Last week, I killed something precious, and I couldn’t stop crying about it for a long time.
Twenty eight years ago, my husband Marco and I had started a web design company, but we were at a loss about how to get new clients. So we hit upon an idea… well, Marco did. We would start a directory for the LGBTQ+ community of queer owned and friendly B&B’s, and then see if we could get any of them as clients.
He even suggested the name – Purple Roofs. I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard, and I told him so. A couple months later, we launched PurpleRoofs.com.
It was slow going at first. We would print out paper invites and have Marco’s mom over to stuff them in envelopes with first class stamps and mail them out.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to finding website clients. Purple Roofs became the business.
It took off, and soon was getting 60,000 visitors a month. In short order, we expanded to travel agents and tour operators, and by 2001 we were making more than enough to live on while providing a vital service to the community. In 2003 we added GayRealtyNetwork.com, and a few years later, we caught the marriage equality wave with PurpleUnions.com, all while running our activist blog Gay Marriage Watch to share news of what was going on throughout the world.
For the first fifteen years, it was the most amazing job… something we built from scratch that filled us with joy.
And then the corporations began to demand their pound of flesh. Slowly, bit by bit, they made it harder to find the listing pages on our site. They reduced our traffic, and then stole our content to give away on their own pages. By the time Generative AI came around to finish the job, the sites were mere husks of their former selves.
Still, we kept them around until those who had paid for listings got their promised time. For multiple years, we kept the sites up and running at a loss, earning nothing and continuing to pay for hosting and upkeep.
In 2022 we shut down Purple Unions.
And last Monday, we closed down Purple Roofs and Gay Realty Network.
Sites we built with our own hands and shared with the world. Safe gathering spaces for our community.
If you ever used one of these sites, or even if you didn’t, I hope you’ll take a moment to remember them with us, along with all the other wonderful labors of love by so many of us that are systematically being hounded off of the Internet by the greed of a few.
I never thought it would end like this.
So now, we pick ourselves up, and start something new. We learn from hard experience, and find ways, once again, to stitch our community together. Ways these corporations can’t touch.
This can’t be the end of the story. We won’t let it be.