Digital Queers’ cyberutopia after the end of history

Introduction

The first edition of Gay & Lesbian Online, a print guidebook to queer cyberspace, claims that “when historians sit down to write the history of gay liberation in the ‘90s, one of the longest chapters will be devoted to the Digital Queers” (Dawson, 1996: 96). Despite this pronouncement, Digital Queers has been only briefly mentioned in scholarly literature. ¹ Digital Queers, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization sometimes abbreviated DQ in their internal and public-facing materials, emerged in 1992 and operated until 1999 throughout the same concluding decade of the twentieth century during which queer studies cohered as an academic discipline and queer Americans achieved significant, if still limited and potentially problematic, cultural, economic, and political recognition from mainstream institutions (Amin, 2017; Duggan, 2003; Puar, 2007; Sender, 2004). This “electric 1990s convergence, under the banner of queer, of same-sex sexuality, political urgency, and radical transgression” (Amin, 2017: 184–185) continues to inform the presuppositions and priorities of many queer studies scholars and American queer activists today, and yet DQ’s role in fostering literally electric queer convergences through digital media technologies has not been substantially addressed. This article constructs a historical narrative about Digital Queers to demonstrate how utopian desires, particularly desires for digital media technologies to resolve social problems such as the marginalization of queer people, worked to materially subsume queer activist processes to capitalist digital political economy during the 1990s.

Digital Queers was founded and initially led by Tom Rielly and Karen Wickre, non-technical, managerial-level Silicon Valley workers who sought to organize other queer tech workers or tech-interested queers and mobilize their capital, knowledge, and labor for social change. Although DQ spawned chapters across the United States and internationally, the location of their national headquarters in San Francisco supported a close association between DQ and the American tech industry based in and around that city. DQ described their organization as both a “national organization geared to queers working in high technology” and a “unique group of technology aficionados who create change every day” (ONE Digital Queers), emphasizing their professional affiliations and their activist bona fides in different sections of the same promotional pamphlet. DQ raised awareness of queer political issues among tech workers, advocated for queer-inclusive corporate policies at tech companies, provided computer training to queer activists and non-profit workers, and distributed computer equipment to queer non-profits in “computer makeovers” often funded by DQ-hosted parties at tech industry trade events. These efforts were underwritten by a belief in the inherently beneficial function of digital computation, which was often viewed by DQ’s members as a transformative technology unleashing novel capacities for queer activists and thus improving the lives of queer Americans.

This article recounts an archivally researched narrative of Digital Queers’ operations, particularly the national headquarters’ fundraising, “makeover,” and training endeavors during the period of Rielly and Wickre’s leadership from 1992 to 95, to query the “cyberutopian” dimensions of their activist efforts. As a synthesis of “cyber,” which entered English through mid-twentieth-century cybernetics discourse (Wiener, 1948: 11–12) and has since come to popularly signify digital computing as in the term “cyberspace,” and “utopia,” which can be understood broadly as “an expression of the desire for a better way of living” (Levitas, 1990: 8) rather than an impossibly perfect “good-place/no-place” in the style of Thomas More, “cyberutopia” designates desires for digital computing to produce better living. ² The knowledge, machines, and networks that DQ shared built “a worldwide cyberscaffold of gay and lesbian organizations” (Dawson, 1996: 96) that they hoped would produce better living for queer Americans, materially enacting the cyberutopian principles discursively expressed in their internal documents and promotional materials. These cyberutopian hopes linked the political economy of Silicon Valley to the then-fluctuating processes of queer activism, developing contradictions demonstrated in the historical record between the former’s profit imperatives and the latter’s mission of progressive social change.

I interpret DQ’s contradictions through the context of their historical situation in the 1990s, a decade which substantially informs the discursive and material conditions of the present. Besides being a period of significant uptake of digital computation in the United States, the 1990s featured a marked shift of utopian imagination from previous decades. The collapse of the Communist Bloc and neoliberal restructuring of the American-led capitalist world-system was understood by many who experienced it in a manner akin to Francis Fukuyama’s infamous claim of “the end of history” (1989, 1992). The idea that capitalist liberal democracy had proven to be a desirable ideal which lacked viable alternatives and would thus govern humanity’s future in the long run was adopted as common sense during the 1990s even by some who balked at Fukuyama’s widely maligned terminology, including many queer activists and queer studies scholars. ³ Locating DQ within this historical dynamic does not totally obviate the value of the queer betterment produced by their work, nor does it dismiss utopian desires or methodology, but it does point to the analytic need to situate utopian desires within a historically materialist view of those desires’ social function.

