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Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Internet Research The Harvey Milk Institute Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Internet Research Edited by Alan Ellis, Liz Highleyman, Kevin Schauer and Melissa White; Harrington Park Press, New York $39.95 cloth, $14.95 soft cover; 180 pages including index. 
This is a very helpful guide for beginners on the Internet, learning to use their computers and searching for information about homosexuality.
The chapters cover the basic way to find such information through search engines, which take a word or name one seeks and finds the resources already on web pages Many of these sources appear under the term "queer", but there are alternative words to get around use of that word. And each chapter gives you a list of pages that cover such aspects as law, queer studies, bisexual info, biological issues, etc. There is also a list of community resources, including non-web resources, such as those with phone numbers, under issues such as youth, hate crimes, etc. To quote a source, "it's mind-boggling to realize how much information is out there. The key is to figure out how to access it and how to filter out the good stuff from the fluff." This of course has been the purpose of the gay movement from the start in 1950 and it is strange that most of the young people starting the gay aspects on the internet seem to not have known of the work of ONE, Homosexual Information Center, etc., which are the pioneers of information and service to the gay community. ONE celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. If you put the word "gay" in the space marked "search" you can get over 3,000 resources. The job is to find out which are the best ones for your purposes. And there are 'chat rooms" where you can share information, discuss issues, etc. Of course you must use common sense in such conversation, on the Internet, just as in person, so that personal information is not given to the wrong people. I feel "left out of it," but get some comfort when it seems that this tool is not that old. In the interview with Gay.com founder, Mark Elderkin, one of several good interviews that give us information on how people got started in the gay area of the internet, mostly at universities, he says "I acquired the domain name Gay.Com in 1994 with my partner Jeff Bennett...it was prior to the release of the Netscape browser and before people had web sites." The point is made that while good research is done at libraries and archives, getting started by searching available resources on web pages will help get what resources there are. And that cuts down on your time. The major sites, such as PlanetOut can give you large amounts of material, such as coverage of the last 5 years of gay and lesbian news, aand yet you can narrow your search so that "PlanetOut is both a mile wide and a miled deep" so that you can go to what you need, as Megan Smith, who is interviewed in this book, says. PlanetOut uses Google as the search engine, as I understand it, but there are other such engines, including Yahoo and Rainbow Query. One of the major virtues of this tool is the fact that young people can use it in their homes or in a library with privacy. If they can't use queer, they can get around it with such words as PLUSnet. Many web pages in the community are listed, under different areas of interest, such as law, community, liberal arts and the humanities, etc. Many people would never have heard of RFD Magazine, serving men in a rural environment, or the racial specific groups such as in The Black List, or sources such as Reclaiming History - which can be controversial when gay pioneers are ignored and closeted gay artists of the past are "claimed." The best answer to those seeking balanced information is the use of the Internet combined with gay/lesbian libraries/archives, such as Gerber Hart (Chicago), etc.
But until that day, there are still useful alternative resourceds today. The guide to resources given in such publications as Gayellow Pages is necessary to anyone seeking information. There you still find the list of gay professional groups, gay archives, gay bars, gay centers (gay/lesbian that is), and local publications. And local gay newspapers and national magazines are still useful, since the papers are usually free and available in many book stores, where the gay magazines are available. From ONE in 1952 to hundreds today, our "cause" is certainly more visible today, to homosexuals and non-homosexuals, and we are all starting out "equal" in learning how to use the Internet to advance our information and issues. And this book is a good start. Billy Glover is a director of the Homosexual Information Center. A pre-Stonewall pioneer of the movement, he worked with Mattachine Society in San Francisco with Hal Call and Don Lucas for a brief time after attending a 1959 Mattachine Convention in Denver. Glover had joined ONE in 1953 (which had emerged from the Mattachine in 1952) to start its first publicly distributed GLBT magazine In 1965, with Don Slater, he co-founded the Homosexual Information Center, Inc., a "service" of The Tangent Group from ONE. He now works mostly from his home in Louisiana. His life and times is recalled in the forthcoming book, Before Stonewall. |