Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Inkwell welcomes author and scholar Avery Dame-Griff. We'll be
discussing his book, _The Two Revolutions: A History of the
Transgender Internet_. In his book, through extensive archival
research and media archeology, Avery reconstructs the manifold
digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer
hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited
the second revolution of the title: the ascendance of "transgender"
as an umbrella identity in the mid-1990s. 

Avery Dame-Griff is a Lecturer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies at Gonzaga University. He founded and serves as primary
curator of the Queer Digital History Project, an independent
community history project cataloging and archiving pre-2010 LGBTQ
spaces online. He also maintains the Archival Internet Video Index,
which indexes video footage of pre-Internet and early Internet
communication platforms. His book, The Two Revolutions: A History of
the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) tracks how the Internet
transformed transgender political organizing from the 1980s to the
contemporary moment. In 2022, he was selected to be a Public
Humanities Fellow for Humanities Washington and will be part of
Humanities Washington's Speakers' Bureau during 2024-2025,
presenting on the impact and legacy of LGBTQ BBSes in Washington
State.

Kevin Driscoll leads the conversation.  Kevin  is the author of _The
Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media_, co-author of _Minitel:
Welcome to the Internet_, and maintainer of the Minitel Research
Lab, USA with Julien Mailland. He is an associate professor of media
studies at the University of Virginia and a newbie on The WELL.

Welcome, Avery and Kevin!
  

    
Hi everyone! Welcome to Inkwell, Avery. I’m thrilled about this
opportunity to chat with you about your terrific new book.

I thought we might kick it off by looking back on the early days of
the project. Your book carefully weaves together trans and internet
histories, demonstrating how these “two revolutions” shaped one
another. How did you arrive at this innovative approach? Was there
an ah-ha moment in your research? Or did you know from the outset
that you needed to write these two histories together?
  

    
Thank you so much for having me! I’m really excited to hear from
folks.

In terms of how my approach emerged, I think I had a suspicion about
its importance based on my own experience coming out, which I talk
about in the book’s introduction. As a trans person living in the
American Deep South (Alabama) in the mid-2000s, I didn’t really have
access to a local visible trans community. Folks absolutely were
active, out, and proud in my state, but they weren’t in my town or
on my college campus (as far as I knew then, at least). The only
trans individuals I knew and talked to regularly, including within
Alabama, were online. So I began with an understanding that digital
communications were important to transgender folks, and existing
academic research supported this assertion as early as the late
1990s with, as one example, Stephen Whittle’s well-known article,
“The Trans-Cyberian Mail Way”
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/096466399800700304).

I didn’t have a good grasp of the longer historical arc, however,
until I really began exploring archival newsletters and periodicals
via the Digital Transgender Archive
(https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/). I knew about the long
effort to adopt “transgender” as the “umbrella” term, and I knew the
Internet had helped increase its spread, but the history that’s out
there largely focuses on the Web and Web browsers. Reading items
held in the DTA, however, shifted how I understood this timeline. My
specific “ah-ha” moment was reading Stephanie Rose’s 1991 piece in
the first issue of Chrysalis Quarterly, “Gender Support in the
Computer Age,” which is where the idea of “two revolutions” is first
used (https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/6682x392q).
Notably, Rose is talking about BBSes, and even then she’s already
articulating the political importance of this technology, well
before folks would begin lobbying in earnest for adopting
“transgender.”

As I read more about early BBSes, I really began to see the
“revolutions” as intertwining tracks. Compared to to the more
visual-heavy media that would follow (namely, the Web), so much of
early trans thinking about BBSes was focused on the idea of future
**potential**, the possibilities for changing how trans folks
organized at a moment when the personal was increasingly becoming
political for members of the “gender community” (as it was then
known). However, it wouldn’t be fully tapped until it became more
approachable to the non-technically inclined consumer--first, via
AOL and later the web Browser.
  

    
Ah, thanks for these links! It’s so amazing that these materials are
now accessible on the public Web. And such a contrast to the
information scarcity you describe in early chapters of The Two
Revolutions.

So the relationship between print media and online communities is
one of the fascinating throughlines of the book. You show how
participants in the “gender community” of the 1980s might have
discovered the online world in the pages of a newsletter or
magazine. 