Utopia as desire

This article discusses utopia as a desire, feeling or impulse, as a process rather than a place. Desires, feelings, and impulses are not precisely the same processes, but they all identify utopia as a presence which is with us now, if not always fully or openly, rather than something limited to the future or to imagination. This understanding of utopia is particularly indebted to the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, both directly and through his influence on subsequent utopian thinkers including Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, and José Esteban Muñoz. Bloch’s sense of utopia as a latent anticipation of future transformations which is uncovered by hope guides this article’s examination of utopian archaeologies, utopian interests, cyberutopia, and queer utopia through the historical narrative of Digital Queers.

Utopian archaeologies and utopian interests

Recounting the story of Digital Queers through archival materials advances an archaeological understanding of their utopian desires. Methodologically, utopian archaeology enacts Bloch’s injunction to analytically expand the utopian concept beyond More’s fictional good/no-place by examining “the imaginary reconstitution of the models of the good society” (Levitas, 2013: 154) latent within readily perceptible artifacts. ⁴ Utopian archaeology aims to analytically reconstruct the desires “behind” or “beneath” cultural and political processes through critique; these desires may be self-consciously expressed as utopian, but in the case of Digital Queers, they are gleaned from qualitative interpretation of what can be discerned of their organizational actions and discourse from archival collections at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. ⁵ These collections contain predominantly print materials, including public-facing pamphlets and newsletters, internal planning documents for DQ events, and printed digital communications which together plot a coherent vision of social change despite the inevitably partial account offered by any archival record and implicit nature of their utopianism. Jameson (2005: xii) writes that “one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.” In this poetic register, this article’s archaeological method observes, recovers, and nurtures utopian sparks thrown from DQ’s historical presence through a critical process which, although attentive to gaps in the record, aims to extrapolate some sense of the comet which birthed these lingering traces but has itself passed decades ago from direct perception as a celestial body in history’s metaphorical sky.

This critical archaeological process is not necessarily hostile, but in this article, it does advance claims about the content and function of DQ’s utopian desires which indicate particular interests within class society. In Levitas’s (2013: 153) framework for utopian studies, this would be the ontological mode of utopia, which concerns how people are supported or restrained by “the historical and social determination of human nature” that are inherent to existing and potential societies. For Jameson (2004: 47), these determinations mean “not only that all utopias spring from a specific class position, but that their fundamental thematization…will also reflect a specific class-historical standpoint or perspective.” Jameson (1981: 290–291) also reverses this formulation elsewhere, arguing that “all class consciousness of whatever type is Utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity” which pre-figures the collective life of an achieved utopia in the future through class solidarity in the present. Revealing how DQ’s archaeologically uncovered utopian desires articulate the specific perspectives and positions constituting their existing and potential class interests is thus a guiding principle in the selection and interpretation of archival materials. For example, DQ promised potential corporate donors to their “Inaugural Event” a “rarified [audience]: 300 gay, lesbian, and straight but not narrow computer professionals who are highly educated and affluent” (GLBT #1/113), interlocking two emergent class stereotypes during the 1990s associating both queer Americans (Sender, 2004) and computer-using white-collar professionals (Streeter, 2011: 119-137) with personal wealth. The inclusion of this description in letters written by DQ’s leaders indicates DQ’s understanding of their members’ class interests as queer tech workers and, by presenting those members to potential donors as desirable recipients of philanthropic capital, reveals a utopian desire for the political methods of liberal reformism to achieve better living for queer Americans.

DQ’s utopian interests are also particularly framed by their situation in the United States during the 1990s after the “end of history.” The idea that capitalist liberal democracy is the Universally valid “end point of mankind’s ideological development” (Fukuyama, 1989: 3) was not new when Fukuyama advanced it, but the market-oriented reforms of the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China during the 1980s which presaged his initial writing and the widespread collapse of state Communism which followed seemed to empirically bolster his claim. This interpretation of the end of the Cold War also proved attractive beyond the boundaries of his neoconservative politics as Modernist desires for a mass utopia of abundantly shared wealth enabled by industrial progress were displaced by neoliberal ideals of pragmatic individualism, limited liberal reformism, and unfettered capital accumulation. ⁶ The instantiation of this “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) during the 1980s and 90s which Fukuyama’s “end of history” projects into the future could be read as a withering of utopianism, but it also represents a prioritization of particular individuals’ utopian interests above others. The interests of “highly educated and affluent” queer tech workers in liberal reforms enabling better living through enhanced individual participation in capitalist accumulation, for example, are better received by hegemonic institutions than collectivist demands for wealth redistribution. Digital Queers’ emergence during this time presents a thickly sedimented “dig site” for utopian archaeology, especially given that their organizational base in Silicon Valley located DQ within a place which transformed personal utopian interests in capital accumulation into fantasies of mass utopia through digital technology.

