From: Sam Damon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Apr 1994 04:48:51 -0500 (EST)

CENTER GOES ONLINE WITH DIGITAL QUEERS
(Center Voice, The NYC LesBiGay Community Center, 3/94)

The Center has been selected as one of a half-dozen lesbian and gay
organizations across the country to participate in a pilot project linking
gay and lesbian liberation organizations electronically into computer online
services.

The program was conceived by Tom Rielly, co-chair of Digital Queers, the
three-year-old organization for lesbian and gay high-tech professionals, and
funded by Tim Gill, Chief Executive Officer and Senior Vice President of
Research and Development of QuarkXPress, the Denver-based software company. 
The project donates personal computers, software and training to selected
system users, providing them access to America Online, other computer
bulletin boards, and the Internet.

Former Center Controller Donald Huppert, who designed the Center's computer
system, will serve as the Center's Digital Queers training consultant on the
DQ project.  Once the system is up and running, anyone with access to
Internet e-mail will be able to communicate with the Center, and vice versa.

According to Quark's Mr. Gill, the idea for the project was generated at
President Clinton's inaugural.  "I was sitting in a room with a lot of NGLTF
(National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) people," he said.  "Tom Rielly was
there, and he came up with the idea.  And I said,'Okay, I can give you
$25,000.'"

Through e-mail and America Online's Gay and Lesbian Forum, the distribution
of informational bulletins, notices of coming events, listings of services,
and urgent messages that require action by the lesbian and gay community is
almost instantaneous.  

"The radical right uses sophisticated computer communications technology
extensively and brilliantly to fight against us," said Richard Burns, the
Center's Executive Director.  "A primary goal of the DQ project is to begin
to use similar tools to organize our community, to make contacts, and
disseminate information to generate rapid response when threats to our civil
rights arise." 

The system will also facilitate the world-wide organizing work of the
International Lesbian and Gay Association, providing international e-mail
access for Center ILGA (the Center's international rights project and the
local world ILGA chapter), which runs the ILGA United Nations project and
will host the ILGA world conference in New York in June.

"We intend to use email as a technological extension of the grassroots
community organizing function we currently accomplish with our monthly
mailings," said Mr.  Burns.  "With regular mail we reach 35,000 households
every month with our calendar of activities and meetings held here at the
Center.  Now, with this electronic tool, we'll be able to reach a much
broader audience more quickly with our monthly and daily calendars, our
newsletter, and other information."

Scott Mindeaux, MIS Director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,
another DQ project participant, said, "The purpose of the project is to get
organizations online and show how computer technology can work in our
community, how to use it to our advantage.  It becomes another outlet,
another way to reach out to constituents.  Now NGLTF can reach out directly
to our many of our members with our action alerts."

Mr. Gill said the pilot project assumes that linking the lesbian and gay
community electronically will "make us better, stronger, and more
coordinated."  If it succeeds, the project will be expanded to include other
gay and lesbian advocacy organizations.