Sno-Isle Libraries is hosting Humanities Washington Speaker Avery Dame-Griff for a Tuesday, June 25 online presentation on the early internet’s impact on LGBTQ communities.

The free event runs from 6:30-8 p.m. and you can learn more and register here.

While the early internet is associated with the screech of a dial-up modem, the soft glow of a boxy monitor and piles of free AOL CDs, there’s a lesser-known story. How, for LGBTQ folks, the experience of connecting online held revolutionary possibilities for not just building community but political organizing.

This talk will explore how members of early digital LGBTQ communities — particularly ones based in Washington state — used computers for everything from exploring their identity and finding love, to getting needed resources to people living with AIDS.

Avery Dame-Griff  is a lecturer in women’s and gender studies at Gonzaga University specializing in LGBTQ studies, political organizing and the history of technology. He founded and serves as primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project, an independent community history project cataloging and archiving pre-2010 LGBTQ spaces online. His book, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet, tracks how the Internet transformed transgender political organizing from the 1980s to the contemporary moment.