And—initially, at least—people didn’t up and move from print to
digital. Rather, you reveal these complex interactions between the
two media forms. Discussions seem to spill across newsgroups,
letters to the editor, chat rooms, and classified ads. 

What do you think this overlap meant for trans people building these
early online spaces? Was there something “writerly” about being
online? And, for you as a researcher, was it hard to follow these
mixed-media flows of conversation? Are digital and print materials
ever archived together?
  

    
(And, of course, The WELL is a prime example of an online community
with close ties to print media!)
  

    
I'm looking forward to this conversation.
  

    
I think this kind of overlap likely existed for many communities,
honestly. Early on, I see it as a symbiotic relationship. Within the
gender community in particular, there were key individuals who acted
as “go-betweens” who straddled both. Two major figures in the
community publishing space at the time, JoAnn Roberts and
Kymberleigh Richards, were both active online and big online
proponents. Their columns and what they chose to include and cover
gave these spaces more visibility than they might otherwise have,
while they were able to increase the reach of their publications
digitally. 

Even in small group newsletters, you see bits of these digital
spaces appearing. In their columns newsletter editors would at times
beg readers to submit content, lest they be forced to yet again fill
the back page with seasonally appropriate clip art. Yet as their use
of desktop publishing software would imply, these editors were also
often savvy computer users who either used BBSes or subscribed to a
service like CompuServe. So as trans spaces grew, they became a
quick and easy way to solve a newsletter’s content crisis. Have some
blank column inches to fill? Grab someone’s textfile essay or even
just a random collection of posts and run them (with citation, of
course)! In fact, some small newsletters ran in both formats - the
“sysop” of CompuServe’s trans forum, GenderLine, edited a
publication named the “Gender Journal” that she distributed in both
print and digital on CompuServe. Notably, she also edited the
newsletter for the Albany, NY-based gender group.

Which goes directly to your questions about the online as a writerly
space. I think the primacy of text encouraged a more writerly
approach. There’s a depth of reflection and thought to what folks
are writing, and they’re more immediately aware of an audience to
their work than I think they were in the monthly newsletter. And I
think this writerly-ness is also apparent in how posts would
circulate through platforms and formats. For example, the admin of
the trans-specific CDForum mailing list, in the list’s early years,
would sometimes include large collections of decontextualized
conversations and posts from GenderLine in the bi-weekly digest
simply because she thought they were insightful. 

This practice of “printing the Net” required me to become intimately
familiar with the media landscape and major players. With that
knowledge, I was able to trace how different documents circulated.
And the re-printing/re-distribution becomes incredibly important for
archiving. So much of what I have about the Net at this time comes
from it being reprinted. For example, the only reason I have a map
of TGNet in 1991 (https://queerdigital.com/tgnmap) is because it
happened to be reprinted in a newsletter. [Also, as a note, that
1991 is currently not working correctly - I need to fix the
JavaScript for it - but the 1994 one is]. For content on proprietary
platforms like CompuServe, there’s almost no archiving at all. The
closest “official” documentation is the book The Electronic
Confessional: A Sex Book of the 80's
(https://search.worldcat.org/title/13318686), which was prepared by
the two contractors who ran the “Human Sexuality” area of
CompuServe, where GenderLine was located. So the re-publication in
newsletters and on CDForum have become incredibly important as a
window into conversations on these platforms.
  

    
This conversation is world-readable, i.e. can be read by anyone on
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<https://tinyurl.com/2revolutions> The full link is
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If you're not a member of the WELL, but you'd like to participate in
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This conversation will last for two weeks, through December 18. In
order to read the whole conversation, we encourage you to return
regularly and, since the discussion will grow into multiple pages,
use the pager (dropdown at the top and the bottom of the page).
  

    
Welcome!   I'm coming off the nasty two week cold going around greater
Pittsburgh and playing catchup.

My online life also started with BBSes and USENET in the late 80s and
I look forward to this discussion.
  

    
Hi Avery! My name is Mack Brumbaugh and I am master's student at the
University of Virginia where I'm studying queer(ed) affective trauma
on television alongside queer audience reception on social media as
it pertains to the show Yellowjackets. 

