for both multicom 4 and
glib even then however both of these organizations were nonprofits first and foremost and this is
reflected in their Community oriented approach to providing internet access both of
them offer
different ways for those in the community who couldn't afford the price of connection ways to
get online that's certainly not the case now when you're lucky if you have more than two hated Mega
conglomerates to choose from for your internet access I should have put Quantum up here cuz I
think quantum local but unlike when the bulletin board system being replaced by new technology
this time the end of the burgeoning nonprofit isps that these boards had turned into their end
was a
ll about economics so to explain this I'm actually going to return us briefly to the story
of multicom 4 so I end talking about it with a shift toward providing internet access in the
late 1990s and by Antonelli's account multicom 4 was doing a decent business enough that they
needed to move out of their existing location in the back of his uh leather goods store into
a newer larger space so as part of this move Antonelli convinced his new skeptical landlord
to invest in laying high-end fib
er optic cable to the building on the ground that it would
attract new tenants not long after the move though Antonelli noticed that multicom 4 had a
new neighbor in the building an America Online server node as Antonelli recounts it that was the
moment he knew multicom 4's days were numbered simply put they wouldn't be able to survive the
competition of what had become a mammoth internet service provider like AOL who no doubt hoped
to take advantage of the very infrastructure he' worked so
hard to get de for multicom 4 zap
faced a similar fate driven out of business by their inability to take advantage of new All
Digital infrastructures controlled by large corporations so far this sounds like a parade
of sad stories right we have three really interesting digital lgbtq spaces once important
pillars in their communities now largely lost to public memory however I think these can also
be understood as hopeful if we think about them differently not as failures but evidence
of p
ossibility uh so in her article feminist theories of Technology feminist Science and
Technology scholar Judy wisman makes a point to note that quote up here Technologies are
not the inevitable result of the application of scientific and technological knowledge and
people and artifacts co-evolve reminding us that things could be otherwise and as black
queer studies scholar Ashen Crawley argues in his essay otherwise Ferguson the politics of
otherwise represents quote the disbelief in what is
current and a movement towards and an
affirmation of imagining other modes of social organization other ways for us to be with each
other in these three stories I see the roads not taken at the time digital social platforms
grounded in their local context communities with a real commitment to Shared governance
and isps focus not just on economic gain but on giving back I see a digital space that was
for lack of a better way to put it ours and like the mid 1990s we're currently in a moment
of
possibility for digital communities individual's internet experience since the mid-2000s has
been dominated by large centralized platforms like Twitter Facebook or Tik Tok with that comes
Market friendly approaches to communication which can have disastrous consequences for lgbtq
individuals as you can see from these three headlines here I suspect some of the people in
this room might have experienced some of this now I am not telling you to go out and start your own
BBS I mean that wou
ld be cool and I would totally log on but that's not very realistic uh but I'd
argue that we can and should start looking for a future beyond what corporate platforms provide new
possibilities are arising with renewed interest in decentralized plat I don't know why I said it
like that decentralized platforms that rely on open protocols such as Bon's activity Pub protocol
and blue sky at protocol these are things that no one corporate entity could fully control and even
if these two things d
on't become the foundation of the next 20 years of the Internet it's
important to not let our imaginations be yolked to the driving impulses of late Sage capitalism
knowing these roads not taken can Inspire us to think otherwise to imagine other ways for us to be
with each other online to return to a time when we would go to a place talk to the people and know
without a doubt that it was ours thank [Applause] [Applause]
you do want to do the so I guess what'll
be open it says questions for
Q&A I also note I me say at the beginning I didn't talk about anything mostly in my book but if
you have questions I'm happy to answer them you want to start over and move up yeah yeah okay hi my name is meline first and foremost
thank you so much for coming to LS and Clark I really appreciated hearing your talk it was really
informative especially learning more about modems which no longer are a thing that exists so I'll be
giving my dad some recommendations but a lot of of the new modern p
latforms that you were referencing
at the end of your talk don't really model The Forum board style of BBS and I was curious if you
could speak to more contemporary like lgbtq plus Forum boards that still have that like text based
like reply thread format and yeah wow that is a very good question and the reason I'm pausing and
thinking is is like one of the things interesting is it's a very good question but it's also like
a part of when you move away from a corporate platform this is a thi
ng that you would see with
BBs is to everyone is their own distinct culture and so as you develop different cultures you
could see the ways which some can be more text oriented some will be less text oriented and so
I this is one of the difficulties of persuading someone to say move to Mastadon which in some
