Source: Letters to the Editor
By: Company Press Release
AVN Online magazine’s February 2002 cover story — "Band of Brothers: Gay Adult Internet Forges Industry from Community," by Rebecca Gray — discusses the gay adult Internet industry — the past, the present and the future — with various publishers, ManNet’s Butch Harris included.
For the complete article, go to the link provided below.
Excerpt: If adult content has proven to be the profit source of record on the Web at the top of this millennium, it could be argued that the gay adult Internet industry is the bellwether. Think about it: A customer base for an adult product in which cultural identity forms from sexual orientation, typically comprised of white-collar highly educated, lifestyle-conscious wage earners with an expendable income generally liberated from child bearing and rearing. …
Let’s start at the Very Beginning: Gay sites have proliferated — along with everything else — from the inaugural stages of the Internet. Some even mark their beginnings in cyberspace’s primordial soup: The BBS. "The Internet was very, very new," Lisa Turner of Badpuppy [http://Badpuppy.com] says. "It wasn’t as we know it today. [Owner] Bill Pinyon had, for recreation, a bulletin board." This was in 1992. "That’s all there was until images were available; then it became more of a home page. ‘Badpuppy’ was Bill’s handle."
Bel Ami followed its fans onto the Web [http://BelAmiOnline.com], according to Webmaster Don. "The producer/director of Bel Ami, George, started by publishing photographs in Freshmen magazine in 1991." Movie deals followed, and by the time Bel Ami got onto the Net, "Hundreds of fan sites [had] appeared…. Bel Ami itself was a late-bloomer on the Net," with an ecommerce site opening in March 1999, and a member section following in June 2000.
Butch Harris, publisher of ManNet [http://ManNet.com], remembers, "I started on AOL probably a good 10 years ago; one of their first subscribers. I don’t even remember how the community of folks connected…. Obviously, the Internet enhanced that. It was natural for the gay community to fit into [the Internet] phenomenon."
"Bedfellow.com was founded June 23, 1997," Karl Edwards reminisces, "… 10 p.m. we got our first sign-up. I got in big trouble because my boyfriend at the time had planned a surprise birthday party for me. I showed up at 11 [p.m.] and everyone had left. Sacrifices!" the Falcon family of companies, which includes the industry’s iconographic Falcon Studios [http://FalconStudios.com], Jocks Studios, Mustang Studios, the Falcon International Collection, and Hot Hand Productions, "Has been creating gay adult video for 30 years," says director of online services RJ Davis. "We launched an Internet presence six years ago, and have been growing our online business and community steadily."
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