hey clarissa, let’s meet up later on technodyke.com
The internet changed everything for a lot of marginalized, disconnected groups of human beings, especially the gay ones. Lesbians took to the web in droves and with great passion and enthusiasm, some establishing their own dykey webnooks but mostly creating pages and pages of links to various dykey webnooks. (Remember when Google didn’t exist yet and the only way to find what you were looking for was to wade through the corresponding Yahoo! Directory?) PlanetOut.com was the primary destination for internet LGBTQs for the first few years, even obtaining millions upon millions in financing which we’re not even remotely jealous of. Now, PlanetOut has been absorbed into Here! Media, which also owns Gay.com, SheWired, OUT and The Advocate.
The other day Laneia and I were playing lesbian website portal bingo on Wayback Machine for funsies and I thought we’d share some of these throwbacks with you. For the record, some of these sites still exist — AfterEllen, obviously, but also Lesbian.com is now under new ownership (very lovely new ownership, if we do say so ourselves), GO Magazine and Curve.
25 Pictures of The Lesbian Internet, 1997-2007
Planet Out – Feb 22nd, 1997
Girlfriends Magazine – Jan 10, 1998
Bad Attitude – Feb 10, 1998
Lesbian.com – December 12th, 1998
Anything That Moves – November 24, 1998
LesbiaNation – December 12, 1998
Women Loving Women Webring- Jan 17, 1999
The Girlie TV Network – April 16, 1999
Lady Lovers – April 28, 1999
Butch-Femme.com – May 5, 1999
[visit butch-femme dot com]
Planet Out’s Dykesville – October 4th, 1999
Gay.com – October 10, 1999
Girlfriends Magazine – October 13, 1999
Lesbian.com – November 3, 1999
Dyke Diva – November 28 1999
Dyke’s World – November 16, 1999
Dyke Test – January 23, 2000
click to enlarge
DykeDiva.com – August 17, 2000
Wishing Well – August 19, 2000
F2F Dungeon – October 14, 2000
Dyxploitation – June 5, 2000
Shoe.com – November 19, 2001
AfterEllen – June 1, 2002
AfterEllen – October 12, 2002
Lesbian.com – March 22, 2004
PlanetOut Women- September 19, 2004
Afterellen.com – December 10, 2004
GO! Magazine – July 14, 2007
OurChart- July 30, 2007
and then this happened…
Autostraddle.com – March 16, 2009
And here we are today.
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i genuinely enjoyed and appreciate this post.
Thank goodness the Dyke test gave me +10 points for shaving my partner’s head after taking all of them away for shaving my legs and painting my toenails.
yes i think i ended up somewhere in the -20 range (ETA: -28), i lost a lot of points for shaving and makeup and haircare. who knew not owning a car or tools would make me not a dyke
And -1 for line dancing? Whoever wrote that should check out a gay bar in Mexico–dykes here love line dances!
I accidentally went to an older-lesbian event this weekend and WAS CORNERED BY A TROOP OF PERFECTLY COORDINATED LINE-DANCING LESBIANS.
Is there anything better than a bunch of queer women doing group choreographed dancing?
Nothing comes to mind.
It’s all about the synchronized lady dancing
that is so amusing
Yup, a similar thought comes to mind regarding dyke line dancing in Austin, Texas.
Seriously tho. At one point I was up to around 35, and then hit those things that the quiz maker clearly have strong feelings about, and that number plummeted. End score: -26
I horribly failed the dyke test. Horribly horribly horribly. What am I even doing on Autostraddle? Clearly I’m not at all gay. I’d better go buy a vehicle to remedy this situation asap.
I took that quiz with all my dyke friends while in college in the late 90s, all of us hanging out at the same time. I was terrified I wouldn’t pass and get my dyke card revoked. Fortunately, none of us fared well. It’s not easy to score many of those points when you are still in college — no one owned drills or had knives on their belts.
I ended up with -41! How is that even possible?!? I guess I’m the least dykey person alive.
I love seeing how websites evolve and change over the years, this is awesome.
This post is a TREASURE.
I was not going to gay sites in the 90s, but that AfterEllen 2004 looks very familiar…
I’m so glad we dress a lot better now. And have better web design.
-24…anyone beat that yet?
-32…
-28, thank jesus i wear men’s underwear and only own 2 pairs of heels, or i would be in really big trouble
+57. Most of that is owning a pickup. And those flannel shirts in my closet are actually from the nineties.
-49
-46 hahaha
-42, officially femme-failing the dyke test.
-50.
-54. Whoops. And that’s without having many pairs of heels.
Noooo I’m no longer winning at being the biggest non-dyke to be attracted to women :(
“Positive integer seeking any real number…”
-36. superfemme.