Cyberutopia

While utopian anticipations of digital computing could be traced as far back as Charles Babbage and Ava Lovelace’s nineteenth century experiments (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 2–4) or the technocratic aspirations of U.S. Progressive Era “robber baron philanthropies” (Geoghegan, 2023: 21–52), cyberutopianism notably accelerated along two tracks with the actual development of digital computing in the latter half of the twentieth century. One “hacker” variant emerged from actual interactions with mainframe computers in their corporate, military, or university settings (Edwards, 1996; Schulze, 2017: 175–179; Streeter, 2011: 17–43; Turner, 2006a: 11–28, 2006b), and another “countercultural” tradition came later to computing through texts like Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media or Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and other cultural and political experiences of the turbulent 1960s (Schulze, 2017: 179–184; Streeter, 2011: 44–68; Turner, 2006a: 28–68). These trajectories substantially overlapped and integrated, especially in places like Silicon Valley, to produce a syncretic cyberutopian discourse which joined aspirations for expanded consciousness and human flourishing to ideals of entrepreneurship and capital-intensive technological development. This cyberutopian conjuncture matured and calcified as common sense as digital computers and networks spread throughout American homes, schools, and workplaces during the 1980s and 90s, and by the time Digital Queers was founded in 1992, both the “hacker” and “countercultural” traditions of digital computing were ideologically aligned and materially integrated with the neoliberal reorganization of American and global political economy.

Many scholars invoke the early 1990s as a high point in the pitch and volume of cyberutopian desires (Dahlberg, 2009: 176; Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 15; Kaufmann et al., 2020; Schulze, 2017: 174; Streeter, 2011: 122; Turner, 2006a: 175–176, 207–209, 2006b: 257). Publications such as Wired magazine or Howard Rheingold’s books about early digitally networked communities, the embrace of digital technology by politicians such as U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, the invention and uptake of the World Wide Web leading to the “dot-com” stock bubble, and the increased depth and frequency of everyday interactions with digital computers supported an inherent association between these machines and a better future. It is this broad association of digital computing with better living which was especially powerful during the 1990s that guides my definition of cyberutopia rather than other uses emphasizing libertarian ideology (Dahlberg, 2009) or disembodiment (Brophy, 2010). While these uses identify particular expressions of cyberutopianism, with the association with American libertarianism being perhaps especially relevant to thinking about Silicon Valley, DQ’s cyberutopianism does not neatly fit within either of these paradigms. DQ’s cyberutopianism drew upon and reproduced the cultural and political common sense of the 1990s regarding digital computation with an emphasis on queer activist practices distinct from either libertarianism or disembodiment, instead calling attention to the intersection of cyberutopian praxis with queer desires for better living.

Such an intersection is evident in an archived internal document planning DQ’s “Inaugural Event” (GLBT #1/113), typewritten and then annotated by hand after printing, which shows how the organization initially understood their conjunction of cyberutopianism and activism seeking better living for American queers. The document lists five goals for a fundraising party benefitting the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), a leading queer civil rights non-profit, to be held in San Francisco on January 9, 1993, during the annual Macworld Expo trade show for Apple products; two of these goals are marked with pen, indicated here by asterisks:

*A. To introduce Digital Queers as a new professional organization for lesbians and gay men in the technology industry.

DQ’s Inaugural Event aimed to raise tech workers’ awareness of ongoing liberal reformist political campaigns and, if the pen markings are understood as indicating emphasis, especially to both establish DQ as an organization for those workers and direct those workers’ capital towards computer equipment for the NGLTF. ⁷ DQ often positioned themselves as both a professional and activist organization within tech industry spaces, combining the opportunity for individual white-collar workers’ interest in self-advancement within Silicon Valley with the potential for social change through financial contributions supporting liberal reformist activism.

DQ’s commitment to liberal reformism might seem anti-utopian, but utopian desires can be readily traced in their conjunction of liberal queer politics with the cyberutopian potential of digital technology. Within the political imagination of the “end of history” assuming the future continuance of liberal capitalism, queer reformist efforts for anti-discrimination ordinances or gay employee groups represent “a utopian desire for unconflicted personhood” (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 557) which would articulate queers as full citizens within the utopian ideal of the American nation-state. ⁸ Reformist queer activism thus attains utopian dimensions as the political work which would complete the promises of liberal ideals. DQ positioned themselves, and the technology industry within which they were imbricated, as crucial vectors for advancing these efforts. In donation requests seeking computer equipment for the NGLTF and sparkling wine for the Macworld party, DQ’s co-founder Tom Rilley writes that “Urvashi Vaid, the outspoken [NGLTF] leader for the last 6 years, is retiring. She will be replaced in March by Tori Osborn…she is more of a technophile” (GLBT #1/113). Technophilia’s presumably efficacious contrasting with Vaid’s (1995: xvi) commitment to, in her words, “acting on the politics of social justice and liberation,” rhetorically aligns DQ’s cyberutopian interests with reformist political strategies and justifies their focus on raising large amounts of capital as their “Inaugural Event” seemingly did. ⁹

