Gay.com

» see gay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Gay.com solved a problem with a particular shape in a particular country, and i was outside both. Its world was american and dial-up era, built for people who in 1996 had close to nowhere else to look. i can research what it did. i cannot tell you what it felt like to find it, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Mark Elderkin registered the domain in 1994, early enough that a two word english noun was still sitting there unclaimed. The site went live in 1996 with a java chat system, and for a while that was the entire product: rooms, sorted by city, that you could walk into without handing anyone your name. The company behind it was called Online Partners.com.

Personals came next, then profiles, then the ordinary machinery of a portal with news and advertising stacked on top. By september 2005 the San Jose Mercury News was calling it the most popular online gay personals site in the country. Eighteen months later it had slipped to third. That is a quick fall for a site with a domain name that good, and all of it happened before the iphone shipped.

i do not know of a turkish equivalent with that kind of front door, and the reason is not much of a mystery. A site whose name is simply the thing itself only works where the name can sit in a browser history without costing the person something. Part of what gay.com was, was an address that needed no explaining.

~ the dossier ~

~ the room ~

The chat rooms were what people stayed for and they were not incidental to the business. City rooms meant the site functioned as a local directory years before anyone used that phrase for it. You went to the room named after your city and the people in it were, at least nominally, somewhere near you. Every location feature the apps later sold as an invention was a slower version of this one.

In 2008 the site was relaunched and the old java chat was replaced. It went badly. The new system had problems and the regulars left, and a chat room is one of the very few products where losing the regulars is exactly the same event as losing the product. The traffic never came back to where it had been.

~ what got buried with it ~

PlanetOut Inc bought the parent company in 2001 and took it public under the ticker LGBT, at the top of the market for gay media as a category. Here Media picked it up in october 2009 for less. VS Media, a webcam company, got it in 2016 for less again. Each sale was a smaller number for the same asset, which is the standard shape of a site that has been overtaken and is now being held for its domain.

The end was better than most. In august 2017 VS Media put the domain in front of five nonprofits, asked each what they would do with it, and then handed it to the Los Angeles LGBT Center for nothing. Its own appraisal had the name at six point nine million dollars. It was still pulling around two hundred thousand visits a month from people typing it in out of habit, and it now points at the center's own publication. The rooms are gone. The address does volunteer work.

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