Nurturing a community in the online world

The flip side
Still, it is easy to give the Internet too much credit. American attitudes toward homosexuality have been liberalizing since the 1970s, long before the Internet arrived; that shift has been accelerated by the Net, but it’s inappropriate to conclude that the Net had a primary role in it.

“Things began to change [with] the civil rights movement and the feminist movement and then the gay rights movement,” said Katherine V. Forrest, a pioneering lesbian author who writes best-selling novels starring Kate Delafield, a lesbian police detective. The Net is a “facet” of that, she said, but “I think a number of things brought us together as a community.”

“Oddly enough, one thing that happened that we thought would absolutely destroy us was AIDS, but what that ended up doing was it absolutely united us as a community,” she said. “It brought many lesbians into the lives of gay men because we were there as nurturers, sometimes as nurses, as good friends, as supporters and as part of their activism because of the revulsion against that illness.”

And for all the help the Net has been, it has also brought about changes that not everyone is happy with. Take Vilanch’s observation about how gay people make contact.

Richard J. Schneider, writing last month in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, ticked off a range of touchstones of gay life in America that look endangered by the Internet: “Small bookstores have been closing one by one, a casualty of Amazon.com; gathering places such as bars and clubs have been disappearing in many U.S. cities; local papers are struggling because they’re not getting the personal ads that once sustained them.”

More troubling, Belge said, is that the universality of the Internet has made the gay community easier to reach for those who would prey on it.

“It opens up especially gay youth for more victimization and potential exploitation,” she said. “We all hear the stories — right? — of someone meeting someone on the Internet and getting taken advantage of.”

What’s to come?
In the long run, the impact of the Internet will be measured as much by how it allows gay men and women to talk to one another as universally it allows them to talk to the outside world, because the gay community has its own divisions along lines of geography and socioeconomic status.

“If you talk to somebody in Chelsea or in West Hollywood, they’re going to say, no, [the Internet] hasn’t changed anything. But that’s not who it really changed,” said Alvear, the sex author. “The people who were out and proud ... that’s not who the Internet changed. The Internet changed everyone else.”

“I think that the Internet is actually a great equalizer,” said Damian McNicholl, an author in Pennsylvania whose novel, “A Son Called Gabriel,” was a finalist last year for a Lambda award.

“I believe that through education and through the portrayal of gay and lesbian people on the Internet ... that they live in suburbs, they write, they’re doctors, they’re lawyers ... I think that gradually it’s going to lead to total equality,” he said.

That day hasn’t come, Forrest said, but “today things are ever so much better.”

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