I recently read your book for my theory course and really enjoyed
it. I thought you crafted your argument extremely well and I learned
so much about a history that there is very little scholarship about.
I plan to rely on it for an upcoming paper I am writing about queer
networked public migration and when I eventually write my thesis! In
reading your book, we were also tasked to write a review, so
hopefully I can get that published soon and spread the word further
about this fantastic book! Kevin let me know you were having this
discussion (thanks Kevin!) and I am looking forward to reading more
of everyone's thoughts as it continues. I did have some initial
questions though. 

As I was reading your book, I was curious what factors went into
your decision to end the timeline where you did with late 2010s
Tumblr and Google’s SERP? Would you ever consider future additions
to the book with chapters on more modern social media, like TikTok,
once it starts to become a piece of our platformized digital
history?
  

    
Hey Avery & all, sorry I'm a bit late to the start of this conversation, 
I've been dealing with some family stuff lately that's taken up a lot of 
time. I've been able to read about a third of the book so far, and as 
someone who got online in the early 90's, first by local BBSes and then 
the internet, it was really interesting to read about how trans 
communities were starting to take advantage of them. I was, I guess I 
could say, trans curious back then. I have a distinct memory of reading 
about GCS and dilation, but as a teenager in a very religious family in 
the south it felt a world away, even though Sandy Stone was literally 30 
minutes up the road at the University of Texas. It's difficult when the 
only trans person you really know of is a genius and you are... not. :) 

My egg ended up cracking decades later, largely due to increased visibily 
of middle aged trans women who looked like me and the trans community on 
Twitter. I know all of these things go in cycles, though, and I'm curious 
to read how communities formed in other places that I wasn't exposed to.

I have a question that I'm curious to get your take on, which is whether 
you think white trans women are over-represented in tech, and if so, why. 
I, personally, fit into so many stereotypes of the neurodivergent, white, 
nerdy trans woman that it feels like pre-destination.

(Also, thank you for writing this book!)
  

    
Mack: "As I was reading your book, I was curious what factors went
into your decision to end the timeline where you did with late 2010s
Tumblr and Google’s SERP? Would you ever consider future additions
to the book with chapters on more modern social media, like TikTok,
once it starts to become a piece of our platformized digital
history?"

So there's both practical and structural answers to your question
about where I go with the last chapter, to be honest. On the
practical level, I’d already done some work on Tumblr, so it seemed
to make sense to build on that and expand it further for the book.
However, I also thought it made structural sense, as one of the big
throughlines is how language around the community changes over time
- so, the process of moving from “gender community” to “transgender
community” to just “trans” as an umbrella. And I think of the
hashtag (#trans) as one of the primary avenues by which the term
took on this meaning within the wider world - users were
structurally encouraged to adopt similar language usage patterns
because that’s what works best for the underlying infrastructure. 

As to tackling more modern platforms, it’s possible! However, the
practical and ethical challenges of this work, including the
question of if and how they’d be archived, is just so much more
complex. Post-Bubble, there’s a real push amongst corporate actors
away from the “New Visual Economy” of the Flash era toward a heavily
“transactional” vision of the web driven by e-commerce (this is a
core part of Megan Sapnar Ankerson’s argument in her great book,
Dom-Com Design: https://nyupress.org/9781479892907/dot-com-design/).


As part of this shift, we see the re-emergence of the walled garden
platform (Meta’s products [Facebook, Instagram] as the prime
example), where all user behavior is understood in terms of
transaction: likes for attention and your attention as a thing they
can sell advertisers, up to having you be able to purchase goods
without ever even leaving their platform. Thus, it’s harder to
encapsulate a whole experience because it’s on such a large and
disparate scale, and if history is any guide, walled garden
platforms are notoriously resistant to the kind of large-scale
archiving efforts needed for future study.

That said, some of my current work tries to think about the present
through the lens of the past. One of my current ongoing projects is
conducting oral histories with LGBTQ folks who were active or
involved with early platforms (sysops, founders, users, etc). One of
my major inspirations for the project, beyond the simple need to
have more documentation, is my belief that these histories offer
lessons for the present. For example, what’s the role of scale in
developing a healthy online community? What alternative models did
they have for community moderation? There’s lots of “roads not
taken” in the history of the Internet, and I think we’re at a moment
where there’s some real interest in moving away from the comfortable
garden.

