The community spirit of gays and lesbians seems to be waning. Fewer balloons go up on Aids memorial day, and pride marches suffer from lack of organisation. Is the whole community model old hat? Are gays and lesbians finally dissolving happily into society at large? No, they have just moved to another place.
Log on to one of the portals and you'll be surprised to see that the gay and lesbian community is celebrating a rebirth. It has become an incredibly welcoming, supportive, vibrant and amusing place. But confusing as well. Of the two now leading US community portals, Planet Out was the first to lure gay users away from busy bulletin boards and newsgroups in 1995. A year later Gay.com was launched.
On the EU side, a private investor made it possible for three journalists who had run the Eurogay website from Hamburg as a hobby to turn it into a professional community in 1998. These virtual commercial communities differ fundamentally from the real life ones in that they have owners. This is were the confusion starts. For when the members of any minority group log on to a commercial virtual community, they enter the digital transformation of their real life community, with its rich history of troubles and triumphs, martyrs and heroes.
Their virtual community may have a familiar face but it also has a business model. Owners of virtual communities are at pains to say they are gays and lesbians themselves. "To me, the Gay Financial Network is my family table," writes Walter Schubert in his founders' message of 1995. "I hope that by bringing my family together, and pooling our collective resources, the GFN home will reverse trends of gay hate, and stop the soul killing disease of homophobia." By bringing this family together GFN raised $6m in its second round of investment deals last October.
"Virtual communities will have the opportunity to create very substantial economic wealth for organisers", say John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong, the writers of the much acclaimed "Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities, in an interview on Amazon.com.
'Market research has shown that gays and lesbians have a higher disposable income, log on more frequently and for longer and buy more via the net than any other demographic group", wrote the Industry Standard, last February. Advertisers and investors are rushing in as Planet Out, Gay.com and GFN run to bring more content to this lucrative market. It shows: their splash pages are filled to the brim and it is difficult to choose where to click first. In their haste for net presence, many start-ups present themselves being half-ready, developing their community on the fly.
Eurogay.co.uk for instance, the English version of the German Eurogay. At its UK start on March 3, parts of the content were copied from the German site. Eurogay also has a French and Spanish version underway. The most prominent features of Eurogay are an extensive shop and sleazy news items mostly about celebrities. Another of the four new European communities started over the last six months is Sonow.net. It is owned by the publishers of BoyzNow and the Pink Paper and includes Dykesworld.
Its hit rate is already higher than that of Time Out or The Independent sites. This promises to become the overall site for UK lesbians. For the moment it asks dykes for feedback on what they want the community to be like without offering them a significant format. A sophisticated start-up of 1999 is Queerlondon.com, which targets well-off tourists with private screenings, luxury accommodation and quarterly meetups. Posh Queerlondoners smile at you in stylish pictures and declare their love of champagne and being happy. They announce sponsorship delights for "our community".
A huge part of their site is also still under construction but questions about their ambitions are met with panic stricken silence. In contrast to run-of-the mill Eurogay and other competitors with work-in-progress, Rainbownetwork stands out as an original. Launched last September, it is the most playful with fun categories like Fluff and a Quizz Heaven. They signed up Bank of Scotland as an advertiser shortly after Outrage! highlighted the bank's anti-gay remarks. Cheekily, Peter Tetchell's first column was placed next to their Java driven ad. Mark Fullalove, managing director, boasts that the British financial press reported on the £1m investment from New Media Spark, the high profile internet venture capitalists.
This net adventurer is also one of the founders of a leisure company running some of Soho's most thriving venues. How confused gays and lesbians are about the nature of online communities is shown by the fact that people volunteer to host a chat or write reviews. Would any gay in his right mind volunteer in one of Fullalove's successful bars?
Rainbownetwork, though, like most virtual communities, has a network of volunteers who are recruited with texts like: "It is through you that we'll become the premier gay and lesbian website online" or "By volunteering you empower our community".
An Amsterdam portal will start on Queensday, April 29. It is built by a small net company run by gay twentysomethings called Guts. Annoyed by the lack of interest from gay rights organisations like COC, they decided to tie together some software they had in stock to build Queer.nl. FaceBase, a popular database for gay contacts which they developed, will be integrated in Queer.nl. The company is pretty open about its motives. "We want to build community software for all sorts of groups. A busy queer community portal will be an excellent showcase for that," says Bram Heerink, one of the founders.
Whereas communities for gay men are mostly for profit, those exclusively for dykes are not. A well known, huge and wonderfully designed German portal, Dykesworld.de (1995), not to be confused with the UK Dykeworld, is the brainchild of Indina Beuche, a desktop publishing specialist of 41 who doesn't want to make a penny from it, out of "love and respect for the global dyke community". As cyberspace is now awash with global communities oozing love and respect, even her authentic support sounds suspect.
Community portals are praised by their grass roots organisations for their good works: making coming out easier, offering a smooth ride through hundreds of webpages, ploughing money back into the real-world community through sponsorships, and raising the visibility of gays and lesbians by sitting at the table with venture capitalists and blue chip organisations like Marks & Spencer, who were never associated with the gay and lesbian community before. By embracing everything gay and lesbian on the net (except hard core porn), they attract clicks as fast as possible and hope for world domination. Is that great or is that simply greed?
Gays wallow in a wonderland to check out Irish jokes here and offers of gentle kissing in a Soho fumoir there with their own gay visa card at hand. Political issues do seem to lose credibility in a banner-plastered context. Or would gays take Peter Tatchell just as seriously if he stormed Canterbury cathedral wearing a T-shirt with a Bank of Scotland logo? In commercial communities, gays are offered the alluring possibility of being connected to an enormous range of likeminded people. With such huge numbers of members however, the gay community becomes a commodity.
Addresses
www.planetout.com
www.gay.com
www.eurogay.co.uk
www.sonow.net
www.rainbownetwork.com
www.queerlondon.com
www.queer.nl
www.dykesworld.de