Hah! I am so glad that I live now, it seems like it’s the best of times for being a gay girl (your own way).
(I’m pretty much -30 gay, apparently)
Also, lol at dyxploitation, the only one out of those (exception for AS <3, obvs) with any sense of humour.
yes i LOVE dyxploitation’s attitude, i wish they still existed
I don’t know if I can let pedophile jokes slide though, even under the banner of satire…
ok ok seriously we HAVE to find the owner of skaterdykes* and make them be our best friend.
*dyke diva. i can’t read sometimes.
Skaterdykes turned my eyes into tiny hearts.
she was a sk8erdyke
she said “see you l8er, dyke”
she wasn’t butch enough for herrrrrr
She’s just a rad grrl, and I’m just a rad grrl, because we both self-identify as such, can I make it any more obvious?
We are in luv, haven’t you read, how we rule each other’s world?
The Diva is awesome. She lived in Chicago and went by the name of Ronit, if I recall correctly. Her site even had an advice column called I <3 My Clit. Also on there, a legendary group known as the Chicago Kings.
Wow, the dyke test totally solves the mystery of femme invisibility: If you wear pretty tights, high heels, make-up, and when you own tons of nail polish, your score might turn out to be a negative number.
It’s -22 for me. Which makes my crappy old bicycle and my fancy, fancy ass more invisible and less existent than zero… Interesting.
Now, where is my Nobel Price? Or my honorary Sherlock Holmes badge or something? (I will also be fine with Lucy Liu licking across my face…)
:)
-49. The only things I got points for were driving a manual foreign car but thats the norm in Ireland anyway.
This is a really fantastic article. I love it. I remember when Autostraddle looked like that!
These are all hilariously designed and brought me back to 2003.
Giving that dyke test major side-eye due to all the femmephobia though.
Is a female “femmephobic” by virtue of not being femme? Because that kinda sounds heteronormative.
Being gender non-conforming was harder a decade ago than it is now. Context.
no it’s ‘femmephobic’ because it seems to suggest femme women can’t be lesbians.
Which is ridonkidonc as we all know.
Context is probably rly important though, I feel you.
no, but that test is femmephobic for refusing to acknowledge that one can be both stereotypically feminine and gay at the same time
It’s not a gay test or a lesbian test. It’s a dyke test. Dyke was, at one time, a particular identity within the lesbian community that also included gender non-conforming aspects.
On the upside, it would seem “dyke” is not so stigmatized as it once was. Some lesbians would be offended if they were even called dyke let alone identify as one. And frankly, it was usually femme lesbians that were offended by “dyke”.
So, I guess it’s interesting that it’s being read the other way around. Where dyke identified lesbians were once marginalized and stigmatized as “wanna-be-men” and radicals, now some think that expression of gender rebellion and resistance is being femme-phobic. Totally takes all the history out of it though.
No one is saying that *being* more masculine or gender-non-conforming is femmephobic. You do you. What people are calling out is the idea that being femme = not being a lesbian, which fuck that noise.
Unfortunately, that was the vibe I got when I came out, in 89/90. If you could “pass” then maybe you weren’t really in it for the long term. I’m glad things have changed.
Of course, now I’ve come out as (theoretically) bi again. :)
I can remember just being so incredibly grateful that there was ANY LGBT presence on the web circa 1997. It was huge. Even if there was no real information…it just existed…and that, at the time, was plenty.
this
awww i feel like the people behind the wishing well would be really proud us! like, all of us here. our little community.
Don’t forget the old usenet groups, like alt.shoe.lesbians and alt.shoe.lesbians.moderated, as well as soc.women.lesbian-and-bi. You can still find the old ASLM info here: http://shoelesbians.com/
YES!! shoelesbians!!
Oh man, this is the best! I remember so many of these from when I was coming out circa 2006. There was also this really scary FAQ on how to have lesbian sex for the first time…I think it involved looking at your partner’s junk and whispering about how beautiful she was.
Woah, I actually remember that first iteration of Lesbian.com #old
And -39. HOW IS GLITTER NOT GAY?
Ah man, I had an account on OurChart…
i wrote for OurChart and so did Laneia!
Such a blast from the past. I forgot all about PlanetOut.
I got a 43 on the Dyke test. I would’ve gotten a higher score in the 90s though. I don’t have my 5 speed manual pickup truck anymore.
Is Dyke even still it’s own identity? It seems like folks here believe it to be synonymous with lesbian or gay.
I think the term is generally accepted to be synonymous with lesbian nowadays, rather than relating to gender presentation. Butch and boi and masculine-of-center and so forth have sprung up to take the place ‘dyke’ used to hold.
