The Story of GayOKC.com

Even though it was only online for a few short years, GayOKC.com’s history is as rich as the history of Oklahoma City’s LGBTQ+ Community.

GayOKC.com (gay-oh-kay-see-dot-com) went online in October, 1998. I had previously been involved in online activism with the Oklahoma Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus. Launched with the goal of motivating OKC’s LGBTQ+ Community to take advantage of the resources available to them on the Internet, the site focused on current and breaking local, state, national and world news of relevance to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Persons of the Oklahoma City area, in addition to providing access to online human rights resources and local businesses, groups and services. I ran the site myself, serving as webmaster, web designer, publisher, editor, and head writer, updating it at least once a day and up to several times a day when breaking news stories warranted, aggregating links to the latest stories on the national LGBTQ+ news sites as well as posting stories about local news, people and events.

During its time online from 1998–2006, GayOKC.com kept Oklahoma City’s LGBTQ+ Community up to date on developments in the Matthew Shepard murder case, Jim Roth’s political career as a pioneering openly-Gay candidate in Oklahoma, the election of the first-ever openly-Gay candidate to public office in Oklahoma when University of Oklahoma professor David Ray won his seat on the Norman City Council, the creation of an LGBTQ+ business group in Oklahoma City — now the Diversity Business Association, the arrival of the Human Rights Campaign’s then-president, Elizabeth Birch — along with Betty DeGeneres, Ellen’s mother — to march in Oklahoma City’s Gay Pride Parade, a rally for Gay Boy Scouts as part of a nationwide protest against the Boy Scouts of America’s refusal to admit Gay Scouts, the appearance in Oklahoma City of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals” exhibit, the movie Brokeback Mountain, and more.

In addition to news and political activism, I was keen to keep visitors up-to-date on local events such as the Oklahoma City Gay Pride Parade and Festival, the Great Plains Rodeo, the annual AIDS Walk, shows and other events at the local Gay bars on 39th Street and elsewhere in the city, and meetings of local groups.

On the national — and international — level, visitors to the site were kept informed of Pride Month and the fact that festivities were taking place across the country and around the world, Gay rodeos across the country, LGBT History Month, National Coming Out Day, AIDS drug trials, and World AIDS Day.

GayOKC.com reported on — and promoted — the efforts of local groups such as OGLPC, Cimarron Alliance, Herland Sister Resources, dba Metro, the ACLU of Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Peace House, the PFLAG chapters in central Oklahoma, RAIN Oklahoma, the efforts of Oklahoma’s political parties for and against LGBTQ+ rights and dignity, and the movement in local churches to welcome LGBTQ+ worshippers — including Soulforce in Oklahoma, the Homosexuality In Scripture conference, and the pioneering work of the Church of the Open Arms.

One of my proudest achievements at GayOKC.com was posting on the site — over several installments — an original manuscript by local Gay teacher Joe Quigley, detailing his efforts at gaining recognition for LGBTQ+ students in the Oklahoma City public school system, specifically NW Classen High School where Quigley taught. The manuscript was followed by Quigley’s daily emails detailing his interactions with school staff, administrators and school board members — including fellow NW Classen teacher Sally Kern, who would soon go on to become one of the most ultra-conservative members of Oklahoma’s State Legislature — as Quigley campaigned to protect LGBTQ+ students from harassment and abuse while at school. Quigley, who now resides in Massachusetts, would go on to win recognition from the ACLU of Oklahoma for his efforts and expand his original manuscript into a memoir about his campaign, The Edgerine Project.

Undeniably, one of the most momentous and historic landmarks of those years was the US Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v Texas legalizing sodomy and effectively decriminalizing homosexuality in 2003. Even so, absolutely no one expected this to pave for the way for the legalization of same-gender marriages in 2015. One of my favorite memories from this time was getting an email from a journalist at the Norman Transcript telling me that they had printed the first announcement in one of Oklahoma’s major daily newspapers of a same-gender commitment ceremony.

In creating GayOKC.com, I was following in the footsteps of local print publications such as Community News, Tulsa Family News, and the venerable Gayly Oklahoman, which, by the time GayOKC.com was launched, had already been in print for 15 years. I had created a website for OGLPC and drew on that experience in creating GayOKC.com. I also served as vice-chair of the organizing committee of the inaugural OutArt Festival in 1998.