cases can be correctly described as um a bunch of white dudes who want to yell at you about
Linux um it doesn't have to be though but it depends on where you go and that's one of the
t
hings I think about I I know I'm sort of like I don't have any individual recommendations um
but what I can say is this is one of the things that is great about the idea of decentralization
is if you can pick where server you are and that can have its own culture and so if that culture
is very heavily teex space you'll be getting a very similar experience possibly it's just it'll
be more about like it's so it's like going to a restaurant there's five things on the menu and
then going to a b
uffet that is clean going to the buffet and being like I have 30 choices and
I get to pick what I choose for a long time we've been stuck with the menu and I'm like I would
like for everyone to get to have the buffet and then maybe you can find that um so yeah I don't
have any specific recommendations off the top of my head but I think this is I think I will say
like I think it's possible certainly um cuz I can think of platforms that start out like that even
say oh God there's that Instagr
am account that became a lesbian dating app Lex yes where Lex
starts out like this and now Lex is essentially sort of like Venture capitally and like that's the
think of like how do we move away from this like how do we make money fast track into turning
into an app um so that is I want Poss exists I can't think of anything off my head because
anything I think of is sort of like it's like well how do we make money we turn into the thing
that's successful so I hope that helped yeah yes hi he
llo my name's Josie I'm a
queer history Enthusiast um and so I just wanted to ask doing research about
online history can be difficult because it's Anonymous or the websites go down and I
was wondering if you could talk about how you found sources for this and like people
to interview um despite the like wall of online yeah I think this is true this is something
I talk about in the book but it's true here is so much of often my sources would be was something
printed thank God that meant so
meone saved it if it was on paper uh so say for 28 BBL a lot of that
has been relying on the archives of Seattle gay news because they describe it so extensively um
relying on what has been archived in the Wayback machine um but sometimes not so much in this
work but um a part of why like I'm doing these or histories is to capture the memories because
what is left is what is in people's brains in some cases these folks are passing away from what
I know vaguely of John laroy's age I think he
's 75 to 80 so I don't know how long he's got left
I hope he's got a long healthy life but I know folks like him from this era will be passing and
what's left is in their memories so some of it is finding people and talking to people um and
the joke I sometimes also say about doing this work is that I called email elders and I'm like
did you save all those old computers in your basement because they're history now please don't
throw them away cuz I mean that is sometimes what it is it is um
at one point I was connected with
Dallas Denny who if you know your trans history was a very uh important activist throughout
the 1990s and 2000s ran a major Information clearing house and I was put in contact with her
and was talking to her about getting some digital donations and in the course of that email thread
she says to me you know maybe I've been meaning to maybe I'll fire up my old Commodore 64 and see
if there's still anything on it there's like one vintage computer Enthusiast w
ho understands what
a Commodore 64 is it's just old let's say it's old um but so it's a part of it is just finding
people finding what they saved looking in the unexpected places but more often than not it's
print it's things that are saved in print or um one of the only screenshots I have of the gay
and lesbian Community Forum on AOL comes from a promotional video AOL produced for God knows
what reason and somebody put it on the internet archive and it just happened it's like 2 seconds
an
d like that's what I've got so it's sometimes it's just looking in the unexpected places cuz
unlike with print there were not these formal archiving structures so you will be looking in
shareware CDs you will be looking in newspapers and or you will just be bothering elders and
hoping they'll talk to you and give you their trash right we got a couple all right
so I'll let you pick because we got a couple I guess we we'll go up and then sort
of like curve down hi um I'm Zach I'm just curious
because you were talking about how
we've kind of moved from uh more localized communities into right with the expansion of
the internet and the worldwide web into more um broad space Anning right by almost necessity
of How It's been structured and you see a lot of parallels in that in terms of like city building
and all of that I've seen a lot of comparisons um between European and American communities and
also um like South American and how they structure their cities and their communitie
s where we are
a lot more the structure kind of prevents local communities from forming um and I'm wondering of
course that's just a parallel I'm wondering what are your thoughts on if it is even possible to
go back to locally run um internet communities like that or if we've reached a point where we
can support some level of that but by necessity there's going to have to be broader spanning
communities on the internet that maybe more have subsections of local groups but are parts
of large
r larger organizations um and then beyond that would going back to local communities be
something achievable on an individual scale right on an individual local community scale
or would that be something where we would need some sort of even government intervention
or policy change to make something like that achievable that is a wonderful very large
question uh I think there's I tried really hard not to use the term fediverse in this
