“They’re in their 30s now, these people who came out back then,” Elderkin says.Įven today, they find him and thank him. For the first time, gay teens in small towns had a place they could come out, a place they could talk. So we knew we were on to something.”Īnd it wasn’t just adults on sites like his. “We couldn’t keep up with the demand,” he says, “and we would hit traffic records day after day. Mark Elderkin founded Gay.com in the mid-1990s. “I was like, this is really different! And then suddenly we were able to get on the Web and find websites dedicated to the culture.” “I still remember the first time I saw those Internet chat rooms on AOL,” she says. She didn’t come out until college and didn’t talk to her parents about it until her mid-20s. And she felt there was no one in Sulphur she could talk to about it. She had feelings for girls, but there were almost no real images of gay people in popular culture. These stereotypes didn’t fit her reality. In her mind at the time, gay men were supposed to be hair dressers, and lesbians were supposed to be gym coaches. “The only exposure that we had to anyone that might be gay were more of what we perceived as the stereotypes of that,” she says. Stephanie Sandifer grew up in the small town of Sulphur, La., in the 1980s. But the Internet, Gross says, allowed gay kids to find each other for the first time.
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“I literally did not have contact with people my own age who were gay.”įor decades, being a gay kid often meant holding tight to a secret you couldn’t share, or having no one to talk to about feelings you might not fully understand. So, you know, I kept quiet about it,” he says. “Gay people - or people who were thought to be gay - in high school were ridiculed, or worse. Growing up in Springfield, Ill., in the 1970s, Todd Bentsen never spoke to his high school classmates about being gay. “The experience that is so common for people growing up gay in the past is: ‘I thought I was the only one,’ ” he says. Larry Gross of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication has been studying gay teens for decades. That change can be seen in the experiences of two women who grew up in the same town, two decades apart. But with the advent of online chat rooms and Websites dedicated to gay culture, communities formed, and that demographic began finding new support. You can directly initiate conversation with Nigerian Girls on chat rooms.In the past 20 years, the Internet has significantly changed what it means to grow up as a gay kid in this country.īefore the Web, many gay young people grew up in what seemed to be isolation, particularly those in small towns. If you want to chat with Random Stranger online from Nigeria, you don’t have to register or login. Random stranger Chats offers the best by providing chat rooms wherein you don’t have to disclose your identity.
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