Gay.com
The Queen Gay Site
By Mikee dela Cruz

I was in Australia some years back (you’re making me tell my age here) when I first discovered Gay.com, arguably the site that started it all, as it was, again arguably, the precursor of everything gay online, from providing news on everything gay (hey, George Michael was caught flashing himself AGAIN!) to gay pick-ups (it sort of came after the fall of mIRC and IRC, at least if I recall right).  That I once thought it’s Australian should prove how international Gay.com is – you get that sense of it being local, since you get news you want to hear, anyway; and you can try to hook up with Barry or Tom or Will or Jim in Oxford Street or Grafton or down Hunter Valley or Wagga-Wagga for a quick shag at some park, or the Y, or at the toilet of Arq or Midnight Shift.

Gay.com is, however, actually all American, a brainchild of PlanetOut, one of the leading online media company exclusively serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, the company based in San Francisco, with an office in New York.

In its Web site, planetoutinc.com states that it aims to “promote health and wellness education, to strengthen and support LGBT families and relationships, and to empower and inspire LGBT youth.”  It certainly has an edge doing that since its Gay.com site is all-encompassing.

There are sections on business, health, lifestyle, and news effectively merge with sections on entertainment, fitness, style, and dating, so what we have here is a comprehensive coverage of almost everything gay under the sun.  And there’s the biggest lure: chat, of course.

And that would be the biggest pro, too.

Other pros include the big membership base (at any logging in time, over 15,000 are online), localization (there are members in, say, Manila, “10 miles” away from me, as the site says), the inter-operability of the sections of the site (i.e. even when in chat mode, you can still access such information as news, lifestyle, entertainment, et cetera), your personal email address (yes, you can say goodbye to yahoo.com, if you want to), and so-so gay porn connection (menafterdark.com – you can partially access as a Gay.com member; but only fully access with payment).

Some cons include the difficulty to find a nice enough name to use as your ID (they have so many members, almost all user IDs are already used up – at least those that will attract whoever you wants to attract, since BigBob is certainly better than John_in_Manila_1234_Big, with the latter not even fully shown as it’s way too long, thereby limiting your target market immediately), the way too many pop-up pages whenever you click on links (e.g. locate people in Manila, it’s another window; chat with someone, again another window; go back to Gay.com, yet another window...), and the limitations of location (for the Philippines, it only has site for Manila – now what if I wanted to get laid in, say, Davao City when I visit?).