Nurturing a community in the online world

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Bruce Vilanch is old enough to remember how gay men used to meet each other. This was back in the day before the Internet changed everything.

“In the gay community, what’s profoundly different is when I was coming along, the first point of communication for people was a bar.” Now, he said, “most people’s first contact with each other is online.”

“It’s made a shift in a way the community behaves,” said Vilanch, a top-shelf Hollywood comedy writer, star of the Broadway show “Hairspray” and author of “Bruce! Adventures in the Skin Trade & Other Essays.” “It’s no longer centered on bars or anonymous encounters. They can all be done online. They don’t have to be done in alleys.”

Today, “you don’t have to feel furtive,” he said. Then he noted a dichotomy: “But there are lots of people who get off on being furtive.”

Staring down fear and isolation
The rise of the Internet in the last decade and a half has meant major changes in how just about everybody goes about his or her day. But this is especially so for the estimated 15 million to 17 million gay Americans.

“The Internet is the greatest thing that has happened to gay people since the Stonewall riots,” the 1969 confrontations in New York that were a turning point in gay political expression, said Michael Alvear, a syndicated sex columnist and author of “Men Are Pigs But We Love Bacon.”

“Nothing has increased individual self-acceptance, nothing has promoted more straight understanding and nothing has diminished the fear and isolation that gay people feel more than the Internet,” said Alvear, who is from Atlanta and is co-host of the British TV series “The Sex Inspectors,” which also airs on HBO.

Kathy Belge, moderator of the Lesbian Life section on About.com, went so far as to say the Internet had probably saved lives because “it’s broken the isolation for gay men and lesbians and, I think, especially for gay and lesbian youth.”

“Let’s say there’s a little gay teenager in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. Previous to the Internet, if there was no one else in his school or in that neighborhood, that kid could just think they were the only one,” Belge said. “And now they can go online and they can find chat rooms for gay teens, all kinds of information about coming out, resources to figure out if they are or are not gay.”

Belge said she had recently gotten an e-mail message from a 16-year-old girl in Australia. Fifteen years ago, she said, the girl would have had no one to turn to, but “now she has somebody that she can write to and say, you know: ‘What can I do? Here’s my situation; can you help?’”

Many prominent gay thinkers and writers echo those testimonials. Besides making it easier for gay people to reach out to each other one to one, they said, the Internet also gave them a way to coalesce as a community.

“Politically, I think it’s helped us to organize around certain issues, become informed,” Belge said, because national organizations can “get involved right away when there’s an issue going on that’s important.”

Alvear added that through sites like Family Acceptance, which helps gay people heal fractures with their families, the Internet “has not only changed gay people, but it has changed straight people.”

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