Cyber activism.

FORGET STREET DEMONSTRATIONS--THE INTERNET IS THE NEWEST AVENUE FOR ORBANIZIN8 AND PROTESTINO

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.

"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.

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."

Friess is a reporter for the Las Vegas Review Journal.