At around 5 p.m. on July 30, one day ahead of schedule, the DataLounge, a long-running online forum that became a gathering spot for (mostly) gay men, went dark. Just like that, tens of millions of posts spanning more than three decades simply disappeared.
Gone were the threads in which the participants contemplated the relative merits of the 1940s teenage star Deanna Durbin versus those of her rival, Judy Garland. Countless posts about the rumored sexual habits and physical gifts of various celebrities also vanished into the electronic ether, as did the many nostalgic paeans to “My Little Margie,” a 1950s sitcom starring Gale Storm.
In place of those lengthy examinations of various cultural obsessions, there was now a simple block of text from the site’s administrators: “In the end, the receding tide of the World Wide Web left the DataLounge disconnected from the wider ecosystem that once fed us,” it read. “Like Cher and Liza, we somehow lingered. Survival, however, is not the same thing as thriving.”
Thirty-one years after emerging from the digital ooze, the DataLounge was no more.
Many people will not mourn its passing. With its laissez-faire moderation policy, the site earned a reputation as a backwater of unsubstantiated rumors, dodgy politics and — sometimes, to its owners’ chagrin — bigotry.
Andy Cohen, the host and executive producer of Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live,” was not a fan. “Rest in peace to the nastiest cesspool on the internet,” he said in a statement for this article. “In the mid 2000s, if I truly wanted to punish myself, I would look at DataLounge. It was the worst of humanity and a nadir for the gay community.”
Michael Musto, the longtime Village Voice columnist who now writes a column at W42st.com, regards the site differently. “It was head-spinningly readable and informative and crazy and fun and reckless, and I couldn’t turn away from it,” he said. “It became almost like a private social club.”
For those who kept it alive so long, the DataLounge represented the promise offered by the old internet. Established long before the dawn of social media, blogs or even Google itself, it was a hangout for oddballs and outsiders brought together under a banner of shared interests.
Most of them posted to indulge their personal obsessions or get a laugh from others in the community. There was no thought of clout-chasing or platform-building. There used to be lots of digital spaces like that. Now there is one fewer.
“Nobody gave it much credence, right?” said Michael Rhodes, 64, a computer programmer who was one of the site’s founders. “The DataLounge was always a joke. We weren’t losing money on it, we weren’t making money on it — it covered its bills. I would log on once in a while, and it would make me laugh. That’s pretty much what it was, and I think it’s why it had longevity.”
The DataLounge was founded by Mediapolis, a digital company in New York. Rhodes and his fellow Mediapolis partners — the entertainment lawyer Tony Travostino and the chief operating officer Carl Pritzkat — started out by building web pages for L.G.B.T. nonprofits at reduced cost or free of charge.
“We were three gay men,” Pritzkat, 63, said. “We were very plugged into gay media. We were still very much in the burning horror of the AIDS crisis. There was this sense that we needed to create a place for ourselves.”
Mediapolis housed the web pages under a single URL, DataLounge.com. Soon, it began publishing original news and opinion content of interest to the gay community. A rudimentary comments section quickly became a lively discussion hub.
The site’s eventual form took shape in those threads. By 1997, in addition to its original content, the DataLounge was offering numerous forums divided by category, from High Art to Celebrity Gossip.
By the mid-2000s, the nonprofit sites had moved on, and the original content fell away, leaving only the message board. What had started as an afterthought became its own universe, with its own language and customs. The users had taken over.
The administrators allowed participants to post anonymously or under whatever name they cared to use, which made the site fertile ground for japery and trolling. Credibly sourced reports about stars and politicians mixed with bits of gossip that seemed to have no grounding in fact. For the site’s lurkers, trying to sort good information from bad was part of the fun.
Many of the regulars took turns posting as “Helen Lawson,” a name familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the kitsch classic “Valley of the Dolls.” Other fictional habitués of the DataLounge included “Peg,” an outspoken Republican lesbian, and “Dionne Warwick” (presumably, not the real one).
Long before Redditors were spinning rage-bait yarns in forums like r/AITAH, DataLoungers were posting elaborate tales, often disguised as personal narratives, to get a rise out of their fellow users. Ongoing narratives took shape and kept growing. Rhodes came to think of them as gargantuan works of collaborative fiction.
One of these sagas concerned Denny, a hapless tourist hauling a Samsonite suitcase across Manhattan in search of strangers to take him in for the night, because he was too cheap to spring for a hotel. Another long-running collaborative tale, under the heading “Once Around the Garden,” was a Bergmanesque domestic saga of a middle-aged gay couple trying to run an upscale restaurant somewhere in the Hudson Valley.
In 2003, a thread popped up titled “Dialing the Phone With a Pencil.” It began straightforwardly enough: “I used to think it was so glamorous when I saw women do this on TV. Imagine, if you will — 10 y.o. boy dialing the phone with a pencil, being all glamorous.” Another poster chimed in: “I did it, too. OK? I also used to moisten the tips of my fingers when turning the page of a book. Just a quick touch to the tongue. Very chic.”
The thread grew to epic proportions, with other DataLoungers sharing their own memories of queer-adjacent childhood affectations (“I asked my mother for a parasol but she refused!”), and the phrase “dialing the phone with a pencil” became a sitewide catchphrase.
The shared voice came about because the users were allowed to post without using their real names. But anonymity also meant that anyone could say anything, and the outing of celebrities (major, minor, dead, alive) became a DataLounge staple. For many years, anyone who went online with questions about the supposed sexual habits of a famous person was often led to a dishy DataLounge thread.
The site, like others of its era, struggled with how to moderate posting. It eventually instituted a Reddit-like system of upvoting and downvoting, which was intended to let the community weed out bad actors on its own. But that couldn’t stamp out the frequent legal threats from people of note unhappy with the gossip that was being spread about them.
“I can think of at least two specific incidents of the Secret Service calling us, saying that so-and-so found out that she was mentioned on the DataLounge,” Travostino, 65, said. “I think the first thing I said to the agent was, ‘She reads the DataLounge?’ He sort of stopped and said, ‘Well, not exactly.’
“We still get people who contact us and say, ‘I found this thread and I’m going to sue you,’ and it’s like eight years old,” he continued. “It’s like, fine, we can take it down.”
Mediapolis’s owners said the death of the DataLounge was less about legal threats and more about how the internet has changed in recent years. Once Google and other search engines began giving priority to A.I.-generated summaries over links to established publications and websites, traffic plummeted.
“It depended upon search,” Rhodes said. “It depended upon other sites producing gossip. All those other things have faded away, right? Gawker is long gone, for various reasons. Google no longer gives search traffic out. They’re no longer a search engine. So we’re left being this island. The tide has gone out on the rest of the internet. It just doesn’t work anymore.”
What about all that data? Buried in the DataLounge’s archives, now permanently offline in Amazon cold storage, are more than three decades of real-time chatter about the AIDS crisis, Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out, the events of Sept. 11, presidential elections and the Covid-19 pandemic — all filtered through the shared sensibility of a caftan-frocked gentleman with a penchant for imagining himself as Helen Lawson.
“There’s 34 million posts in the current database,” Rhodes said. “What we’re going to do with that, I’m not sure. But one idea we had was actually making an A.I.-driven system, which would allow you to do a séance with the spirit of the dead DataLounge. Just to bring it all back to its quirky origins.”
