UC Irvine

Before the widespread adoption of the commercial internet and long before social media platforms, networked computing was considered a niche hobby for technoevangelists. For LGBTQ+ people, however, it proved to be a vital lifeline at the onset of one of the most significant medical events in recent history: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Working against the compounding influences of homophobic stigma, ableist rhetoric, and misinformation, LGBTQ+ people utilized this emerging technology to forge social connection and networks of critical information exchange from the privacy of their own homes. This dissertation explores the ways in which LGBTQ+ people made use of computer networking during the first decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, and offers considerations for how these important contributions to a burgeoning tech scene have been archived, recorded, or otherwise remembered.

Here, I provide an overview of the bulletin board system (BBS) and Usenet scene in the 1980s, and how it was used by LGBTQ+ people to navigate an evolving cultural landscape affected by HIV/AIDS. I outline the scholarly legacy for this work through current and historical literature, then demonstrate my project’s significance within that landscape. I then provide an extended case study of a particular BBS, SURVIVORS, dedicated to AIDS discussion amongst people with AIDS. Following, I present the implications of three fractured born-digital records that represent queer life online at the onset of the epidemic. Finally, I examine how LGBTQ+ people co-developed content moderation policies online to confront misinformation, discrimination, and abuse; reworking the contemporary and otherwise presumed values of free speech or meritocratic discussion in similar spaces. Together, this study offers a sustained archival analysis of an underresearched, but crucial, component of networking computing history.