The Internet, and specifically mobile technology, is an environment gay and bisexual men are using for sexual purposes. Moving forward, a more holistic understanding of gay and bisexual men's sexual behavior might be warranted to address continued HIV and STI disparities. The urgent need to reduce HIV in this population has been a driving force to develop innovative research and Internet-based intervention methodologies. Much of this work has been grounded in models of disease prevention, largely as a result of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Studies have carefully considered the ethics, feasibility, and acceptability of using the Internet to conduct research and interventions with gay and bisexual men. In kind, researchers too have adapted to the Internet to study gay and bisexual men, though not at the same rapid pace at which technology (and its users) have advanced. Gay and bisexual men have adapted to the ever-evolving technological advances that have been made in connecting users to the Internet-from logging into the World Wide Web via dial-up modem on a desktop computer to geo-social and sexual networking via a handheld device. Over that time, gay and bisexual men have rapidly taken to using the Internet for sexual purposes: sexual health information seeking, finding sex partners, dating, cybersex, and pornography.
“With gay.com messenger,” Nagler writes, “I could swiftly click on guys who popped up to see their photos, profile and stats, and decide off the bat whether I was aroused.” (Digital Queers founder Tom Rielly founded gay.com competitor PlanetOut in 1995, which merged with gay.com in 2000.In this review, we document the historical and cultural shifts in how gay and bisexual men have used the Internet for sexuality between the 1990s and 2013. At that time, existed as the first online dating site, but gay.com offered a more real-time and forward-looking experience, with the same sort of browsing and chat mechanisms familiar to OkCupid users today. Mark Elderkin happened to purchase gay.com in 1994 as a personal website, only to find that he attracted a huge audience of people looking for online information by 1996, he had relaunched the site as a chat/dating service. Erich Nagler chronicled the progression of gay social networks from AOL to gay.com to Manhunt in his piece “ My Life Cruising Online.” His adventures read as pretty typical, until you remember he’s writing about the 1990s, before anyone had heard of Google.
“It was all rather furtive.”įrom online chat it was a short step to social networking. Even on MUDs that didn’t advertise themselves as queer, cybersex “was often at least a bit queer, because you so often didn’t really know the gender of the person you were having cybersex with, even if the sex you were simulating was straight-which it wasn’t, necessarily,” Sophie says. The combination of role-playing and cybersex allowed participants to act in the guise of a fantasy character. “My MOOs were always terribly queer, in part because I’d been frustrated on other MOOs,” she says. Sophie, who was in college in the 1990s, created her own MOOs, or object-oriented MUDs, which allowed greater customization by players. And while a good deal of the fantasy was G-rated, it was not uncommon for users to engage in role-playing cybersex in private chat.
Multi-user dungeons, or MUDs, were an early form of online communal role-playing and collective storytelling, easily customized based on your own interests. Gay spaces frequently cross-pollinated with other areas of geek culture. “That policy prompted the Great Trans Debates and the Great Bi Debates every six months or so,” Goodloe recalls, “as everyone weighed in with their opinions of who counted as a ‘woman’ and whether bisexuals should be allowed in ‘lesbian only’ space.” There was also, a Usenet group that was started as a nonsensical joke by two guys in 1996, then discovered and colonized by a small lesbian community a month later. Amy Goodloe, who ran many LGBTQ-oriented lists and later founded says that discussion-oriented mailing lists were particularly popular in the lesbian community by 1997, she says, “there were some 46 email lists for lesbians.” While gay male spaces rarely attracted women, lesbian spaces frequently felt the need to limit participation exclusively to women. Even if your provider didn’t support Usenet, you could still subscribe to mailing lists on email, such as “the mother of lesbian lists” Sappho, founded by Jean Marie Diaz in 1987. The spread of Internet access enabled interservice communication across providers. Around this time as well, dial-up providers began offering tentative Internet access through email and telnet.