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| From the 1997 Motss Con at Ti Couz |
What is soc.motss you ask? Soc means "social" and motss means "members of the same sex" (ie, gay). Clear as mud? Back in 1983 the Internet was young. As in *very* young like a few years old and the great TCP/IP flag day happening that year. It grew out of a US defense department agency called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) which built the world's first interconnected network called ARPANET. There were just a handful of locations at first but it grew and by the early 80's was worldwide. So... connectivity.
Email at the time was *the* killer app and its uses expanded to create mailing lists and other uses so that users could exchange ideas, trade gossip, and have discussions. Usenet was more or less built out of email to create discussion forums, mostly technical but with some social groups. Usenet which though not bound directly to the internet, was heavily intertwined with its rise. In 1983, Steve Dyer then of BBN (who created the ARPANET IMPS which we'd call routers today) decided that it would be great to have a GLBT group called soc.motss so that gay people could meet and discuss issues of the day both grand and mundane. The soc.motss name was purposely sort of opaque so as to not raise homophobic admins' eyebrows.
Soc.motss was still sort of an oddity as the number of people using the internet in the 80's was still tiny and mostly used by academics and researchers. But it grew and became the first gay online community. It was also very unusual in that later there were lots of BBS's but they were usually geared toward dialing for dick. Motss was different. It ran the gamut on every subject imaginable from gay culture, the trails and travails of being gay, and of course in those terrible years the scourge of AIDS. For people who had access it was a window into a world of people, cultures and lives across the world we could have never hoped to experience in real life. Given the limited set of people who had access to the internet, it wasn't as you'd imagine the most diverse set of people, but it did have a fair number of lesbian regulars which was nice. And bisexuals. More on them later.
While hooking up wasn't the purpose of motss, it's not to say that it didn't happen. Ok, it happened a lot. In 1988, they decided to have a first meet up in San Francisco -- the motss.con (convention). I have no first hand knowledge of the frivolity, but i imagine it was in the air. But people used their real names back then and their location so it became the norm that when somebody was visiting another city that people would meet up. This eventually led to the infamous fuck chart of which my other half was a nexus. Motss led to quite a few couples getting together too. For me, I had more than a few people completely change their mind about me when we met. I really don't see me and my style as much different online vs. in real life, but it's really hard to read tone on the net so when I'm just chuckling and being somewhat silly, others read it as fire breathing. In one memorable meeting, Steven Levine and I met at a gay bar called the Paradise in Cambridge Ma and he was sort of bemused that he was chatting with me and actually having a good time. I just bat my eyes and smile.
I came around in 1991 having been working on internet connected things as the internet was just opening up to the wider public. At that time, soc.motss was a fully formed community with norms, well known personalities, inside-jokes, age old flame wars, and various factions including what is now known as the bear community. And to balance the bears, were their mortal enemies: twinks. Twinks of course didn't have any clue they were enemies and just looked pretty wondering what all of the bellowing was about. It also, I'd say, had a hand in expanding gay rights in tech. Since there was so much crossover between gay tech folks and their lobbying at work with groups like NOGLSTP finding many of its members who posted to soc.motss. It was all really quite magical and fascinating and unlike anything i had experienced. It was impossible to explain to anybody as they'd look at you as if you had grown a propeller on your head.
Some of the flame wars were downright hilarious in their sound and fury. One particular flame war was about the appropriateness of cruising guys at the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Another was a very strange flame war called Anal Carrot to the Eyeball in which a drag queen apparently shot a carrot out of her bussy and hit somebody in the audience. Another was about the perennial debate about circumcision which was crowned by Steven Levine's covenant with his old testament god. Another involved me where somebody who was tetched had announced loudly to the group that I wasn't gay. The hilarious part about this is that I was down in LA visiting my friends Ken, Arne and Howard and staying in Howard's room with the world's worst hangover. Howard was infusing himself and howling with laughter at the post declaring that we were going to have to inform my boyfriend Aric, while I could barely open my eyes in agony.
Oh and bisexuals. There were bisexuals and flame wars a plenty. A recurring one was whether "monosexual" was a legitimate way to group gay and straight people (spit). Another was what the big deal about gay marriage was where one of the bisexuals called Muffy said it wasn't a big deal since we could get married in San Francisco (we couldn't). We started calling her Muffy Antoinette as in "let them eat wedding cake". It turns out that she married to get somebody a green card, making it all the more hypocritical. But nothing beats the bisexual indignity of one of their loin fruit being suckled on my bed.