Does anyone else find it hilarious that The L Word was originally called “Earthlings”??
THANK YOU! I thought no one was going to mention that!
Wow, this article makes me feel really young. I don’t think I ever did any internet surfing in the 90s. When I was a little kid in school we’d only use the internet to play supervised math games. I didn’t have a home computer till the year 2000 (when I was still in elementary school). The internet has really grown up! And so have I!
This article is life-altering.
Oh those late 90s graphics, they really were horrible.
I’ll always remember the original Autostraddle design fondly.
Thanks for this– yall are always the best at finding and sharing the best and most fun parts of our history.
Anybody else remember Technodyke?
i mentioned it in the caption of clarissa explains it all because it’s not indexed on wayback machine so i couldn’t screenshot it!
BUT BUT BUT my dear Kate, you should know that they have their 2000-2003 archives online!
http://www.technodyke.com/indexarchiveold.asp
!!!!
Awesome! That was my introduction to online lesbian communities as a 13 year old baby gay. The message board was fantastic.
Yep! Met my first girlfriend on Technodyke…
No i don’t. And i never ever possibly had cat whiskers on any profile piccy. I never believed in the degenerative poison that is the religion you all still do – and came into this world with my present knowledge already. And was never young, never weak, never a kitten.
Leave a light on in the night for me
That, I can find you
Remember when we both where young
And reckless and so curious
Now you’re hiding from your child
A new day’s dawning
Remember that you felt alive
Sometimes
/Wolfsheim – The Sparrows And The Nightingales/
There’s so much going on in the lesbiandotcom one from 1998. Boys!
I got a 6 on the test, thanks to tattoos and sleepwear. My favorite question is: “45. Do your friends call you by your initials?” (The answer, sadly, is no. For now.)
Great post. I’m glad we’re here today (winks forever).
So I got all the way up to 50, but by the last question I landed at 0.. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
sorely tempted to respond to one of the personals from Lady Lovers. 14 years later, here’s hoping Agnes is still looking for an assertive woman…
this blew my mind in 349834 different ways
Wow! Autostraddle looked so cool in 2009!
…Not that it doesn’t look nice now, but that, I thought to look quite visually literate. I never had to use it, though, so I imagine this iteration’s probably easier to use. :)
soooo definitely wishing those girlie network shows were real things i could watch right now
LMAO: “a combination discoclub abortion clinic!”
I lived on the world wide web when I was a kid, so this post makes me ridiculously nostalgic… I was too young to know what being a lesbian was, so I never visited these sites but it’s soo interesting to see what they looked like!! My fav places were bust.com & gurl.com :)
gurl.com had a definite queer vibe to it i think.
Failed that Dyke Test miserably. Who the hell exercises to Jane Fonda & Richard Simmons? I know that test came out in 2000, but they would’ve played out even then. I think Tae-Bo was popular during that time. I remember Girlfriends magazine. I used to be so embarrassed to go up to the checkout with it, hoping the cashier wasn’t judging me.
7 on the Dyke test…
I guess that’s good :P
I didn’t go beyond the LGBT board on Bolt.com during most of those years, hahaha. (Sidenote: Anyone else remember Bolt? GOOD TIMES)
Other memories:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030806045830/http://ikissgirls.org/
HOLLA. I haven’t ever met anyone else who was on Bolt. That was where I first tentatively started calling myself bi. I loved that site. Until Myspace came along and killed it.
I’m just so glad. So much gladness I don’t know where to put it.
This is so cool! And re:the quiz – I went and found page two out in the web, and got 13 which would make me a “Bumbling Bisexual” I’m apparently getting a lot of points for wearing my watch the way I do, and I have no idea why. Is the watch-face worn on the inner wrist a thing? Am confused. Also, I remember being a young thing stumbling onto Bad Attitude (I remember a slightly different page, but that could just be my brain) and wishing I could subscribe. I had forgotten all about that! Ah, nostalgia.
OMG this test had a second page?!
… [I’m here >>> http://www.oocities.org/mtnlvr11/test2.html<<< You're not] …
Woohoo, my previous score is now up to 0 (from -22)!
But being femme & sexually dominant still makes a "hopelessly heterosexual"… Okay then :D
About the Dyketest… I wonder if, given the date, it means the gender identity “dyke” not dyke as in lesbian. A few of my friends who grew up in the 90s see “dyke” as pretty synonymous with tough, soft butch.
If it’s not… then yeah. All the femme invisibility. And I’m a -44 lesbian.
I was wondering this while Abby was reading me the questions while I was driving my car. Thanks for being on my brainwave with me, Launa!
Oh, Ali. I like being on the same brainwave as you. Like a mental “Come to my bosom” moment.