Jennifer: “I have a question that I'm curious to get your take on,
which is whether you think white trans women are over-represented in
tech, and if so, why. I, personally, fit into so many stereotypes of
the neurodivergent, white, nerdy trans woman that it feels like
pre-destination.”

It’s a fascinating question! There’s definitely precedent within the
history, and I think early on part of it was connected to
demographics: folks assigned male at birth were more likely to enter
tech and tech-adjacent fields as well as have the economic means to
afford microcomputers and modems. These would also explain some of
the present over-representation, as these trends continue to the
present moment. However, I think there’s also other factors at play,
such as, for example, SF/F fandom as an important driver of not just
early BBS use, and then wider media fandom as a driver of online
activity in general. It makes sense that a preponderance of folks
might be located at the nexus of these different factors
(tech-adjacent, fannish/nerdy, some social privilege), to the point
a cultural narrative emerges. I mean, speaking for myself, my
personal narrative follows a similar track: grew up middle class
surrounded by tech, but was part of a cohort of assigned female at
birth folks who were heavily involved in fandom on LiveJournal,
which also allowed them to connect and explore gender. JB Brager’s
comic “LiveJournal Made Me Gay” is, IMO, a great encapsulation of
this (https://thenib.com/livejournal-made-me-gay/). 
  

    
Interesting, thanks!

I'm one of the folks who found community on Twitter but then left when 
things got bad ownership-wise. I think quite a few white trans women who'd 
been around for a while also left. You mention in your book about trans 
people joining trans communities before and during their realy transition, 
but historically tend to slowly disappear as they just start living their 
lives. That's certainly happened to me in some extent. I was part of a 
small but very active community of Twitter transfemmes back in 2020, but 
conversation there has largely ended.

What do you think about the trans twitter community, and how it has 
changed over the last few years? Do you think a lot of the activity has 
moved to even more walled gardens like IG and Facebook? Is there a 'nexus' 
of trans online community anymore?
  

    
Hi <mackb>! Hi <objfox>!

I know the questions are starting to stack up but I just wanted to
add one more to the queue. In short: what do we miss about this
history when we ignore the walled gardens like CompuServe?

Your book documents vibrant community spaces on CompuServe and AOL
during the 1980s and 1990s. And the service providers seemed to
encourage the adoption by trans users (at least initially). For
example, on the Queer Digital History Project, you note that
CompuServe featured GenderLine in a magazine sent to _all_
subscribers of the service in 1991! I followed the link and found
the essay so touching:

“I could feel love radiating from the computer screen. Sometimes
when you live in the twilight region between genders you just need a
hug from someone who cares.”

Wow! But you also show how shifting politics and economic pressures
lead to changes in how these services engaged with communities like
GenderLine. 

What else do we misunderstand about the walled gardens? How did they
compare with systems like USENET or BBSs when it came to supporting
trans communities? Did you have any surprising or counterintuitive
observations in your research? 
  

    
Thank you for such a detailed reply! It makes total sense as to why
you ended your book where you did with the changes in communal
language. I also agree that finding ways to archive digital
information is only going to get more difficult from here on out. I
thought it was really interesting at the end of your book that you
bring up Archive Of Our Own as a good model for the type of digital
infrastructure that supports the goals of a trans technology. As a
user of that website myself, I completely agree with that point!
It's a great corner of the internet that really allows for a freedom
of expression. Do you think that you will do any research on AO3 in
the future as it pertains to it being a good blueprint as a trans
technology? As I was reading that section of the book, I wanted to
hear more of what you had to say, but then sadly realized there
wasn't much of the book left! 

The reason I ask is because my future work intersects with fandom
studies, and I have really enjoyed your work on Tumblr, particularly
your research on tagging. Throughout that research you situate your
points extremely well and it made me actually reconceptualize my
everyday use of Tumblr as someone who has been using it for years. 

(Also, your upcoming oral history work sounds extremely interesting
and I look forward to reading it whenever it comes out!)
  