Soc.motss even lead to somebody getting outed. I was using the gnus news reader (which was written for the Emacs text editor) at the time and was going through its documentation and it was making clear references to soc.motss with allusions to various flame wars and the general style of how proper flaming was to be done. I hunted down the author who had a .sig (ie a tagline at the end of your message) which had "instant slut, just add milk". Caught red handed, I outed him to the group and Larsi became part of the lore. I believe he even attended a motss con the next year or so.
One recurring theme is that as more universities gave access to students there would be a deluge of new posters, both gay and homophobes. For some reason Penn State was the locus of a lot of ire for the yearly ritual and sort of a running joke. But motss attracted lots of students, often closeted or semi-closeted, who often wrote privately to the regulars forming what was called the soft underbelly of soc.motss. Since students are perennially starving, we afforded quite a few of them over the years "scholarships" to be able to attend motss cons. The younguns also provided some new blood to the group which would otherwise have become ossified and sclerotic. But there were undoubtedly a huge number of people who just lurked enjoying the fun at what was essentially an electronic cocktail party. Hopefully we made an impression that being gay could be positive and fun and interesting even in the face of their terrible local and home situations.
Soc.motss had its serious side too. Howard who was sick and fighting what would be his last battle wrote a deeply moving post about his condition on the occasion of Greg Louganis announcing that he had contracted HIV. We did make that trip, but Howard was too sick to come with us. Howard's death was very traumatic for soc.motss as he was a well known regular and everybody loved him. It led to me of all people delivering his eulogy at Forest Lawn (update, it was actually Mount Sinai Memorial Park which was next door) which I still don't know how I managed to pull off. A year later I wrote a post about a custom that we had taken up since he died by starting a meal with friends with a "To Howard" toast. Soc.motss lost other people to AIDS of course but it was like being in the suburbs in that we probably didn't know all of the ones we lost because they would just stop participating.
But the Internet and Usenet grew and grew and Grew and GREW. Incursions by homophobes were common and had its set of well known freaks spouting the same homophobic bullshit that is still being recycled to this day. But there were plenty of flame wars to be had with the regular participants as well. Gays and religiosity was a lightning rod. Likewise hiding drag queens and leather men at gay pride parades, and if only we showed the good gays(tm) we'd get our rights faster (hint: no). And of course the time honored "I am unlike the other gurls" whine which is a staple of every Reddit (basically Usenet 2.0) gay-related sub to this day.
I had the pleasure of hosting the 10th annual motss.con in 1997 at my house in the Castro in San Francisco. It was fabulous with people from around the world packing my place and the Dixieland Dykes playing in my cul-de-sac overlooking the city much to the amusement of our neighbors who also feasted on the fete in our garage. There were probably 200 people there that year and really marked the zenith as the net took off in zillions of other directions with loads of new people coming online. This made a relatively tight knit set of people who knew each other into a wild west, overwhelmed and especially subject to spammers. Usenet faded away eventually and was replaced by other social media, Reddit being closest to being the same format.
This was written up about 10 years ago about soc.motss. I know almost everybody in the article over the years. it's something that probably can't ever be recreated, and certainly not with Reddit given its anonymous format. But suffice it to say that it was as life changing for gay people then as it even is today for gay people isolated in small and homophobic places today. It was a window into a much larger world where being gay can be normal and special and fun.
The core of soc.motss is now a Facebook group and is getting... old. Steve Dyer died in 2010, and many regulars have passed away in the mean time. The group is rarely contentious anymore because everybody knows everybody's hobby horses and it's easier to ignore them than relitigate fights from 30 years ago. Thankfully it's old age and the ravages of time that are picking us off rather than the horror of AIDS. But what a time and what a great bit of gay history that almost nobody knows about. There is an archive of soc.motss, but it is very incomplete and it's a miracle that it exists at all since it definitely wasn't Gene Spafford's day job.
Oh, and it's sOsh motss, not sock motss. Anybody who says otherwise is a moron1.
1: Moron was in-group kind of language and was used liberally on soc.motss. It was also handy when somebody felt overly attacked by morons as in "who gave me the moron magnet?"