DQ’s early fundraising strategy demonstrated by this event mixed “grassroots” appeals with philanthropic contributions, especially from Tim Gill, the openly gay founder of software company Quark, whose Colorado-based Gill Foundation would provide substantial financial support to Digital Queers. “Grassroots” in this context should not be a priori understood as working-class or populist. Stephanie Guilloud and William Cordery (2007: 107) suggest that in the context of funding a non-profit organization, grassroots income can be understood as “all income generated from individuals, fee-for-service, and non-foundation sources,” such as the funds raised by DQ through party donations. Insofar as grassroots fundraising can build financial and political connections between non-profit organizations and the communities they aim to serve, DQ’s strategy of hosting fundraising parties at tech industry events advanced the utopian interests of queer tech workers within and through the realm of queer activism. Their insistence upon cyberutopian claims of inherent betterment through computation extended their interests through digital connections beyond the explicitly “rarified” and “affluent” attendees of their fundraising parties to a broader collectivity which might be called a queer utopia.

Queer utopia

Insofar as queerness might be thought of as constitutively utopian in the tradition of Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, DQ’s linkage of cyberutopian desires with queerness invites interrogation of how some queer utopian interests do not automatically attain the anti-capitalist resonances which could otherwise be viewed as essential to the discursive-political convergence of “queer” in the 1990s. ¹⁰ Idealist interpretation of Muñoz’s canonical text, arguably among the most influential in queer studies, can produce an intellectual equation where aesthetically represented or lived queerness equals utopia equals anti-capitalism. While Muñoz’s formulation of queer utopia helpfully informs the apprehension of DQ’s utopian interests, a materialist interpretation of this concept elaborates how those interests cohered through adherence to capitalist political economy rather than opposition to it. ¹¹

Muñoz utilizes Bloch’s utopian temporality to ascribe an essential futurity to past and present queerness. For Muñoz (2019: 1), “queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring,” that attains utopian resonance through an insistence on the past and present potentiality of another world in the future. This concrete possibility of queer futurity is figured as a vital quotidian force which sustains queer living and thus runs contrary to arguments in which “queer utopia” is a pejorative for excessively postmodern theorization (Martin, 1994) or, as Nishant Shahani attributes to Jameson, in which desire “is inevitably ahistorical and can thus never be political” (2012: 89). Bloch’s utopian hermeneutic of identifying anticipatory desires in aesthetics and performances enables Muñoz to critically invest the future with the potential for better queer living without falling back upon heteronormative natalism or teleological narratives of inevitable historical progress. Muñoz expresses a desire for queerness to be a mechanism for relationality that concretely produces better living in the future from past and present daily moments of queer life-making which constitute historically situated utopian anticipations of actual or potential collectivity.

This framing of a relational queer futurity is explicitly opposed by Muñoz (2019: 20) to anti-utopian pragmatism which seeks “mere inclusion in a corrupt and bankrupt social order.” Muñoz’s investment in utopian futurity aims to push queer political imagination beyond the accommodations with neoliberal capitalism and imperial nationalism which arguably dominated American queer activist strategy during the 1990s and 2000s (Chasin, 2000; Duggan, 2003; Puar, 2007; Vaid, 1995). In this sense, Muñoz’s queer utopia can be read as attempting to enact Jameson’s view of utopia as class consciousness in similar terms as the latter theorizes the utopian potential of revolutionary “dual power” in the same post-historical moment as the former. The quest for an American institution “to play the role of a parallel and non-state power” (Jameson et al., 2016: 15) capable of revolutionary struggle against capitalist hegemony could be answered by queerness’s utopian potential for radically remaking social relations and insisting upon a collectively survivable, anti-capitalist future. Digital Queers, however, was founded during a moment of profound change for queer activism in the United States. While the HIV/AIDS crisis spurred highly visible direct protest actions, there was also “an influx of more respectable men—with money, power, and conservative politics—into gay activism” (Briggs, 2017: 164). Registered non-profit organizations, which had already been exponentially growing in number and complexity in the U.S. throughout the twentieth century, began to assume an even more pronounced role in determining the strategy and tactics of American queer activism. ¹² According to Vaid (1995: 104), “by 1992…the consensus among gay people was that direct action was no longer an effective strategy.” ¹³