talk which I again there'll be like three of you groanin
g when you hear that um but I think
there is there a part of this work that I don't talk about is the early BBS Network phonet which
was founded by a queer Anarchist skater Punk um a literally designed it based on the principles of
Anarchy it's this very interesting weird Network um that I think gets at some of the same issues we
have now cuz I I think it is possible requires a rethinking of what is this thing for cuz so much
of how we've understood post the. crash has been about big spaces
the idea we would all this is
the this is the I won't call it X it's not X it's Twitter whatever um this is the Twitter problem
of you take all the crabs and you put them in the bucket and you're like let's see what happens
and it's like sometimes the crabs can make their own little corners but they're never really safe
to themselves there's no way for them to have any kind of privacy um so it like the system can do
great things about connecting folks but there's all these other hazards th
at make it equally
unsafe and I think this is a thing that this research being done by like Robert Gale at um
I think he's now at Concordia University um and there's a book that just came out from University
of California press called sharing governance it's open access that is about um governance
online where folks are starting to think about what these structures could look like because
a technical infrastructure like a decentralized protocol allows for small centralized servers
but indi
viduals can connect to each other but your host server is in the case of some of them
they run like cooperatives so everyone involved gets a vote in some of the decisions yes there
is a governing board but folks get to vote and your funds like any other Co-op your funds support
the structure um so I think folks are starting to think about what these structures could be like
cuz that's one of the thing about the bulletin board system they were not popular or wellknown
so they worked out a lo
t of this stuff but nobody really remembers that because most Americans never
used them or if they heard of them to be perfectly Frank they heard of them because mass media
said they were full of porn like that was the way they were branded like they were these dirty
mediums and but they also worked out a bunch of this stuff and now we're ENT kind of rediscovering
some of that work so folks are really starting to think about what is it like now that we have the
technical capacity to have wh
ere you can be inner connected but also decentralized and so moderation
Authority can be local in a way that it wasn't before all right so we had for hour yeah thank you so much um I'm wondering you
talked to in the very beginning about going to college in Alabama and I'm curious with the
like bbs's as um like kind of organizing spaces for like offline organization um if in your
research you've found or if you could speak more to like online spaces as like a replacement
if there's like no g
ay bars in your town that you can invade um like if if that question makes
sense is like um did these bbs's or other places function as like a third place in the virtual
world um in like spaces of more suppression of like LGBT community oh yeah they they absolutely
do one of the um so the Washington post covers glib twice and in the introduction the introducing
anecdote to one of these columns is a story with Bob who is a graduate student at the University
of Mississippi at the time but who
's a regular glib user about how he cannot find any of this
in Oxford Mississippi and I believe it cuz it would have been 1993 then or he's struggling
to find Community but glib becomes the place he finds people and he describes how like these
days when he's struggling that's when he dials in he's like sometimes I'm doing it every day
sometimes I can go a couple weeks but that's where he's coming back to and for folks who had
no connection like that was key um even if if a board itself wasn
't gay or lesbian when they were
connected to a network like phonet which connected a bunch of them together phonet just like you see
on Facebook carries specific forums for gay topics so you can still access some of that so even
if you can't find one that's specific to you you can access networks of that other information
and it was absolutely true for folks who weren't connected otherwise like that was key for them
especially trans users cuz trans users this is where the internet matter t
he most when you could
not find a local community that was where you found it until you could afford to go to some
sort of inperson meet up uh and so even though someone was very locally based they were still
ways if you had nothing else you could still get connected I guess over and then down yeah okay yeah um I have more like a general question for up
to today things as somebody who is tries to do a lot of community organizing and tries to it's
a little not against but has a hard time sta
ying connected through online services and like spaces
because of just what social media and like onine spaces has become I'm a lot I'm tending a lot
more to try to do things in person and meeting in person community spaces being like one on one
why would you say are some of the main ways that you've seen that people are nowadays using
uh basically online spaces to reconnect back to that inperson setting if any and what are your
recommendations to basically utilize the platforms that are av
ailable right now um to reconnect
people and then with the understanding that some people won't actually be able to go to this iners
spaces especially for like Mobility reasons or for other safety reasons um what are some of the
ways that you would say we can basically combine those two to make them work with each other and
not against each [Music] other oh the last part of that question is a hard one um it's certainly
