“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.
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“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.
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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.
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Around this time as well, dial-up providers began offering tentative Internet access through email and telnet.