In honor of the fact that we have some truly precious perks (that you can get right here as a way to get something cute with your donation to Autostraddle) the Autostraddle team got together and recalled the very first gay things we saw within the electric void in which we do our daily work — the internet. Every one of our perks counts toward our fundraiser goal, too! It’s a win, win, win! (You, us and the people who get to be in your glorious be-perked presence.) So while we celebrate just how darn gay the internet has been since its birth, we hope you’ll help us keep it gay by supporting our fundraiser. We’re fundraising to make it through January 2022, and it’s true, Autostraddle would not still be here without the support of readers like you.
Comments
Oh wow, this is taking me on a nostalgia trip. I’ve been on the internet so long that I’m not exactly sure – I assume it was meeting other gay people in chat rooms and forums, but it might have been looking up Ranma 1/2 information (which although might not ACTUALLY be gay, still feels very gay to me).
ranma 1/2 is gay culture for sure
Ranma 1/2 is definitely one of the things that, for me, falls in the category of “anime that experiments with and subverts gender and relationships.” It’s really something to else to think about some of the things that these very mainstream anime and manga were doing back in the late 80s and early 90s. But as an adult, I increasingly wonder how this stuff is considered within Japanese culture, given that it was only earlier this year that the Japanese Supreme Court found the gay-marriage ban to be unconstitutional. I don’t know, but I do wonder how Japanese media that very clearly reads as a part of queer culture in the West is processed and considered by queer people in Japan and by the larger Japanese public.
I would love to read something about that!
I WISH I could remember how I found my way to the site-which-shall-not-be-named where I was first introduced to Heather’s TV recaps in my junior year of college (Actually it was probably googling Glee recaps?). Somehow it took a year of reading exclusively gay PLL/rizzoli&Isles/Glee recaps to have any suspicions…
All I can think of is the time I got my very own AOL account, and my mom set my account up with child controls, and then apparently tried to see what I could see with the child controls by going to a website called like “nearly nude Nancy” from my account and then did not know to clear her browsing history so I followed the link to the same site, which I recall having at least one very-slow-loading picture of a scantily-clad woman. But now I’m wondering if my mom knew I was gay the whole time? Like why wasn’t she searching for nearly-nude-Nathan?
…starts googling “Nearly Nude Nancy”
Probably something on a BBS… and now I feel old. Great.
I am pretty sure one of the first things I saw was gay porn in middle school. This was around 1997 & was just getting the hang of searching Yahoo & the internet in general. At the time I had just discovered the internet could be used to find nudes & would look at everything. I think I was on some site that had a variety of stuff & started clicking everything like I normal would. It lead to some gay fetish porn for men that I didn’t understand at the time.
Early witch sites! Sailor Moon! Neopets! The rainbow paintbrush!!! (I was always partial to the fairy one.) Yes to it all! Truly what a time to be alive.
I came out in 1991 so, like KaeLyn, I did most of my pre-coming out work the old fashioned way, through books and tv and weird flirting with / pining after supposedly straight friends. Plus Rocky Horror.
I’m not sure I saw anything gay on the Internet in the early days – I used the Internet so much for work and grad school that I kind of missed the whole geocities and livejournal heydays.
It may have been reading Dan Savage online or reading a review of an ff or mm romance on either Dear Author or Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. The first article I remember reading on AS was the sick lit article – not the question, but fwiw.
Who is everyone’s queer awakening celebrity?
10-year old me: Rachel Stevens from S Club 7 and Jennifer Lopez
Gillian Anderson (X-Files,natch) and Patricia Tallman (played Lyta Alexander in Babylon 5).
Looking back probably Miss Honey from the Matilda film.
So many people say that about Miss Honey!! I was totally indifferent to Miss Honey, but was really into Trunchbull, and no, I do not want to unpack that.
I found Autostraddle via Ellen/Elliot page coming out posts so there is that.
I don’t know if it counts if I didn’t understand what it was until later, but definitely Melissa Joan Hart in ‘Clarissa Explains It All’.
Shirley Manson.
That i was sort of aware of, Jennifer Garner in Alias. But years before that, my only reason to watch “Clueless” was Dionne (i never understood why she was dating Donald Faison’s character) and the day i remembered that, i was like mmmmh…
very nerdy but…Annemarie Schwarzenbach. There was a photo of her in the feminist magazine my mom read. I was mesmerized and kept looking at the photo. My mom promptly asked me if I found masculine women attractive, and I blushed. SO. much.
Yes I always liked Rachel too! Also Kate Winslet in Titanic. I guess in middle school, I had a thing for British women with great boobs.
Xena fanfic, Tom’s Xena page, and what was the other one.. yes, Whoosh <3
+1 for Tom’s Xena page, and every fic where Xena and Gabrielle go to Lesbos.
OMG X E N A. That takes me back.