true I if I think of a modern analog this is the local Facebook group ag
ain I you could tell
how old I am and I'm a local Facebook group uh but it is sort of like having a place where
you do some of that connection offline or if the younger version of this being like the the local
Discord server if you've got like a Discord server fur the space that's a way to stay connected
but often that space is then attached to a physical space so I'm based in Spokane Washington
so Odyssey youth movement is the lgbtq essentially Youth Organization and Center so like they ha
ve a
physical center with regular meetups but they also have a Discord server and that's a way for them
to stay connected to a bunch of members especially for youth who are maybe live a half hour away
can't get in as often but it's still local to them like still possible if they can get a ride
to attend stuff but there might not always be but they can stay connected so I think it's especially
when the any of these areas are attached to some sort of physical infrastructure is what makes it
possible I think the the question of hybridity is that is where some of this does break down and
there's not an easy answer because it is that is the thing about computers especially early on when
microcomputers in the' 70s one of the arguments for them was around the way in which they would
increase access for people with disabilities in different ways and so it was like a reason to Lad
them but also as with anything else you idealize it and then you miss the ways in which these
folks actu
ally use the technology that doesn't fit your neat narratives um or the way in which
the technology actually doesn't Advantage them and I think there's there is no good answer but is
always ATT tension and this is why I think having non-corporate options allows for someone to say
if I want to think about how I'm designing this how am I building say rules and infrastructure
and expectations you're actually working with members listening to what members need as opposed
to being like well this
is industry standard it's like well is what the industry does always
best for people or do we want to talk to the people what do you need cuz maybe this is the
um uh well I think about teaching the pandemic the idea of hybrid teaching I was terrible at
it I'm sure some of you are having flashbacks when I say something about hybrid classes some
folks really good at some are not um but with that move there was never a conation of what is
that actually look like what are students when it's on
ly successful is when it's like well what
do students actually need and talking to them and so I think if there will be spaces where it will
work even using existing tools it's about talking to what do folks need what do you need to make
this work for you so you can feel involved and engaged and then trying to do your best to meet
that instead of just being like well you know we got all this other stuff to worry about it's
like no you need to Center these needs first over the other stuff be
cause the other stuff will
get it self- handled these folks often do not I hope that that that is not always I wouldn't say
the best answer but that's what I can think of yeah hi um so I wanted to ask so there there's been a
long history of course as I think a lot of us know of conflating um queerness with explicit and adult
content and I um and it's been used for a long time for oppression and uh silencing of of voices
and stuff like that but um especially recently I think on the internet
there's been a lot of
discussion around this with um es uh I think the big thing recently that was in your presentation
was uh Tumblr got rid of that and as someone who grew up on Tumblr and had that as sort of like
a uh a formative queer space I just want to know like do you think that that is uh that some things
like that and things like I I believe there was a sort of push for only fans to get rid of their
explicit content at one point um and I I would just would be interested in hearing
your thoughts
on whether you think those are Market manipulated or uh primarily sort of queer repression motivated
or some combination of the two somewhere in between I think I I think this is the market
I would put this as the market facilitating oppressive politics in the sense that this
is an argument I make at the end of my book that's basically like whenever there aquarium
trans users they will always be a problem for a company they will always be a problem because
for some section o
f the people funding them they will be associated with this in the same way
when you see that Tumblr takedown a part of that was around Apple standards around what is
appropriate content and the threat that was made we yank your app out of the app store and then
where does all your money go so all these Market forces collude in particular ways and we see this
throughout the entire history of the internet is in when we when we I say we for queer and trans
folks as a trans person when we are
there we are always some sort of threat or problem to them
because at some point someone's going to be asking but why are they here aren't they bad
and so I think this is why I really H even at the end of the book I hammer into that
ownership thing because when we own it we make those determinations when queer folks are in
control of those decisions they can set different standards but there are also different options
for how you interpret this when a corporation is in control they are goin
g to lean toward what
is the most Market friendly solution because advertisers also hate this stuff like this
was always so one of the things I talk about in the book is the history of AOL and that I
promise I'm not going to summarize the whole chapter uh but that until 1994 AOL banned use of
the words transsexual and transvesti because of their association with adult content like you
were not allowed to say it and if you said it too many times your account was banned and so
there was a wh
