March 2, 1999
Cyber activism Comes on Strong.
FORGET STREET DEMONSTRATIONS--THE
INTERNET IS THE NEWEST AVENUE FOR ORGANIZATIONS AND PROTESTORS
By Steve Friess
Long before E-mail became a modern necessity
and the World Wide Web even existed, gay visionaries pointed
their cursors at cyberspace and proclaimed the medium the future
of activism. Sure, Pat Robertson owns a huge TV operation and
Jerry Falwell has a mailing list of a million antigay zealots,
but someday gay men and lesbians could neutralize all that by
organizing via modem.
The first glimmers of that vision materialized
in 1998, with the Internet playing key roles in saving Navy
officer Timothy McVeigh from discharge and in provoking and
sustaining the international outrage over the murder of gay
Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard. "The lesbian, bi, gay,
and transgendered community really came of age last year using
this technology,' says Loren Javier, interactive media director
at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
GLAAD was among the pioneers of online gay activism
nearly three years ago when it started GLAADLines, a weekly
E-mail bulletin that provides news and breaking stories about
gay men and lesbians. The bulletin usually includes information
on where readers can E-mail or call to express their views on
the particular stories featured, which "makes it easier and
easier to act," Javier says. The alerts routinely spark thousands
of responses and are credited with encouraging ABC to allow
Ellen De-Generes's sitcom alter ego to come out in 1997.
Indeed, the charm of cyberspace is its ease,
the fact that a simple E-mail can be forwarded to thousands
of people at almost no cost. McVeigh proved how effective this
tactic can be. By using the Internet in his fight against the
Navy's effort to expel him, McVeigh became the most famous beneficiary
of gay connections in cyberspace to date.
The sailor was on the brink of discharge in
the fall of 1997 after Navy investigators discovered that an
America Online screen profile containing the word gay belonged
to McVeigh. The probe appeared to violate the military's "don't
ask, don't tell" policy, and AOL's divulgence of McVeigh's identity
to the Navy certainly broke the company's rule against revealing
personal information about users. McVeigh pointed this out in
an E-mail he sent to every AOL member whose profile also contained
the word gay.
The E-mail prompted an outpouring of mail to
the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress, and that support
encouraged McVeigh to sue the Department of Defense, which resulted
in a federal judge's preventing his discharge. Many non-AOL
users also received a copy of McVeigh's E-mail plea, including
John Aravosis, founder of Wired Strategies, a one-man Internet
company that specializes in left-wing advocacy. Aravosis took
McVeigh's effort to another level: By playing up the Internet
privacy angle of the sailor's plight, Aravosis caught the interest
of online journalists. Writers for the Web versions of major
mainstream newspapers picked up the stow, creating a buzz that
eventually led to coverage on ABC's World News Tonight and the
front page of The New York Times.
"What's new here is the ability to get the message
out without going through the [traditional] media," Aravosis
says. "In a sense, we went around the media. We were able to
get [McVeigh's stow] to thousands of people without ever calling
one print reporter."
And the speed at which such issues are bubbling
up to the mainstream continues to increase. In January it took
just two days of E-mail buzz from activists offended by Merriam-Webster's
online thesaurus listing gay slum as synonyms for homosexual
to bring the stow to the attention of established media outlets.
A cybersecond later, The New York Times, the Associated Press,
and The Wall Street Journal ran items on the flap, and an apologetic
Merriam-Webster and AOL, which had licensed the service, both
shut down the thesaurus.
While McVeigh sought the support of the masses
through the Internet, it was the masses who sought the support
of the Internet when Matthew Shepard died. As news of the brutal
October slaying spread, the world's gay and gay-friendly Netizens
went online to express their anger over the atrocity and to
push for more hate-crimes legislation.
"We had absolutely never seen anything like
it," says Aleta Fenceroy, who with her partner, Jean Mayberry,
distributes information about gay and lesbian issues over the
Internet. "Up to then the biggest news event we had dealt with
was Ellen's coming-out. Matt's murder and the ensuing debate
about hate-crimes laws far exceeded that." Javier agrees, noting:
"People in Peoria who may not have been out or able to express
their emotion about Matthew Shepard in any other way could go
online and let their feelings be known."
The spontaneous outburst gave the Shepard murder
worldwide attention, leading to candlelight vigils in tiny and
huge communities alike and a January 6 lobbying effort in Washington,
D.C., in support of a hate-crimes bill in Shepard's name. The
Washington effort, though, showed that Internet activism has
a lot of room to grow: It's unclear how many people showed up,
because there wasn't a time or place arranged for a gathering.
Instead, small groups wandered the Capitol searching for lawmakers
to approach.
Even so, the Internet has helped gay groups
around the country combine and expand their activism efforts.
In January, in a gay Internet version of the Exxon-Mobil merger,
GLAAD fused with Digital Queers, the groundbreaking group that
has worked to bring gay organizations online since 1992 and
was one of the first to predict the potential of gay online
activism. The move is logical, Javier says, because "we're at
an age where more and more People are online, so the message
`Get online' isn't as important as `Get online and get involved.'"
The Internet has also let gay activists reach
abroad to cultures and communities even more remote than small-town
America, to places where cyberspace is the only form of a free
press. Rex Wockner, who operates an E-mail list that alerts
journalists and advocates to gay news, ticks off several instances
in the past year when the medium provided the message to the
world. The most prominent example is that of the president of
Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, whose virulently antigay statements
and policies Wockner documented online.
But months later, long after activists had praised
the company's responsiveness to their protest, an old E-mail
alert urging a boycott of Red Lobster continued to bounce uncontrollably
through cyberspace. Jayson DiCotignano of Las Vegas, for one,
unwittingly forwarded it to his list of 250 names and later
regretted not taking more care. "I did it without thinking,"
DiCotignano says. "Now I'm more cautious. I'll ask more questions,
find out the history." DiCotignano and others worry that bad
information can undermine the integrity of the gay online movement,
but Wockner shrugs at that concern. "If a corporation continues
to get hate mail even after a particular problem that started
it is resolved, that's not necessarily a bad thing," he says.
"Let them drown in that for a while."
Aravosis says the cyberactivism successes of
the past year, which astonished even those who engineered them,
still need to be picked apart and analyzed. "We all have our
shining moments, but none of us have figured out a consistent
way to tap into the Internet," he says. "We're all still trying
to figure out how to make this effective in the long term."
"Basically, Mugabe can't go anywhere in the
first world without there being a protest by gays outside of
whatever building he's in, and that's because of the Intemet,"
Wockner says. Still, these successes come with some risk, as
shown by a case outside of gay activism: In China a 30-year-old
man was sentenced to two years in prison January 20 for "inciting
the overthrow of state power" when he provided 30,000 E-mail
addresses to a pro-democracy Internet magazine in the United
States.
The speed at which information is being passed
around presents the additional risk of false alarms that are
impossible to shut off. One such incident occurred in July when
Chicago activists became outraged by Red Lobster's challenging
the constitutionality of a local human rights ordinance protecting
gays. The activists' outcry immediately prompted the company,
which was appealing a finding that it had discriminated against
a gay employee, to apologize and withdraw its challenge.
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