DQ’s pursuit of liberal reformism eschewed the “bodies in the streets” logic of prior queer activism oriented towards direct action while maintaining a claim to utopian queer relationality through the connectivity of digital computation. The price of computing power fell “an average of 14.7 percent a year” (Turner, 2006a: 212) from 1987 to 1995, and the development of user-friendly applications for accessing the newly invented World Wide Web, such as Mosaic in 1993 and Netscape in 1994 (Gillies and Cailliau, 2000), further suggested that the potential uses of computers were rapidly expanding in DQ’s early years. The American tech industry was on the precipice of the explosive influx of capital which would eventually be pejoratively known as the “dot-com bubble” (Streeter, 2011: 174-175) but at the time seemed an unalloyed success in marked contrast to Soviet struggles with networked computing. ¹⁴ For the American tech industry at large, which emerged from both the anti-Communist Cold War military-industrial complex (Edwards, 1996) and the socialism-skeptical California counterculture (Turner, 2006a), cyberutopian pledges to deliver better living through digital technology without anti-capitalist wealth redistribution flowed easily into liberal reformist praxis for those seeking such connections. For DQ, Silicon Valley’s cyberutopianism provided an ideological basis for routing queer activism across the United States through digital computation.

“The Silicon Solution”

Conducting computer training for queer activists was one practice by which DQ extended their cyberutopian desires outside of Silicon Valley. At the November 1993 Creating Change Conference in Durham, North Carolina, an annual gathering of queer activists hosted by the NGLTF, DQ put together several workshops supporting the use of digital computing for queer activist practices. A packet for the “Basic Computer Skills Workshop” provides step-by-step instructions for designing postcards and flyers in desktop publishing software, creating and utilizing a database to produce mailing labels and e-mail lists, and generating graphs or charts from spreadsheets (GLBT #1/115). Another packet, titled “What is an online communication system? Why should I use one? Techno-speak for analog users,” introduced unfamiliar users to the basics of computer networks, and additional documents with robust lists of resources for computer hardware and software, technical support, and general information about computers such as common “techno-terms” altogether provided a significant volume of information about digital computation (GLBT #1/115). If DQ’s fundraising parties perhaps primarily built financial and political relationships between queer tech workers, these trainings definitively directed the knowledge and resources of those tech workers outside of Silicon Valley.

DQ’s provision of computer equipment and computer trainings could be sites of utopian queer value insofar as queer activists’ uses of digital technology might exceed the conventional uses of such machines. Muñoz (2019: 147) suggests that Bloch offers an alternative to the Marxist conception of surplus value by which “surplus becomes that thing in the aesthetic that exceeds the functionalism of capitalist flows … [and] as a sort of deviance from conventional norms, conveys other modes of being that do not conform to capitalist maps of the world.” DQ’s cyberutopian activism could be interpreted in this way as queerly mobilizing digital computers for non-profit activism which potentially supported these non-capitalist modes of being. DQ’s irregularly published newsletter, PDQ: Publication of Digital Queers, lists almost fifty organizations as receiving varying amounts of “technical assistance, products, or consulting services” (PDQ v1n2, #GLBT-PER 140) in 1993 and 1994, including AIDS activists, queer community centers, red-state activist groups and service providers, and organizations centering queer of color and trans communities. ¹⁵ While it would be difficult to rigorously account for how each of these groups or others who received assistance from DQ utilized their computer equipment and/or training, the breadth of these groups’ activist work makes it very likely that at least some, perhaps many, queer lives were bettered by their access to digital technology. Viewed through Muñoz’s utopian conceptions of queer temporality and supplementary value, DQ’s activist work enabled queer survival in their present time and enacted a commitment to queer futurity by making possible queer uses of digital computation.

However, foregrounding this interpretation as the primary account of DQ’s utopian interests would miss how their cyberutopianism attached the supplementary queer value of their activist practices with the very operations of capitalist economics which that queer value was supposed to exceed. Muñoz’s conception of queer surplus assumes that queer deviance from norms automatically coheres as an anti-capitalist utopian interest, and although Muñoz is attentive to the immiseration of queer people by capitalist economics and its historically interlocking social structures, the assumption of a heroic agency animating queer relations, which Kadji Amin (2017: 13) argues is typical of much queer theory produced during and after the 1990s, misses how queer utopianism can contribute to the continuance of capitalism just as much as queer pragmatism. Indeed, another packet from DQ’s Creating Change workshops announces “THE SILICON SOLUTION: AOL’s Gay & Lesbian Community Forum,” which is noted as the NGLTF’s “electronic base for information gathering and dissemination, as well as activist networking” (GLBT #1/115). A press release issued simultaneously with the conference by DQ expands upon also expands upon the group’s cyberutopian view of digital computing:

Historically, because of great costs, the lesbian, gay, bisexual community has not had access to traditional media outlets, unlike the far right, which holds sway with major media. Alternatively, online information services do not concentrate media power into a single individual or one company’s hands.