ole campaign led by trans users to get that overturned but a reason I mentioned
that it's a part of that Association was in their term essentially how their moderators worked
those terms equaled adult content and a part of that concern was this was happening at the
same moment when AOL is trying to convince all of America to sign for America online I don't
know how many of you lived through the AOL CD carpet bombing of the mid to late 1990s uh that
was a campaign waged against all of us but
like they were trying to get Americans online they're
trying to get middle class families and a part of what you see about what is known as the Cyber
porn Panic was all about the idea that kids could encounter adult con and some of that adult content
was queer people existing so we will always be a problem for them when we are not in control and
so I think we see that with tumler we see that over and over and it is it is not thought of as
oppression it is thought of as Market forces but th
at is what it becomes it becomes about we need
this off because our advertisers don't like it it'll attract the wrong people it is not what we
want to accidentally come up it's like we will always be a problem unless we're in control
and we get to set the standards for how this works so I think I think to we're
about it one one more feel it for one more yeah yeah yeah yeah and I
think people can talk to you yeah yeah thank you so much for your uh talk it's been
really amazing to hear you s
peak and hear about uh all of your work um one thing that I've personally
just experienced over the course of my lifetime being on the internet uh specifically in relation
to queerness and transness is that um it becoming seemingly more widespread especially among uh
young people and young adults um is that it's the result of some kind of social contagion that
people are learning about it through the internet and they are becoming trans or are thinking their
trans because it is cool and tre
ndy um and that is unfortunately been happening in my lifetime
as long as I can remember and I wanted to know if that kind of similar phenomenon was something
that uh you experienced um in doing your research specifically on queer and trans spaces in the
early days of the internet and online digital spaces so last on some of these early days this is
the thing I actually um I I have a whole chapter of the book where I sort of I talk about it um
because this is the thing we have this theme of
social contagion this idea of essentially what
is a moral Panic this moral Panic has happened over and over about the idea of what will our
children learn from the internet um and one of the arguments I make looking at the historical
data about trans youth in particular is if you say if have you read uh Jules Gil Peterson's
wonderful book histories of the transgender child we know what we would Now call Trans kids
have existed for time and Memorial and they have been seeking care since Har
ry Benjamin first
opened a clinic in the United States they have always been here but thing is they couldn't really
talk to each other and they couldn't access the offline trans communities so they say couldn't
really go to a meeting in fact trans adults were afraid to interact act with trans youth for fear
they would be accused of child endangerment and be arrested there were very strict rules some
groups set around any kind of involvement with teenagers or youth but once teens could talk
with
each other via computer via like a BBS and then later on mostly honestly websites and IRC a thing
again five of you know what that is um but like through aim which more of you know what that is uh
once they could start to talk to each other they could start to see each other they could start to
know that they were trans and they could encounter this concept and think of themselves differently
and this is why I laugh when that comes up and if I were teaching this class i' immediately Go
ogle
Abigail shri's book with its horrifying cover I don't suggest Googling it because that is where
these ideas of social contagion come up is that just there all these kids are becoming trans now
and my answer is just like they were always there it's just now they could talk to each other
they could start to talk to each other cuz they didn't have access to the existing Community
infrastructure same is true for G for all kinds of queerness you couldn't talk to each other until
the intern
et and talk safely unless you lived in a major city with a big like youth group like l in
San Francisco if you didn't have that you didn't know where to go but you could find somebody on
the internet and so they started talking to each other you start to see oh you know it's okay
that this is me and you start to recognize oh there are other people like me we can all have
a space we can identify like this so this idea that it's a social contagion which like no they
get to talk to each other
and you can't control how they talk to each other that's what happened
um so yeah this is why the uh social contagion is bunk it is a moral panic and it is just youth
get to have feelings and identities and I'm sorry and they get to they get to self-determine and
folks don't like it but that's how it works like and a part of how they get to self-determine is
they get to encounter these Concepts at earlier ages see other youth who identify have role models
and be like you know that's me and
that is what's happening there is no sorry I'm entering into
a rant I'll stop now we need to stop well I'm just like there is no social cion it's that
youth can talk to each other now and that makes that makes the kind of folks who talk about
social Contagion uncomfortable cuz youth are not supposed to have they're not supposed to have the
authority to Define who they are they're supposed to be told what they are and they're just not
supposed to change all right rant over we should [Applaus
e] stop
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