A Dozen Queer Geeks: February 21, 2004

(Please note: This article was originally posted to my personal blog on February 21, 2004.)

This month's (February 2004) Rainbow Lives column for Swerve (now called OutWords magazine), is in keeping with the issue's theme of computers and the Internet and their use by, and impact on, the queer community.

Rainbow Lives: A Dozen Queer Computer Geeks

1. Bruce Bastian, American computer programmer, co-founder of the WordPerfect software company, and multi-millionaire philanthropist (among the organizations he has donated to are the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, the Utah Symphony, AIDS researchers, and gay and lesbian groups); member of the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the U.S.'s largest gay and lesbian political action committee: "People look at being gay as a deformity or a sickness or a choice. It's none of those. It's part of who I am. I am not Bruce Bastian, the gay person. I am Bruce Bastian, and by the way, yes, I happen to be gay...I do not believe any human being can be happy without being true to himself or herself. I think that's the first rule of life. It's not easy and sometimes that goes against the grain." (quote source: Romboy, Dennis. 'Bastian's profile low in Utah, at least: But philanthropy gives ex-WordPerfect whiz plenty of clout' Deseret Morning News, June 22, 2003; online at http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,510034607,00.html)
2. Sister Mary Elizabeth Clark (Michael Clark; Joanna M. Clark), American religious sister; the world's first transsexual nun, founder and sole member of the Community of St. Elizabeth, a nonprofit religious organization, she took her vows at St. Clement's by the Sea Episcopal Church in San Clemente in 1988 (she transferred to the Order of St. Michael in 1997); a U.S. Navy chief petty officer pre-sex change, and a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army Reserves post-sex change, she is the only person to serve in the U.S. military as both a male and a female (working at various times as an antisubmarine warfare technician, a SCUBA instructor, and an electronics technician); webmaster for AEGiS (AIDS Education Global Information System; www.aegis.com), a definitive and comprehensive web-based reference for HIV/AIDS-related information, which started as a BBS (computer bulletin board system) she had set up in 1990, to meet the need for access to up-to-date HIV/AIDS information by people in isolated areas: "Of all the things I've done in my life, military-wise, or working with children, I don't think I've had anything in my life that I've had more passion for. I really can't put it into words. When you see letters from people and you know that you're helping them, that's what it's all about."(quote source: Pasco, J. "A Life of Service", Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1997).
3. Lynn Conway, American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and inventor; professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan; made major contributions to supercomputer system architecture at IBM before being fired in 1968 for planning sex reassignment surgery; starting her career all over again as a woman, she joined Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973, becoming a pioneer of computing and microelectronics for her innovations in VLSI chip design methods; co-author of Introduction to VLSI Systems (1979), a text adopted for computer chip design courses at over 100 universities thoughout the world, she was largely responsible for the huge wave of chip design innovations during the 80's and 90's; she was also a key technical architect and leader of planning of the U.S. Defense Department's Strategic Computing Initiative.
4. Will Doherty, American founder and initial Executive Director of the Online Policy Group and an online activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); former Director of Online Community Development at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and manager of GLAAD's Digital Media Resource Center in San Francisco: "In 1983, I was general coordinator of Gays at MIT (GAMIT) and was working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, an engineering lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was very involved in setting up the infrastructure of the Internet. The Internet infrastructure would crash frequently, and I would have to reboot the computers that were critical to the Internet—computers that still required paper tape and had clunky readers. We did all sorts of leftist activism using the precursor to the Internet, which was rather ironic since much of the funding came from the Department of Defense." (quote source: Ellis, Alan, ed. The Harvey Milk Institute Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendeered, and Queer Internet Research, p. 45).
5. Mark Elderkin, American computer systems analyst and business executive; Executive Vice President and co-founder of the online service Gay.com; co-founder of Volano in 1996, a Java-based software company specializing in Internet chat software, used by over 400 corporate customers including AT&T, GeoCities, E*TRADE, and Gay.com: "I acquired the domain name Gay.com in 1994 with my partner Jeff Bennett. We did not have a plan for it at that time, as it was prior to the release of the Netscape browser and before people had Web sites. People were using e-mail, so we decided to create a gay and lesbian newsletter talling people about what was happening worldwide. We started the subscription service in 1994 while we were employed by other companies. So we were doing it as a hobby. As we learned more about the gay community and technology, and with the later explosionof the Web, we built Gay.com in August 1996. We launched before the other gay Web sites and we started from the beginning as a community site, where we were connecting people via the Web." (quote source: Ellis, A., ed. The Harvey Milk Institue Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer Internet Research, p. 31).
6. Tim Gill, American philanthropist, computer programmer and creator, QuarkXPress software (his company, Quark Inc., which he founded in 1981 with a $2,000 loan from his parents, is now worth $500 million); in 1997, Gill took on Amendment Two in Colorado, which abolished all laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination, he spent $40,000 to fund a campaign to defeat the amendment (and won); creator of the Gill Foundation, which to date has granted more than $19 million and provided technical assistance to hundreds of organizations serving LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities; #6 on the gfn.com (Gay Financial Network) 1999 list of the 25 most influential out gay and lesbian executives in corporate America, and one of the 2001 gfn.com 25.
7. Roger B.A. Klorese, American computer industry executive; Director of Product Marketing for VMware, Inc.; founder and project manager of QueerNet, a non-profit online service for the GLBTQ and HIV/AIDS communities.
8. Marshall Kirk McKusick, American computer scientist, UNIX guru, and gay geek; writer, teacher and consultant on UNIX (a computer operating system) and on BSD, the version of UNIX first developed at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976; he was the Research Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD; past president of the Usenix Association; the copyright holder and creator of the BSD Daemon image (pictured right; in UNIX, daemons are process that run in the background attending to various tasks without human intervention); he is such a geek that he has hooked up his wine cellar to be accessible from the Internet via telnet.
9. Mark Pesce, American; Chair of the Interactive Media Program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television; inventor of VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) for the Internet; computer technology author (Browsing and Building Cyberspace; The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination)
10. Tom Rielly, American computer professional; founder of PlanetOut website and co-founder, Digital Queers; was named one of Upside magazine's 100 most influential people in Silicon Valley.
11. Jacques Servin, American writer, artist, and computer programmer who was fired by his company, Maxis Inc., in 1996 for inserting unauthorized images of two scantily clad men kissing in a new computer game SimCopter, in order to bring attention to the larger issue of the total lack of lesbian and gay imagery in computer games; Servin's hack was discovered only after more than 50,000 copies of the computer game had been shipped: "There was already a 'bimbo' in this game, but she was just a scantily clad woman. That one was authorized...Overt gratuitous heterosexual content is present in many games, but I can't think of a single example of gay or lesbian content."
12. Alan Turing (1912-1954), English mathematician and cybernetics theorist, credited with creating the theoretical framework and design for the earliest modern computer (dubbed the "Turing machine"); he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1946 for his work as a cryptographer, deciphering German military codes which eventually led to the Allies' World War II victory; hounded by the police and forced to undergo hormone "treatment" for his homosexuality in the 1950's, Turing committed suicide in mid-career.