I fondly remember the thrill of my first chat interactions with strangers in the mid 90s on CompuServe forums. I was really into a paranormal one because of The X-Files. I want to say it was the Encounters forum? I was a punk little kid at the time, and so calling some stranger a fartface who was 1,000 miles away was good fun. So cringe.
The people in the chat had a really interesting reaction to that! They didn’t take the bait, and they didn’t gang up on me. Instead, they were just kinda like, “let me guess, first time on the internet? you’re not going to get very far acting that way. we don’t really do that here. you want to talk about UFOs?”
It really made an impact on me. I remember a few months later some other (presumably) punk kid was calling people fartfaces, and I reacted the same way to them, and the chat went on to being about ghosts again.
Some of the people on that forum were ALWAYS online, and it led to me staying up until 4-5am sometimes, much to my parents’ horror. I remember some forum members who would be pretty open about their story of being disabled and how CompuServe was this sudden new way to get social interaction they had previously not been getting.
I also participated in some of the early graphical chats / virtual worlds. There were huge numbers of users there who were quite expressively Queer (as we might call it today) – avatars that broadcast things well outside of 90s gender norms and lots of avatars engaging in (PG) versions of gay/poly cybersex. Definitely a prototypical Furry-esque culture, too.
Wow, this doesn’t sound entirely appropriate for me at that age in retrospect, LOL.
After a couple-few years, maybe by 1998, I did start to see folks communicating their experiences with harassment around gender/sexuality/etc. in those spaces. Something had changed a bit. It wasn’t really tolerated by the admins or the community, though. Wasn’t cool to be judgmental.
I didn’t participate in ZZT, but folks looking for a different kind of perspective on the past era of these virtual spaces might enjoy the ZZT book by Anna Anthropy.