While I basically had the local market for online LGBTQ+ news to myself during GayOKC.com’s first years of operation, it was eventually joined by other local sites such as Hard News Online and Gossip Boy. Despite my enthusiasm and imagination and conscientiousness and many hours at my computer, I had no experience running a business and no business training. I also had no formal training in journalism, so it was all on-the-job training for me! In addition to running everything else at the site, I was also head salesperson, but I struggled to market the site — owing to my lack of experience in addition to a serious case of shyness (Self-promotion? Me? Forget it!) — and did not seek outside investment because I feared doing so would lead to a loss of control over the editorial direction of the site, which I strove to keep as inclusive of as broad a range of political perspectives as possible. While I managed to keep the site online for several years, I stopped updating it in 2006 and eventually let go of the domain name.

Though the success of my efforts to market GayOKC.com by conventional means proved uneven at best, I came to feel that the most effective strategy was to focus on community involvement as the chief means of giving the site exposure in the community and developing word-of-mouth. From the springboard of my involvement in OGLPC and OutArt, this led me to become directly involved in many events and political situations, often attending meetings personally so I could report on them myself. Yes, I even did a stint on the Pride Parade Committee in 2001! From there, I made the decision to create a number of local events that could be directly branded as “Presented by GayOKC.com”.

Among these events were:

Gay History Month

I organized this panel discussion of Oklahoma City’s LGBTQ+ History to coincide with National Coming Out Day, and even concluded the event with a coming out ceremony-of-sorts for audience members who felt brave enough to step up to the microphone and announce their sexuality to the crowd. This aspect of the evening stands out due to the impromptu participation of Paula Sophia Schonauer, who was still an Oklahoma City police officer at the time and would go on to become a successful author and a major figure in Oklahoma City’s trans community.

The panel was moderated by the Gayly’s then-head-writer Paula Hand Brown and included several leading members of Oklahoma City’s LGBTQ+ Community offering their recollections of days gone by and their thoughts on what it all meant.

While the event was well-attended, a press conference to announce the project yielded exactly zero interest from the local mainstream media.

Rally for Gay Boy Scouts

This was part of a national protest effort called “Scouting for All” in August, 2000, and I was able to obtain the participation of Nathaniel Batchelder of the Oklahoma Peace House as co-organizer. This time, media interest was intense, and one memorable moment came when a local television reporter stumbled over the word “homosexual” live on the air.

It was not our intention to seek to legally force the Boy Scouts of America to admit Gay Scouts, but rather to educate the public about the Scouts’ own history of reaching out to minorities and inviting them to participate in the Scouting movement, which we felt the BSA was betraying in the case of Gay members.

A genuinely electrifying moment came when Kent Doss, a Gay former scout, returned his Eagle badge and told local Boy Scout leaders to their faces exactly why he was doing it. I have seldom witnessed a more powerful display of genuine moral rectitude.

Unfortunately, I made my own stumble when the time came for me to present a number of letters to the Boy Scout leaders and I fumbled around looking for them for way too long. Hey, I thought I knew where they were!

The State of Our Community

This idea was inspired by the various annual State of the (Union — State — City — fill in the blank) events, but I decided to showcase the breadth and diversity of Oklahoma City’s LGBTQ+ community by inviting a number of members of the local LGBTQ+ community to offer their thoughts on the state of things locally, one after the other, instead of just one person giving his own perspective.

This was a highly experimental event that featured a format that could charitably be described as unwieldy. Speakers were asked to limit their remarks to five minutes each. Nevertheless, two more attempts were made, with various adjustments to the format and varying levels of success. Events were held in 2003, 2004 and 2006.

GayOKC LIVE!

Streaming was still in its pre-history when I decided to try what was then referred to as an Internet radio show — what we call, these days, a podcast. The primitive state of the medium was exacerbated by the fact that many in the area were still using older computers that could not handle the cumbersome, resource-hogging software. This, combined with the total absence of any means of acquiring data about how many people were listening to each episode, led me to quickly become frustrated with the endeavor and so I abandoned it.

GayOKC.com was self-financed, and I did not have any finances. While I certainly had ideas, lack of capital and resources prevented me from attempting other, more ambitious projects, such as a Gay and Lesbian Bridal Show — which would not be held in OKC until 2019.

I would, however, like to thank Sean Winders for helping me with the logistics of some of these events.

It was not a lack of enthusiasm that led me to stop putting effort into updating GayOKC.com, but the increasing realization that all my effort was simply not paying the bills and I had to make a choice about the time that I was giving to it. That led me to make the decision to stop updating GayOKC.com in 2006. Today, there is no lack of fundraising resources and tools online that I could make use of, but they did not exist back then.

The original site is no longer online but I have set up a Facebook Page to commemorate it at facebook.com/gayokcdotcom. Some of the original material can also be viewed by using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

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