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A gay Web site called Badpuppy is nipping at the heels of finance giant Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Discover & Co., accusing the vendor of the Discover card of "sexual censorship" following the removal of the site from the ranks of merchants who can accept the card. Badpuppy founder Bill Pinyon is calling for a boycott of the card, and has launched a Web site - discoversux.com - to air his grievances. The troubles began two weeks ago, when Pinyon received a letter informing him that Badpuppy clients would no longer be able to use the Discover card for online payment of membership fees and merchandise. The reason, the letter stated, was "security concerns or irregular card transactions."
Pinyon says he scrutinized his books, and found only a handful of disputed transactions made with the card in the past year and a half - less than the number of disputed transactions made with Visa or MasterCard, and well within acceptable standards for merchants who accept credit cards, Pinyon asserts. When Pinyon called Novus Services - the credit-card division of Morgan Stanley, serving over 45 million users - the story changed.
"They told me, 'The truth is, the reason we can't let you use the card is that you have adult content on your Web site,'" Pinyon says. "They told me if we removed the adult content, we could use the card again."
Pinyon doesn't dispute the notion that there's adult content on Badpuppy. The site - which has 14,000 paid subscribers, and receives more than 2.5 million hits a day - is bulging with beefcake, more than 740,000 GIFs of it. In part, Badpuppy functions as an online museum of gay erotica, with "galleries" of steamy images going back to the coy physique magazines of the '50s, when thong-clad models flexed their pulchritude beside Greek columns. Other areas of the service offer live video conferencing with nude models, Web chats with other users, a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" zone for fanciers of men in uniform, and an archive of CD-ROM hunkware called "Prime Beef."
Not all of Badpuppy, however, is devoted to one-handed websurfing. Also featured is a daily news service, called GayToday, that rivals PlanetOut's NewsPlanet. (Earlier this week, GayToday featured a minute-by-minute update from the scene outside the houseboat where Andrew Cunanan shot himself.) Pinyon points out that Badpuppy also provides information on travel, health, and AIDS awareness to its members, calling the site "the ultimate in safe sex."
The plot thickened, says a spokesperson for Badpuppy, when the company was told by a different Novus representative that the site's right to use Discover had been forfeited because Badpuppy was "philandering - selling products for other companies." The next day, says Pinyon, a third representative from Novus reiterated the company's initial statement, claiming that Novus has had a policy of not doing business with "sellers of 'adult' products or services" since first launching the Discover card in 1985.
The Discover card logo, however, is plastered on the front doors of many adults-only Web sites and businesses. Playboy.com accepts the Discover card, as do PornoPictures.com ("thousands of hard core XXX Adult pics"), Newd.com, a mail-order service called Eve's Wet Panties - and the comparatively low-key Good Vibrations, which specializes in sex toys and erotic literature. It's the selective enforcement that rankles with Pinyon, he says.
VISA, MasterCard, and American Express do not filter merchants for adult content, company representatives told Wired News.
Though a report that appeared in Florida Today asserted that Novus was terminating its relationships with merchants like Badpuppy for reasons of "disapproved sexual orientation," Pinyon says that the gay angle was never mentioned in his discussions with Novus representatives. On 14 July, Morgan Stanley announced that it would be launching a Net-based banking service using the Discover brand.
Pinyon, a former NASA employee who coordinated Net access for the Kennedy Space Center, says that he has met with attorney Mark Tietig of the American Civil Liberties Union to consider his options. The discoversux.com Web site, he says, is his "first step."
Calls to Morgan Stanley by Wired News on Friday were not returned.