    
Jennifer: "What do you think about the trans twitter community, and
how it has changed over the last few years? Do you think a lot of
the activity has moved to even more walled gardens like IG and
Facebook? Is there a 'nexus' of trans online community anymore?"

Trans twitter certainly has shrunk, especially under its new owner.
I suspect some of those folks have gone to other places,
particularly Bluesky or Mastodon, depending on their inclination. I
don’t know there’s a nexus, really, or that there ever was after the
rise of social media. Generally, folks seem to seek out community on
the platforms they already prefer - for example, one of my
interviewees in 2014 who was in her late 30s at the time had
initially explored trans Usenet, but was turned off. However, when
she came out in her mid-30s, her trans “home” was Reddit because to
her, it just made sense - she was already a heavy Reddit user, so it
felt familiar.

(We're cleaning the house in preparation for a kid's birthday party
next week, so I'll be back in to respond tomorrow!)
  

    
Sometimes it seems like Mastodon is close to majority trans. Maybe
that's just my own follows.
  

    
Tacking on to this question:

>What else do we misunderstand about the walled gardens? 

How can we even know what happened, from a historical point of view,
other than word-of-mouth?  I wasn't on AOL, GENIE, CS, nor any other
commerical provider, so that bit of the book was interesting.  I had
no idea how difficult it was to have communities there wrt moderation,
corporate ownership, RWNJs, etc.

Here on the well you can get an account and use some of our
command-line tools to extract old posts.  I wonder where did all the
CS and GENIE data end up?

Looking at newer platforms I'm rather surprised by how many people use
IG as their primary tool for social media.  Glass artists use it to
share photos of their work while others use it more like USENET/LJ.
Ex: one of the firearms instructors I follow (on youtube) seems to do
most of his interaction with his peers via IG or private email.

The question is again, how does one study that data?  I wonder if Meta
would license it as a historical resource while providing privacy to
current and past members.

(As an aside -- I think you get a huge gold star of achievement for
making it through USENET without one mention of MES.  They also once
had an account here as <grandma>, I think, but I read recently that
they passed away.)
  

    
Kevin: "What else do we misunderstand about the walled gardens? How
did they compare with systems like USENET or BBSs when it came to
supporting trans communities? Did you have any surprising or
counterintuitive observations in your research?"

In terms of support, they seem to have varied. CompuServe/CIS is the
most developed beyond AOL, but I think that's more because of how
CIS treated the whole Human Sexuality (HSX) section as
medical/psychological support groups, as opposed to a space for
socialization. Otherwise, I don't know a lot about most of the other
communities beyond what folks reported secondhand. They definitely
had active communities, but I suspect part of how they remained to
active was by staying "off the radar" of regular users, so to speak.
I'm really hoping to eventually talk with some users, but I've not
had any luck tracking any down.

The biggest misunderstanding, I think, is that these platforms were
far more varied in terms of content and users that was recorded in
mass media - or even their own promotional media. And because
there's basically no archives, as far as I know, the only recovery
is either in books or personal archives/memories. I mean, there's
what shows up on eBay, but that's no guarantee. What'd you do with
that CompuServe tape drive anyway, Kevin?

Mack: "Do you think that you will do any research on AO3 in the
future as it pertains to it being a good blueprint as a trans
technology?" 

I might! I think there's some real opportunities for participatory
design research here, depending on what the future looks like. I'd
love to work with a design team to explore these ideas in practice.
  

    
> What'd you do with that CompuServe tape drive anyway, Kevin?

Haha-- calling me out! ;)

<apdg> is referring to a reel of magnetic tape marked "Property of
CompuServe" that popped up on eBay earlier this year. It's still
sitting here on my desk!  (Maybe my new year's resolution should be
to figure out what's on there?) 

A call for help: if anyone knows how to recover data from 9-track
tape, please get in touch! The reel is marked with Graham Magnetics
"Verituf" branding. A hand-written notes indicates that it was made
in early 1983. It appears to have been left in a closed cardboard
box for the last forty years. I would happily hire someone in
forensics to take a crack at it.
  

    
Jet: "I wonder where did all the CS and GENIE data end up?"