Xena fanfic was my first gay internet too. I’ll be forever thankful there is so much of it. And it was so well organized too, even in the olden days of the internet.
tATu ‘all the things she said’ music video, obvs
Yes, this is right
I think probably the first gay thing I sought out on the internet was fanfic of Becca/Chloe from Pitch Perfect. I may have seen gay stuff before, but that was the first gay thing I remember purposefully looking for.
I hope Anna Kendrick and Brittany Snow know that their shower scene changed my life forever!
clips of Tila Tequila’s show, Shot of Love (Shot at Love?), which is the first video of girls kissing I remember returning to again and again. I feel like now I’ve heard lots of problematic things about her, but so grateful those clips found their way to youtube at one time.
I don’t know if it was the first thing but I remember finding a Queer as Folk forum and I was obsessed with Thea Gill who played Lindsay, that I frequented. I started reading non-straight fanfic at this point too. I think I was either 18 or 19.
CARMEN
I am also in the “some reference to “homosexuality” on some witchcraft site / forum or other” camp. The first queer thing I deliberately looked for on the internet (and I left my home, got on a bus and went to an internet café to do it because this was Long Ago) was info on lesbian bars in London – I found the now defunct gingerbeer.co.uk and had a thrilling summer of terrifying social anxiety nights out at the (also now all defunct) Vespa Lounge, First Out and (because who could then escape it?) Candy Bar. Heaven, too, and they’re still around. Three separate people grabbed my behind in the first ten minutes I spent there: ah, the olden days.
God, I was hanging around gaying on the internet in the late 90s trying to find my teenage peers. There was this website called ClubLez or something, which basically found every single time two women made out in a movie/TV show and put screenshots and described the scene. Preeettty sure a dude made it, but God, I went through that whole goddamn website repeatedly and checked it for updates all the time, and spent all my part-time-job-waitressing money buying the movies where women made out.
I just checked and it’s still there. Huh. Who knew.
The first gay thing I saw on the internet was Aragorn/Legolas fanfiction, which is also how I learned about anal sex.
Back in middle and high school, I was sort of living under a rock, so didn’t really notice anything day on the Internet. However, my high school chorus sing seasons of love from rent. When I asked our teacher what it was about, he said to go look it up. It would be three or four more years before I would actually see rent, and I knew I liked it before I was really out myself.
The first gay thing on the internet was when i was around 6/7 my sister our neighbours who were sisters around our age and i played Boom Volleyball on miniclip just to get to the 5th level where they play topless
i can’t remember the 1st thing, predating the internet and all, but the 1st thing i remember was the chart that showtime put up after the chart became a thing on the original l word. such a let down when they dropped it.
Quizilla quizzes. 1. That had the gayness as an option built in the questions. 2. This also eventually lead to all of the fanfic on Quizilla.
OMG QUIZILLA
Leia/Mara fanfiction on theForce.net archives. Didn’t read it, but knowing it existed sure was something!
The L word sex scenes on YouTube that I meticulously deleted from my search history in case my parents saw them. Also, a German lesbian website, and the whole of “The incredibly true adventure of two girls in love” (very subtle) with Laurel Holloman, also on YouTube :D which finally pushed me to come out to my neighbour explosively, so she took me to a gay youth centre lol . Then the first queer I fell in love with exactly at that place (tragic story of first queer love) showed me Autostraddle and the rest is history
other formative pieces of media in my coming out phase: my mom watching Tila Tequila and explaining bisexuality to me.
also, there was a story arc of a lesbian in the German telenovela “GZSZ” that my mom also watched (obviously, the lesbian’s girlfriend died in a car accident in true bury your gays manner) and I was HEAVILY invested in that story. I still remember a scene where she is at a club and they’re playing “I kissed a girl” and she’s as “OMG I’M GAY WHAT AM I GONNA DO” about it as I was in that exact moment sitting next to my not so oblivious mother
wow, your mom really consumed a lot of queer media didn’t she…
truuue :D and she made a point of telling me that she was NOT interested in sex with women when I came out with a vehemence that made me go, huh? :D
LOL, I’m so old, the first gay thing I saw on the “internet”, was re Xena on Usenet. [I think alt.tv.scifi.xena-warrior-princess? something like that] Circa 1996
It went like this:
Line 1: “Am I the only straight woman here (I thought I was straight!) who’d like to get her groove on w/ ROC? [i.e., Renee O’Connor, forever and ever, Xena’s Gabrielle]
[Under that, many responses, “No, you’re not”]
Line 2: “Am I the only gay woman here (I thought I was gay) who’d like to get her groove on w/ Kevin Smith? [i.e., the late great, forever and ever, XWP’s Ares God of War]
Line 3: “Am I the only bisexual woman here (DEFINITELY bisexual!) who’d like to get her groove on with the ENTIRE Xena cast, except for Joxer?
[Thread then descends into the Joxer Wars]
Good times! 😁
When I was around 11 or 12 there used to be a website called Picturetrail (A lot like Myspace), and there would be clubs you can join. There was a club called ~*Gay & Lesbian*~ and the featured logo for the club was this bright rainbow graphic. Very 2000s and very gay. Those were the days!