The end of gay.com

First I'll say that my passion is technology and all that that entails. Of course things change, sometimes drastically at the blink of an eye. However, a particular site has made a recent change that has left me disqusted for lack of a better term.

This morning when I attempted to log onto the lifestyle website of gay.com through a program called Morar Chat, it wouldn't connect. So, I navigated to the site www.gay.com only to find that the site has been completely changed. In this change, they have completely removed the chat rooms. It now appears that the site is trying to compete with other services that focus on location-based "whatever". They don't realize that others have been doing it longer and probably do it better.

I started using the site many years ago mostly to chat with people. I realize that non-location based chat rooms are kin to ancient, dusty tombs. But, I was able to meet wonderful people through those chat rooms. Often, I've chatted with people from all over the world that shared similar interests and it's actually where I met my fiancee.

I completely understand that that environment had many issues, not the least of which being legal. However, certain changes could have been made to curtail the majority of that. Those rooms provided a forum for various parts of the GLBT community. They provided a safe environment for those of our kind to communicate with others.

Perhaps I'm a relic. Perhaps I just want to cling to a highly outdated era where the Internet provided ways to connect with people that went much deeper than a random one night encounter. Perhaps I'm in the wrong field altogether.

/rantoff

I remember the days when Planetout was the go to place, then it was Gay.com. In my area gay.com died here just after they changed the layout of the chat rooms, no one was happy. Looks like another mistake in a string of mistakes for them. I'm sad gay. is I met my boyfriend.

LOL I used to volunteer for PNO at prides up and down Ca. I'm sorry to see gay.com make this decision as I used to really enjoy the chat rooms and speaking with people from areas other then my own. I hate being location bracketed, I don't use gay.com or grindr to hookup I really just want to chit chat with people.

In 2001, 2002, I would play the game of popping random adjectives and nouns into Google followed by .com--purple.com, annoying.com, teddybear.com, you get the idea. One day I got up the courage--and I was shaking like a leaf--to enter gay.com. Understand I was in the school computer labs, I was still in ex-gay therapy, and I was terrified someone I knew would see me. Also understand that I had absolutely no idea what I would get when I typed gay.com.

After hits and misses, I found a bit of a home for myself in the Christian and Intellectual rooms. Some of those guys gave me the courage to make the first most tentative steps to come out. Fast-forward just a few years and the environment was absolutely nothing like that. (A couple of years ago, in a bout of severe depression and loneliness, I entered my local room just to have someone to talk to, and was run out with claims that I was a mean, arrogant person and that I was lying about being from Minneapolis.) But had it not been what it was when it was, over a decade ago, it's possible that my life would have gone far, far worse.

A sad day indeed. I liked logging into chat rooms elsewhere to talk... although I haven't logged into the site in almost three years...

This is a sad day! I, too, enjoyed much of what the site gay.com used to offer. I hadn't logged on in some time and was shocked to see that it was not what it used to be!

I loved the idea that I could go to other states and talk with people that just wanted to talk as if I were not in the state, and they were aware of this, the chat would indeed be based on no other premises but the conversation itself!

Gay.com helped me to come out, too. I didn't know anything and was able to meet with people who to this day are some of my best friends. I started using gay.com in the late 90's.

I also know how important the site was for people dealing with specific issues to discuss them with others in specific chat rooms.

I will miss gay.com and what it used to be and what it did for me.

John

That's a shame that gay.com is just trying to become a browser based version of Grindr. I remember when people moved away from IRC to gay.com to chat and meet people. Sure, it was a meat market back in the day, but now it seems to have completely taken the social aspects away and getting to the point where it's pretty much about hooking up and getting off.