“As I’ve found in my research on early digital trans communities, trans youths have been online since the late 1980s,” Dame-Griff writes. “They weren’t seeking out information and community because their friends were all doing it. They were doing it of their own accord.”
Avery Dame-Griff
Avery Dame-Griff is a Lecturer of Gender and Women's Studies at Gonzaga University, as well as the primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project (queerdigital.com), an independent community history project preserving information on early LGBTQ-specific communities. His book, The Two Revolutions (forthcoming from NYU Press) tracks how the Internet transformed transgender political organizing from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. His work has appeared in Internet Histories, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Language and Sexuality, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.