electronic labours of sexuality

I’ve been watching Jason Scott’s huge and excellently nerdy BBS documentary, and besides taking me back to my own bulletin board childhood, I picked up some more subtle clues about the relationship between the pre-Web hobbyist computer networking of the 1980s and sexual cultures.

I’ve mentioned before that Tom Jennings, the creator of FidoNet — the first international electronic network for personal computers, which foreshadowed the popularity of the Internet by a decade — was an editor of Homocore, a queer anarchist punk zine of the late ’80s. And it also transpires that Wynn Wagner III, the creator of Opus (i.e. a “work”) — the Fido software’s effective successor — was a queer AIDS activist, who went on to write “Day One”, which is purportedly “the most widely-read article on HIV ever written”. Everyone from the US military to the Sandinistas used the Opus software (I’ve still got a copy somewhere in my mouldy collection of 5.25” diskettes — sigh), and Wagner made Opus operators donate to HIV research and AIDS care services. In Scott’s film, Wagner chuckles about Christian Right organisations and the Navy inadvertantly helping to raise over a $1 million for organisations like Shanti and AMFAR. (Whacky aside: Wagner is also the proprietor of the Eye of Newt magick shop, and has more recently been ordained as a priest of the Liberal Catholic Church.)

I can’t say much about the significance of these links except to note that I’m not surprised that vocal queer scenesters and actvists have played such pivotal roles in the development of various grassroots technologies and cultures of computer networking. This goes beyond the somewhat dull acknowledgement in Internet studies circles that “minority cultures” are going to “adopt” networking technologies in order to create new social connections in a majoritarian world — we’re talking about “pioneering” developments in the technology here.

[ tags: activism, AIDS, bbs, bulletin-boards, fidonet, HIV, homocore, networks, queer, sexuality, tom-jennings, wynn-wagner, zines ]