This framing of digital technology relies upon inaccurate narrativization of both pre-digital queer media and 1990s digital political economy. ¹⁶ The latter mischaracterization especially bespeaks a cyberutopian understanding of digital technologies as inherently democratizing and elides the fundamentally corporate nature of networks like AOL which needed users to yield profits. Tiziana Terranova (2000: 51) takes AOL’s unpaid community moderators as a signature example of the digital economy’s dependence upon “free labor” which is willingly given but not financially renumerated. Even those who only access networks like AOL as consumers rather than contributing free labor as moderators “keep a site alive through their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, [and] participating in conversations” (Terranova, 2000: 49). DQ’s “Silicon Solution” directing queer activists to AOL constituted a lucrative revenue stream for the company; whatever supplementary queer value was produced through activist interactions on the platform also yielded economic surplus value to the corporation. The routing of new users to AOL by DQ is especially significant given that AOL relied upon the free recruitment of queer users to its platform. Avery Dame-Griff (2023: 76–77), notes that although the platform’s Gay and Lesbian Community Forum “was one of the most popular areas on AOL, logging ‘close to 1.8 million hits a month’,” AOL outsourced most marketing and promotion to third-party contractor QView whose volunteers handed out AOL’s infamous free trial discs at Pride events.

While the capitalist nature of AOL and the other tech companies which DQ directed queer activists towards does not totally obviate the utopian queer value of activists’ engagements with digital technology, it does complicate Muñoz’s juxtaposition of that value with “capitalist maps of the world.” Although DQ’s arguments for utilizing digital technology for queer activism were presumably motivated by genuine commitment to cyberutopianism rather than cynical profit-seeking, integrating these users to Silicon Valley’s digital political economy adhered the queer utopian horizon to the former’s corporate growth which was achieved precisely by expanding the social penetration of digital technology for any use, including non-profit activism. This process goes beyond the promotion of a single company like AOL. Although the cost of operating a digital computer is perhaps less than a printing press or television station, such machines “exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence” (Chun, 2016: 1) and require frequent, often expensive updating of hardware and software. And while the provision of such computer equipment was part of DQ’s activist mission, their entanglement of activist and corporate interests further complicated that capital-intensive work.

“A credibility problem of the highest order”

DQ continued hosting fundraising parties for queer non-profit technology upgrades at tech industry events during the early 1990s. In August 1993, DQ hosted a party during Macworld’s East Coast event in Boston where around 200 attendees were “networking shamelessly, cavorting with new-found and old pals, and generally taking a break from the show floor” (PDQ v1n2). This party raised “$16,200 for additional hardware purchases for the NGLTF network” (PDQ v1n2), in part through a matching donation by Tim Gill. Another Macworld party, back in San Francisco on January 8, 1994, yielded even higher returns to benefit the Frameline queer film festival, with “double the number of partygoers we expected (over 1000)” (GLBT #1/109), including actor and comedian Robin Williams who delivered “a 15-minute routine poking fun at gay arch-enemy Sen. Jesse Helms, the Catholic Church, and the Walt Disney company,” received “wolf-whistles galore when he pulled off his sweatshirt,” and donated $7700 with his then-wife, film producer Marsha Williams (GLBT #1/98, PDQ v2n1). The Frameline benefit raised tens of thousands of dollars, and although not all of DQ’s parties were so financially successful, the organization continued to frequently raise large sums to fund computer upgrades. ¹⁷

In September 1994, DQ hosted a party at the Delancy Street Town Hall in San Francisco concurrent with the Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference, a recurring tech industry gathering about print and electronic publishing, to benefit the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a national non-profit focusing on queer media representation. DQ and GLAAD began communicating about a computer makeover as early as 1993, and notes show that GLAAD was discussing their computer needs by early 1994. ¹⁸ Despite a relatively low level of extant computational infrastructure—step one was to “get on-line with a service” (GLBT #2/1)—GLAAD saw cyberutopian potential in digitizing their activist work. One set of notes sets an eventual goal of “a Queer Daily On-line Newspaper” once a national network was established, while the other document lists “instant activation…the ability to notify every member in the country with a touch of a button is the ideal” (GLBT #2/1). Donna Red Wing, GLAAD’s national chapter coordinator, wrote to Rielly shortly after GLAAD’s initial meetings that she took “her first online baby steps” by logging into AOL and was “blown away by the possibilities. Organizing, activism, and advocacy juxtaposed with these tools, I can hardly begin to imagine what we can do, who we can reach and how profoundly we will change hearts and minds” (GLBT #2/1). The utopian anticipation of how those networks could catalyze queer activism during a moment in which strategies, tactics, and goals for that work were already in flux motivated GLAAD’s collaboration with DQ to upgrade their computer equipment.