And yeah, that’s the only acceptable conclusion I could come to after reading the test. I have a few self-professed Dyke friends who would ace that test. One is even a carpenter. Like… one who has tools *and* can carve you stuff by hand. I feel like this is the kind of dyke this test is about.
my brain just sang “come to my bosom” like melissa etheridge
+40 dyke points
That would make sense but the results say the following:
Below 0: Hopelessly heterosexual
1-25: Bumbling bisexual
26-75: Faux femme fatale
76-125: Alluringly androgynous
126-175: Brassy dyke
176-225: Decidedly diesel dyke
226 or above: Testing transexuality using hormone therapy
Source: http://www.oocities.org/mtnlvr11/test2.html
Oh, sad. Then they are just being jerks.
Dear Riese –
This is like an internet time capsule. Thank you for making it exist.
Love, Ali
I got a -79 on the Dyke Test O_O What does it mean?
omg earthlings
-39 on the Dyke Test (and I’m pretty middle-of-the-rode when it comes to femme vs butch).
Also, the design of early 90s websites is the greatest thing and I wish I had been an internet user in the 90s to properly appreciate this
Oh jeez, the internet. I have to say I laughed harder than I should’ve with the lesbian.com one. And that it’s still not a porn site is awesome!
crap, i feel ancient now.
“Hey Clarissa let’s meet up later on technodyke.com” made me snort-laugh.
and you had to unplug the phone to use AOL to spend 10 minutes waiting for the planetout website to load – that was patience.
yeah and AOL cost $2.95 an hour, too!
AOL was the first provider we had in our house, on my Mum’s ancient apple mac. I can remember thinking “the woman who says ‘welcome’ when AOL starts up sounds just like that drunk woman off ‘absolutely fabulous'”… I was a smart kid.
-42 for me. I was doing SO well until the last few questions!
Also, as a designer, these make me want to cry.
I got -81 on the dyke test. Does it mean I’m straight?
And I didn’t know english that well until like.. 2005 maybe.. So I don’t know any of these pages. But still enjoyed looking at the amazing webdesigns!
Obviously! You better find yourself a men to marry, young lady.
Or … Just turn your watch around, start working out (preferably outdoors), put a f-o-l-d-e-d dental dam into your wallet and purchase a fancy vehicle + some tools. That should be enough to make you gay again.
That skaterdyke website looks so rad.
On a related note. I loved Geocities so much when I was a kid. I had so many accounts. The best site I made was one dedicated to female skateboarders that included very bad photos of me attempting to do kickflips and stolen images of Elissa Steamer.
Man I always thought sexuality based websites always sucked graphically and design wise, and now i have proof :D hahahha
after everybody scoring low scores in the dyke test i feel worried about my score i got 104… i guess i better start building that time machine to be sent back to the 90s :(
Wow, this made me super nostalgic. I was still feeling out my sexuality in the 90s, and the internet just made it all the easier to figure out what I liked. That is, when my parents weren’t monitoring my AOL account.
I feel like the “dyke test” is out dated and based on stereotypes. I don’t wear flannel or know how to change oil or drive a truck. But I do date women, kiss women, sleep with women and the male genitalia is not for me. So i guess I’m pretty much a dyke.
okay, the simple fact that any kind of bisexual community/support/pride/etc. existed on the internet as early as the 90s is kind of making me tear up because it’s so awesome
i miss all those sites. even the webrings, gack.
but what i really miss? IRC
(totally met my first girlfriend in a chatroom)
Everyone’s negative scores on the dyke test makes me question my 41… did I subconsciously cheat?
My favorite part was definitely on Lady Love Personal Ads when Debbie from Upstate New York claimed that she was looking for a long term relationship but wanted to “take things slow at first” .. and she said this immediately after detailing the activities in which she and her partner would partake during the long term relationship. Slow at first indeed, Debbie. Slow at first indeed.
Oh my god OurChart!!!!! I had an account!
Also super-shoutout to the Livejournal communities for lesbians/queer folx….birls was my fave comm. And Myspace’s “Not Your Everyday Lesbian” group page.
who remembers DOWNELINK circa 2009-2010?
Hahah 38 on the dyke test even tho I’m girly as a unicorn in diamonte encrusted high heels? I guess that’s what you get for growing up in a mechanics family tho
What about our website? The L Word Online?
http://www.thelwordonline.com
God, I wish I could of been older so I could of seen all those sites!
The L Word was originally called Earthlings? That’s too funny.
This is genuinely beautiful, wild, and chaotic AF. Where did these pictures even come from? This is my kind of sorcery for real.
Also I’m lowkey salty about having been too young for this version of the web…