‘Love and Modems’ looks at early days of online networking for LGBTQ+ people

“The Internet is often framed as a ‘global’ phenomenon and we all stay in contact via these massive international platforms, Facebook, Instagram, X, etc., that can make someone feel pretty insignificant and anonymous. However, it wasn’t always like that,” said Avery Dame-Griff.

Dame-Griff is the author of “The Two Revolutions: A History of Transgender Networking Online” and a lecturer in women’s and gender studies at Gonzaga University. His research focuses on the intersection of technology history and LGBTQ studies, transporting lecture-listeners to days of internet infancy where real-world community, surprisingly, thrived.

Before social media, the World Wide Web, and AOL, people connected online with a variety of different networks. Today’s internet can be thought of as a unified network of networks. This unification made the online world accessible to the general public, but that’s far from where internet use began.

ARPANET was one of the earliest networks and, funded by the Department of Defense, allowed universities and researchers to become some of the first institutions to engage in digital messaging and file exchange. Other networks came soon after, including one called FidoNet which became one of the primary networks for hosting bulletin board systems (BBSes).

By the early 1980s, home computer use was on the rise and the first online internet cultures were emerging. BBSes were one of the primary methods for groups to connect and communicate digitally.

Documenting some of these early online communities is what Dame-Griff’s Queer Digital History Project is all about.

“The Queer Digital History Project emerged from my doctoral research. I’d collected a lot of information about early digital communities, but it seemed a shame to keep it all locked away in a spreadsheet,” said Dame-Griff.

“We often forget that throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, there were lots of communities and services doing interesting things with digital technology but ended up largely left out of our popular histories because they didn’t fit the Silicon Valley narratives.”

The project hosts queerdigital.com, a website where you can browse images and text files of digital exchanges within the queer community prior to 2010, as well as essays discussing the early platforms and important figures of this online movement.

The site’s document collection is, for lack of a better term, a total blast to the PC past. Photos of a CD-ROM containing 1995 and 1996 materials from the online Transgender Forum. A newspaper clipping listing bulletins for specific queer groups and a brief mention of the new-at-the-time concept of internet “handles.” Screenshots of “Pride! Universe,” a social virtual world where each user has their own customizable avatar. An archive collection of more than 12,000 files documenting the distribution of critical medical information by AIDS activists.

The AIDS collection is of particular value, giving Dame-Griff a powerful tool to help younger generations understand the impact and experience of these early internet users.

“… one workshop I give includes looking at an archive of messages sent to an email mailing list for AIDS caregivers, all written during the mid-to-late 1990s to early 2000s. In these messages they can see firsthand how much being able to communicate online meant to these posters,” Dame-Griff said.

With firsthand accounts like the ones archived in this project, the stories unfold right in front of you. Dame-Griff will share some of these stories and more on Thursday from 6 to 7 p.m. at the South Hill Library during his presentation, “Love and Modems: The Early Internet & LGBT Communities.”

“My favorite one related to the talk comes from an oral history I did with someone who regularly used one of the bulletin board systems I talk about, 28 Barbary Lane. She described meeting up with someone she’d gotten to know through the BBS and driving from Seattle to an event in Oregon – and this was the very first time they’d ever met in person. Her sister was terrified for her, but she felt totally safe the whole time,” Dame-Griff said.

“Now, however, she said she could never imagine doing that with someone from, say, a Facebook group she belonged to even though everyone used their ‘real’ names and photos. I feel like this speaks to the sense of intimacy the BBS fostered, because almost all of the regular members lived in the Seattle Metro area, whereas the scale of a platform like Facebook can increase one’s sense of overall isolation.”

In an age where internet connection feels like a given and where bots and influencers seem more prolific online than average people, Dame-Griff reminds us that the internet can be and has been so much more than just a place to doomscroll.

“It’s a topic that anyone attending could learn a great deal from. Learning about how people connected online in the past, and tying that to how the internet can be used now for building community, makes it a relevant topic. I hope the discussion time at the end of the talk will be a great opportunity for people to ask questions and learn from each other,” said Spokane Public Library librarian Becky Mace.

To learn more about the “Love and Modems” presentation, visit spokanelibrary.org.