I wonder about that too, though my assumption was that it was
deleted when the services folded (in GEnie's case) or were bought
(CompuServe). It's hard to know with CompuServe, because not only
did it change owners several times, these changes was also happening
right around with AOL was moving away from the Walled Garden "churn"
model to being more of an ISP that funded content through ads. I'm
not sure who owned the rights to the content in AOL's "community"
(who were all, AFAIK, subcontractors), but my assumption is they
just  got rid of it to save space. 

"The question is again, how does one study that data?  I wonder if
Meta would license it as a historical resource while providing
privacy to current and past members."

There are some projects that provide it to researchers, but that
increasingly comes with fees or strings attached. I'm of the opinion
that there should be a framework and legal regulation developed to
support more systemic historical preservation of some digital
content beyond just websites, but that's not exactly a top priority,
unfortunately. It also gets into the ethical questions about who
owns the right to certain content and how to seek consent, if that's
practical/possible at all. There are absolutely technical solutions
to some of these questions, but there's no commercial incentive to
actually integrating them.
  

    
Re: The Trans Twitter diaspora, I know a lot of white trans women ended up 
on Bluesky. For a while it felt like all there was, and there was a lot of 
drama about inclusion and racism, just like there was on Twitter. Mastodon 
definitely got a lot of folks, but with the higher barrier to entry it 
feels like the non-tech transes were more drawn to Bluesky. Or perhaps it 
was more sticky. I haven't been able to get into Threads, so I'm not sure 
how that's faring.

Have you seen any notable impacts of the pandemic on online trans spaces? 
Did they seem to flourish more with a lack of in-person activity? I know 
there was certainly a thing around people being stuck at home inside with 
their own thoughts and lots of eggs cracking as a result. I remember memes 
about pandemic transes having it easier since they didn't have to do the 
awkward early transition in public, which may be true, but also felt very 
clique-ish gatekeepy.
  

    
I have some of the same experience with Mastodon and Bluesky, though
on both I'm much more of a lurker than a  poster. I'm also an
academic, though, so my social media is never not sort-of work
related.

"Have you seen any notable impacts of the pandemic on online trans
spaces? Did they seem to flourish more with a lack of in-person
activity?"

I don't have any hard numbers (especially given the current
diffuseness of community), but I do anticipate the pandemic led to a
bump in folks coming out and being active in trans spaces online,
but how much of that is still present five years from now harder to
say. It's one of the funny things about so much of trans life going
online: at some point, the digital is just never going to be enough.
In person meetings, contact with other folks, both trans and not,
are essential to affirming your identity. 

Unfortunately, I feel like gatekeeping has also been a essential
element of trans life, from Virginia Prince turning her nose up at
the "wrong kind" of cross-dresser in the days of Transvestia to the
hierarchies of passability that have haunted trans life since the
very beginning. Even online, when the access to community is so much
wider than your local social or support group (as it was in the
1980s), there's still a pull toward comparison and ranking. 
  

    
I know two people, one is a friend, who decided on surgery in the
middle of the pandemic.  I think one decided before there was even a
vaccination readily available, but I'll double check that.  If I see
either of them soon (in person) I'll ask for details and if I can
share them.
  

    
This book challenges some common beliefs about the development of
the online world. For example, I always took for granted that the
shift from hourly to flat-rate billing was good for everyone. But
you show how changes to AOL’s billing structure resulted in a
devaluation of the popular Transgender Community Forum, transforming
it from a “valuable asset” generating thousands of dollars a month
to a mere “loss leader.” Shortly after, the Transgender Community
Forum seemed to lose status and influence. 

Do you think former TCF users experienced that change as a
collective loss? Or, was it just part of a larger shift to the
“always on” web services you describe later in the book?

More generally, I’m curious to know how people deal with repeated
struggles to make space on different platforms. Do you have a sense
of how long-time participants in trans spaces online respond to
platform problems (e.g., the destruction of Twitter) differently
from users with less experience? Can communities develop a kind of
collective resilience? Or, does the disruption become a kind of
inevitability? Like, oh well, nothing lasts forever!
  

    <scribbled by apdg Thu 14 Dec 23 10:51>