Digital Queers and High Tech Gays: The History of LGBTQ+ Cyber Activism

How LGBTQ+ cyber activists in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom shaped the Internet and how the Internet shaped LGBTQ+ activism.

Digital Queers and High Tech Gays tells the history of LGBTQ+ cyber activism in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom and how it ultimately shaped the Internet as we know it.

Beginning in 1980, queer cyber activists founded regional, national, and international organizations of engineers, scientists, and high-tech professionals. From advocating for tech workers’ rights to equipping LGBTQ+ organizations with the hardware and software needed to do their work to creating in-person and online spaces where they shared information, socialized, and preserved queer histories, LGBTQ+ cyber activists used analog and digital technologies to transform queer folks’ lives both on the Internet and away from the keyboard.

Queer cyber activists also built crucial Internet infrastructures and expanded the idea of who could be an Internet user. And, through their work with LGBTQ2S+ archives, they ultimately created the tools needed to preserve their own history. In this book, Alex Ketchum shares their untold, pathbreaking story.