DataLounge, an online forum and gossip site aimed at gay men, has shut down after more than three decades.
The website consisted of threads and message boards where largely anonymous posters shared news, gossip, opinions, and personal stories, often prompting responses from other users. Speculation about celebrities’ sexuality was a recurring topic, making the Gossip Forum one of the site’s most popular destinations.
While DataLounge’s forum guidelines nominally required posters to respect others, much of the site’s appeal came from the witty, sarcastic, and glib replies users flung back and forth. The site also developed its own lore, including a number of “in-jokes” employed by community members.
DataLounge was launched in May 1995 by the New York City-based media company Mediapolis. It was the brainchild of co-founders Michael Rhodes, a computer programmer; Carl Pritzkat, a publishing expert who served as the site’s chief operating officer; and entertainment lawyer Tony Travostino, who went by “Muriel” and served as webmaster and moderator.
“We were three gay men,” Pritzkat told the New York Times of the DataLounge’s beginnings. “We were very plugged into gay media. We were still very much in the burning horror of the AIDS crisis. There was this sense that we needed to create a place for ourselves.”
DataLounge — which predated social media, blogs, and Reddit — grew quickly during its first decade, adding numerous forums devoted to gay issues and celebrity gossip. Its early editorial content included articles by New York drag queen Trudy and journalist Chris Barillas.
The site also linked to and established affiliations with other LGBTQ-focused websites, including the dating site Edwina.com, the web guide Homorama, and Gay Health. By 2000, it had expanded beyond gay issues to cover topics including lesbian issues, religion, and sexuality. By the mid-2000s, however, its original editorial content had fallen away, leaving only the message boards.
The site’s administrators allowed participants to post anonymously or under whatever handle they wished, often making it difficult for visitors to distinguish credibly sourced reports about celebrities and politicians from dishy exposés with no grounding in fact.
Some users posted elaborate fictional tales disguised as personal narratives to provoke responses from others. Still others reveled in the site’s anonymity, inserting a healthy dose of bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, and other prejudicial statements into their posts and replies.
DataLounge struggled to moderate posts and eventually instituted an upvoting and downvoting system that allowed users to police themselves and weed out bad actors, according to the Times.
According to Travostino, the site received multiple lawsuit threats from celebrities and politicians unhappy with the gossip being spread about them.
“We still get people who contact us and say, ‘I found this thread and I’m going to sue you,’ and it’s like eight years old,” Travostino told the Times. “It’s like, fine, we can take it down.”
Ultimately, the site’s demise was hastened by search engines prioritizing A.I.-generated summaries over links to established websites, resulting in a significant drop in DataLounge’s traffic.
On July 30, after 31 years, the website shut down, leaving behind only a block of text explaining the co-founders’ decision.
“Here at the DataLounge, we served up a steaming pile of Gay Celebrity Gossip, Politics, News, and Pointless Bitchery for 31 long years,” Travostino wrote in a farewell message posted one last time as “Muriel.”
“Somehow, this place, where anonymous strangers could spend forty pages arguing about a princess’s right to wear a particular tiara and forty more debating whether her husband was a total bottom, ended up becoming one of the internet’s more authentic communities.
“In the end, the receding tide of the World Wide Web left the DataLounge disconnected from the wider ecosystem that once fed us, as well as from the posters who came here to rage at the absurdity of it all.”
“I hope DataLounge lived up to the legend of being the internet’s longest-running ‘vile pit of trollery.’ Thanks for the memories… Hopefully, I’ll wake up next to Suzanne Pleshette, refreshed, albeit somewhat bewildered, only to discover all of this nonsense was actually a thirty-one-year fever dream,” Muriel concluded, referencing the series finale of Newhart. “Last one out, turn off the fucking servers.”
Rhodes has since floated the idea of creating an A.I.-driven system that would allow users to explore some of the website’s 34 million archived posts, likening it to a “séance with the spirit of the dead DataLounge.”
Not everyone is mourning DataLounge’s demise. Some celebrities who found themselves the subject of rumors circulated by its users are dancing on the site’s grave, recalling how snide, bitchy, nasty, and even unhinged its posters could be.
Andy Cohen, host and executive producer of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, released a statement to the Times celebrating the site’s demise.
“Rest in peace to the nastiest cesspool on the internet,” Cohen wrote. “In the mid 2000s, if I truly wanted to punish myself, I would look at DataLounge. It was the worst of humanity and a nadir for the gay community.”