Numerous archived documents suggest that the process of making decisions about GLAAD’s computer upgrade extended past the September 1994 fundraising event into 1995. On August 4, 1995, Lesli Klainberg, a film and television documentary producer who joined GLAAD’s Board of Directors in 1994, wrote to DQ’s Rielly and Wickre requesting “a breakdown of all our costs to date” (GLBT #2/1). Wickre then sent a memo to Klainberg and other GLAAD leaders on August 8 recapping funds spent to date on the computer makeover (GLBT #2/1). The first figure provided is the “GLAAD fund contribution (including Gill, Ring/Harrison matches—for national and chapters)” at $60,348.71. Next, Wickre provides the “net available to spend (accounting for DQ fee),” $52,893.75. Wickre’s tone is anodyne throughout, but the AOL message Klainberg sent to Wickre and Rielly in response was not. The second paragraph is worth reproducing in full:

The summary you sent is a bit confusing and distressing. For example, why am I just finding out about a DQ 15% fee. I cannot believe in all the time that we have all talked that DQ never made me aware of this fee. This is a credibility problem of the highest order. I do not want you to short change your ogranization [sic] and its needs but I am shocked that you did not let me know in all of this time. I did not have the opporunity [sic] to discuss its implications on our budget or present it to our board. It is very disapointing [sic] that you did not trust me enough to have let me know about this. I am also in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to chapters about your fee.

Klainberg concludes that “everyone loves their computers…they have made a big difference…please let us work these accounting issues out and move ahead” (GLBT #2/1), but Wickre’s disclosure of a fee for DQ clearly violated Klainberg’s personal and professional sensibilities despite her cyberutopian appreciation of the machines.

Rielly replied to Klainberg early the next day. According to Rielly, DQ assessing a fee was “standard practice since Tim Gill and David Ring recommended that we do it, because we were going broke supporting the people we raised money for” (GLBT #2/1). ¹⁹ While Klainberg’s next response later that day continues to express surprise, confusion, and hurt that she wasn’t aware of the fee, she also wrote that “frankly a fee is not out of line” (GLBT #2/1). However, she added that “a 15% fee is a bit steep for a non-profit to work with” and unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate a lower fee in subsequent messages. ²⁰ A later memo from Klainberg seeking reimbursement from DQ for computer systems at three GLAAD chapters includes a column labeled “DQ 15%,” implying that GLAAD acquiesced to paying the full fee (GLBT #2/1).

An archived spreadsheet titled “GLAAD fundraiser rev 2,” printed over a month before the spending recap sent by Wickre, offers a different set of numbers which further complicates the historical narrative (GLBT #2/1). According to this document, the September 1994 party in San Francisco produced a total gross income of $83,235 between party receipts and two matching donations from Gill and Ring. A summary section of the spreadsheet lists this number as “income,” followed by figures for expenses and “15% of Gross for DQ,” leaving $60,348.71—the same number described in Wickre’s memo as the pre-DQ fee sum—as “net for GLAAD.” If this spreadsheet is accurate, DQ charged a 15% fee against a dollar amount which included both party income and five-figure matching donations, but not party expenses, and then charged an additional fee against the already reduced amount. ²¹ This possibility should be evaluated with some degree of skepticism given that a single archived spreadsheet of unknown veracity which may not represent a conclusive accounting of the project is the only presently available evidence. However, it should be kept in mind when considering DQ’s fee that the sum might have exceeded the amount which was already, in Klainberg’s view, out of step with non-profit expectations.

Regardless of the actual dollar amount claimed by DQ, the assessing of a substantial fee indicates an interest in capital accumulation which cuts against the anti-capitalist resonances of queer utopianism. Rather than embracing capitalism pragmatically, DQ articulated their desires for queer futurity through cyberutopian practices which still restricted their activist work to capitalist “maps of the world.” Despite Rielly’s claim that DQ was “going broke,” the PDQ issue with a publication date of August 1994, a month before the fundraising party for GLAAD’s computer makeover, includes a section charmingly titled “Income, Expenses, the Whole Megillah” which briefly describes DQ’s financial activity between October 1992 and March 1994. In this accounting, DQ ended up with a net profit of $995 from 14 months of operations which PDQ described as “just about [breaking] even” (PDQ v2n1). While this limited, public-facing representation of DQ’s finances may not tell the whole story, nor would a profit of around $70 per month allow much margin for error, a small profit is not typically synonymous with “going broke.” Non-profit organizations of course may reasonably hope to keep a positive balance to continue operations, but DQ’s prioritization of a profit imperative above the impact of their activism produced a contradiction of utopian interests. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022: 241) writes that the purpose of activist work “is to gain liberation, not to guarantee the organization’s longevity,” a claim which resonates with Muñoz’s anti-capitalist queer utopianism and suggests that the non-profit organizational form is not inherently attached to significant capital accumulation. DQ, however, instead functioned as “a hegemonic apparatus, articulating the desire for community with a desire for capitalism” (Joseph, 2002: 73), in this case specifically welding their liberal reformist vision of queer futurity to Silicon Valley’s cyberutopianism.

