The Internet has changed the way gay people grow up, come out, organize political actions, and fall in love. For the last four years, a pioneering journalist named Rex Wockner has used the Net to up the intelligence quotient of the mainstream press and to affect the way media cover gay and lesbian issues.
By aggressively marketing his international news feed to Web sites like PlanetOut and to regional newspapers all over the world, Wockner has also widened the scope of gay journalism. Whereas gay newspapers in the '70s focused exclusively on the epicenters of the urban subculture -- like New York, San Francisco, and Amsterdam -- Wockner's international coverage has brought the struggles of emerging sexual-freedom movements in places like Zimbabwe to the attention of an international readership.
Wockner is "a one-man gay AP," says Tom Rielly, chairman of San Francisco-based PlanetOut. Wockner provides the invaluable service of being "an intelligent news agent," Rielly says, a smart filter in an ever-burgeoning datastream. PlanetOut supplements its own original coverage of gay and lesbian issues, Newsplanet, with Wockner's reportage.
PlanetOut is one of Wockner's 91 affiliates, a network of reprint outlets that includes such far-flung publications as bar rags in the Bible Belt, the high-traffic gay erotica site Badpuppy, a Thai journal called Pink Ink, and the newsletter of the Estonian Lesbian Union.
As Wockner does with a gay newspaper from the Ukraine called Our World, he only charges the Estonian Lesbian Union the equivalent of US$1 a month to reprint his blend of original reporting, clips, and a cheeky biweekly assortment of celebrity quotes called "Quote/Unquote."
"I have a stack of Estonian crowns in my closet," he chuckles. "My bank doesn't know what to do with them."
Wockner's diligent networking played a crucial role in breaking the story of America Online naming gay sailor Timothy McVeigh. Though the Navy's actions against McVeigh received some local coverage in Honolulu, it wasn't until Wockner funneled an email implicating AOL's role in the case to his mailing list that the mainland press picked up on it.
Elaine Herscher, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter -- and subscriber to Wockner's list -- who ran with the McVeigh story, says that reading Wockner's international coverage "gives me a sense of what's going on all over the world that I couldn't get any other way."
Other subscribers to Wockner's list -- most of whom pay nothing to read it -- include noted gay activists and writers Larry Kramer, Michelangelo Signorile, and Gabriel Rotello. In addition to a keyword-searchable archive on gaytoronto.com, there's a complete archive of Wockner's coverage in the Queer Resources Directory.
Wockner taught himself how to work the network -- from Unix to newsgroups -- while on sabbatical from reporting for print in 1994. He estimates that he spends four hours a day online gathering and disseminating information, as well as sifting through 150 gay publications a month for quotes and info-bites. His search for access points to the Net once entailed hotwiring alligator clips into the phone system behind a wall in Mexico City.
"In the old days, Activist A had to call Reporter B at Paper C and hope that the editor was interested. That strategy used to take two weeks to get anything out and only reached the readers of gay newspapers. The Net has changed all that," Wockner explains. "Now it takes 10 minutes to reach millions."
Wockner credits online organizing with the storms of protest that attend public appearances by Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe outside his home country. Mugabe has advocated the imprisonment of lesbians and gay men, calling homosexuality "subanimal behavior," and declaring, "I don't believe [homosexuals] have any rights at all."
The most valuable role he could play as a journalist, Wockner believes, is "to help out fledgling gay movements in the Third World" by bringing news of gay activism to remote locales and by building networks of communication and support between incipient gay organizations and established ones.
"If someone in an organization with 14 people in a Third World country reads a story about hundreds of thousands of people marching in a pride parade in Los Angeles, they could get the idea that if they stick with it, they might make it," says Wockner. "That's really why I do this."
