Creating Queer Space Online: An Ode to the Titans of the 2000s

The internet in the 2000s felt a bit lighter compared to the digital landscape of today, almost like an experimental playground. I think back to the hours spent on sites like Albino Blacksheep and Ebaum’s World taking in the most nonsensical flash content, or my first blind run-through of The Scary Maze Game (after which I proceeded to run out of the house).

Looking back even further, I recall the fascination with AOL Instant Messenger, latching onto acronyms, emoticons, and early internet slang.

As a queer kid growing up in the 90s and 2000s, it’s almost overwhelming witnessing and embracing the amount of affirming, digital spaces we see today. Though, I think back to those initial days and their role in setting the foundation these online queer spaces sit upon today. 

So, take a look back as look back at internet’s past and the websites (and queer folks who used them) that paved the way for today’s plentiful, digital communities of queerness.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal blended the social network model with online diaries, and plentiful privacy settings to give users free rein to pour all of their deepest, most intimate thoughts onto the internet. The website acted as a way to bring together people with similar, niche interests in its option to build smaller communities for posting within the platform.

Some concepts of the 2000s seem a little wild by today’s standards, including LiveJournal, but who’s to say? We’re also comparing it to modern-day apps like TikTok, which is essentially the opposite of anonymous.

For many teens of the 2000s, it was the perfect outlet. For queer teens? It often acted as a place to work through emerging questions around their identity among other supportive parties.

Though it wasn’t long ago, we have to remember that the 2000s were overall a very different time to be LGBTQ. Even cisgender queer representation, and legislative moves toward equity, were few and far between, and trans folks were hardly a discussion at all. Spaces like LiveJournal let teens seek out support and representation they may not have had at home, among people from all over with all kinds of different lived experiences.

Many users simply outgrew the website, but it was a way to express themselves without all of the baggage and pressure of saying the same things face-to-face, while exploring communities and topics, and seeking out the support you might not have immediate access to IRL.

Neopets

It was also during this time that many queer kids and teens escaped into fandoms and niche spaces to find affirming parties to explore themselves. 

Neopets had a simple concept: You have your pets; you can customize them; you explore Neopia with them and enjoy. Similar to LiveJournal, the anonymity of Neopets allowed users to spew their secrets and internal monologues to the masses. Neopets also had a sort of impermanence with the way it stored data, so it wasn’t online forever.

For some, it was as direct as taking part in queer guilds or finding consistent friends in queer players. The in-game chat function had numerous limitations that made it challenging to talk unfiltered about their lives, with words like “kiss,” “girlfriend,” “boyfriend,” and “dating” all flagged. With codes, letter replacement, or simply moving to chat with Neopet friends offsite, LGBTQ users found a way to find their people.

Also, it’s cute and fun, and there’s a rainbow Neopet option. Of course the queers were there.

DeviantArt

For artists of the 2000s, DeviantArt was the place to be. It acted as a sort of online art portfolio, though it was also a great place to browse and follow other artists, inviting in comments, countless tags, and an entire digital playground of visuals.

The website was also plentiful in fan art and users celebrating the fandoms they loved. For gamers and anime fans, also around the time when digital art saw a hearty growth spurt, you could find anything and everything. And of course these subcultures aren’t inherently queer, but as our preceding entree mentions, LGBTQ kids very much mesh with these niche interests and spaces, back in the 2000s and even today.

This was also a place to connect with alternative folks as a whole. While some users showed their faces, many represented themselves solely with their art and words, offering a choose-your-own adventure experience for creatives.

Personally, I still have a handful of online friends I met from DeviantArt back in 2007. Fun fact, we’re all nonbinary and queer!

MySpace

Ahh, MySpace—The iconic spot where many of us learned basic HTML coding to get our pages just right; the revolutionary platform that dared us to rank our friends on a public “Top 8” list; the infamous Millennial graveyard of high-angled selfies, flat-ironed hair, and everyone’s friend Tom.

Everyone was on MySpace. It still holds a special place in many of our hearts. It was also where we began getting a bit more candid online and expressing ourselves online to the people we knew in person.

Customizing your profile was like decorating the walls of your room. You had to make it FULLY represent everything you were, and everything you wanted to be—not to mention the blog posts, which often felt reserved for intimate, internal commentary that your friend might casually share on their Instagram story today. The bulletins were rife with increasingly lengthy questionnaires to repost (and if you don’t, the ghost of a child would stab you while you’re sleeping), also challenging users to reveal elements of their sexuality and ideas around intimacy, romance, and gender in a more public capacity.

It was also monumental in its user filter abilities, including sexual orientation. For some people (me!), it was their first experience using the internet to meet other queer kids to hang out with in real life.

Now MySpace has rebranded as a music site, and I’m still mourning because I never screenshotted my perfectly curated layout before the site shifted. We are endlessly sad but happy for the memories we made along the way.

Tumblr

I would argue that Tumblr was one of the first true homes of queer internet culture, or at least one of the most visible when we talk about LGBTQ internet spaces. The site launched in 2007 and ballooned into popularity in the years following, especially in the early 2010s.

In its prime, Tumblr was a hub for endless fandoms, niche topics, everything “aesthetic,” and as a whole helped to bring a number of LGBTQ topics to the forefront of the culture. The amount of queer discourse on Tumblr is sometimes referenced in infamy; many Millennial TikTok users reference that the queer discourse on the app feels very similar to the same conversations on Tumblr 10 years prior.

But it normalized conversations around asexuality and aromanticism; other LGBTQ identities; and queerness, gender spectrums, and LGBTQ journeys as a whole, giving queer kids and young adults an affirming place to explore themselves and an abundance of queer topics.

Tumblr also felt like a sort of transition to the new era of the internet, bridging the gap between the 2000s and 2010s and working with everything that came before it. There’s not finite way to measure the impact of Tumblr, but for many Millennial and Gen Z queers, it was a formative part of their queer awakening.

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The world’s queer internet pioneers set forth to use what they had, and in retrospect, that very different internet still had its own, very queer niche spaces, even if that wasn’t their initial intention. 

We’re fortunate to have so many digital spaces today, made explicitly by and for queer folks, and for that, we nod to the online icons of Y2K (and look ahead in horror as all our mobile apps are steadily homogenized and we face whatever the hell Zuckerberg is planning with this Meta platform).