Conclusion

This generally critical presentation of DQ’s cyberutopianism could imply that utopian methodology should be dispensed with altogether, but I would instead suggest that both media studies and queer studies could benefit from a situated, historically materialist consideration of utopia. Although Bloch (1986: 1370) gleans utopian desires everywhere in the world, he interpolates Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach to insist that “only Marxism has given rise to the theory-practice of a better world, not in order to forget the existing world…but in order to change it.” A utopian media studies which aims to archaeologically excavate utopian desires from the past for the sole purpose of finding hope amidst immiserating circumstances in the present risks becoming so enamored with those traces of a better future that both the accurate apprehension of the world and the injunction to change it slip out of view. Utopian archaeology shows how desires for a better future not only gesture beyond determinate historical conditions but also produce less-than-utopian conditions through the activities they spur. Critiquing these desires and their historical productions works towards the continual goal of achieving better living. The predominance of cyberutopianism after the “end of history” in the 1990s contributed to the increasing economic and political power of the American technology industry in the twenty-first century which some fear could replace capitalism with technofeudalism (Varoufakis, 2024), neofeudalism (Dean, 2025), or simply “something worse” (Wark, 2019). The concept of utopia offers valuable insights for understanding the role of media technologies in these transformations and identifying new strategies for better living, but only if utopia is not implicitly equated with anti-capitalism and if utopian traces are not accepted as the limit of utopian desires. For utopia to be concretely forward-dawning futurity, as many practitioners of utopian media studies hope for it to be, utopian desires must be situated within an analysis of their historical and social production rather than be assumed to be sufficient because they exist at all.

This situation includes acknowledging that DQ represents a particular expression of cyberutopianism that may not be representative of how queer desires for betterment through digital computation operated in other times and places, or even for other people proximate to Silicon Valley in the 1990s. DQ rhetorically targeted white-collar professional workers in their promotional materials and typically hosted parties at trade events for that same class, meaning that their “highly educated and affluent” audience likely also represented other demographic tendencies of that milieu. Karen J. Hossfeld (1990: 155) observed shortly before DQ’s founding that in Santa Clara County’s microelectronics industry, only “12 percent of the managers, 16 percent of the professionals, and 18 percent of the technicians are [racial] minorities” in contrast to the high percentage of racial minorities employed in low-paying, semiskilled operator jobs in that same locale. Similarly, although queer women such as Karen Wickre significantly contributed to DQ, Judy Wajcman (2004: 109-111) notes that women were significantly under-represented among Americans receiving degrees in computer science or engineering and that “the ‘cyber-brat pack’ of the new millennium…consists almost entirely of men.” Research elucidating the experiences of additional marginalized workers in Silicon Valley during this same period, or of queer activists and/or tech workers beyond these geographic and temporal boundaries, could indicate similar or entirely different desires and interests in digital computation. This article emphasizes how only a “rarified” group of queer tech workers in Silicon Valley engaged in computationally inflected activism during the conjuncture of 1990s cyberutopianism and the “end of history,” and scholarly works moving beyond these limits provide additional ways of thinking simultaneously about digital technology and better living. ²²

Although I am critical of DQ’s function at the nexus of Silicon Valley and queer activism, I do not believe that DQ’s founders or members were particularly malicious or irresponsible social actors. By interpreting their actions as utopian rather than pragmatic, I take their stated altruistic motivations at face value rather than assuming the presence of self-consciously cynical desires for profiteering or ideological control of queer activism. It rather seems that utopian desires to imagine and instantiate queer ways of living better than those immediately at hand animated DQ’s activism. That those utopian desires reinforced capitalist hegemony through their cyberutopian articulation is precisely why DQ’s example is so compelling for thinking about the intersection of digital technology, queer activism, and “end of history” liberal capitalism in the 1990s. Their utopian desires both gestured beyond that period towards our present and beyond, and yet they are also embedded within the determinations of their moment. They cannot be dismissed as anti-utopian pragmatists, but nor can they be uncritically celebrated as prefiguring anti-capitalist futurity. Digital Queers invites utopian media studies to engage in both utopian speculation and utopian criticism, finding queer value in their work but also charting the orientation of their utopian horizon.