Then the modem started screeching — and everything changed. Our new piece picks up where “Before the Apps, There Were Maps” left off, tracing the dial-up years: when finding a gay bar moved from fold-out maps to LGBTQ+ websites and online directories. From the BBSs and “GayOL” days to Gay.com and PlanetOut, the community was online before almost anyone else. And FunMaps didn’t flinch — it carried a trusted name from paper straight into the browser as FunMaps.com. A look at how the internet rewired the way we found each other.
In our last piece, “Before the Apps, There Were Maps,” we traced how generations of LGBTQ+ people found the gay bar through coded address books, free bar rags, and Alan Beck’s beloved fold-out FunMaps. That whole world ran on paper. Then, in the mid-1990s, a modem started screeching in the corner of the room — and everything about how we found each other began to change.
This is the story of the dial-up years: the strange, thrilling stretch when the gay bar stopped living only on a folded map and started living on a screen. And, once again, FunMaps was right there in the thick of it.
The Community Was Online Before Almost Anyone Else
Here’s a piece of history that rarely gets its due: LGBTQ+ people didn’t just adopt the early internet — in many ways, we built it. Long before the web went mainstream, gay men were gathering on bulletin board systems (BBSs) — local dial-up networks like the Backroom and Gay.Net, the latter launched in December 1993. On AOL, the LGBTQ+ presence was so large that people affectionately called it “GayOL.” Much of this early energy was born out of necessity: during the darkest years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, these digital spaces became vital lifelines for solidarity, information, and simple human connection when the offline world felt hostile or out of reach.
By the mid-’90s, that energy exploded into the open web. Gay.com — purchased by Mark Elderkin in 1994 and relaunched as a chat and community hub by 1996 — became a digital town square. PlanetOut, founded by Tom Rielly in 1995, launched on the Microsoft Network and grew into a media powerhouse that would eventually merge with Gay.com. Suddenly there were homepages, chat rooms, and message boards where you could ask a question that used to require knowing exactly the right person: where’s the good bar in this town?
I have a personal stake in this chapter. In May 1995, I launched GayWired.com, which grew into one of the top LGBTQ+ websites in the world. I lived through this transition from the inside, and I can tell you it felt like magic — watching a community that had spent decades whispering directions suddenly able to publish them to the entire planet.
From the Back-Page Map to the Online Directory
What the internet really transformed was the directory. For decades, the definitive listings lived in print — Bob Damron’s Address Book, the Gayellow Pages, the Guild Guide. These were remarkable works; the 2001 Damron Men’s Travel Guide alone carried more than 12,000 listings across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Europe. But a printed guide had an unavoidable flaw: the moment it went to press, it started going out of date. A bar could close in March, and the book on your shelf would keep sending travelers to its door until next year’s edition.
Online directories shattered that limitation. Now a listing could be updated the day a bar changed its hours, added a patio, or closed for good. You could search by city from your desk in another time zone, read what other travelers said, and print out directions before you ever left home. The web didn’t just digitize the guidebook — it made it living, current in a way paper never could be. It’s no accident that the great print guides, which had chronicled queer life through the AIDS crisis and beyond, gradually wound down as the internet took over their core job.
FunMaps Makes the Leap: From Fold-Out to FunMaps.com
This is the part of the story I find genuinely visionary. Plenty of print institutions saw the internet coming and froze. Alan Beck didn’t.
The FunMaps brand was, fittingly, born of the internet moment. As the dotcom era dawned, publisher Jeffrey Goodman took the two words of Beck’s “Fun Maps” and smartly fused them into the web-ready FunMaps. Goodman offered to sell the operation to Beck in 1992; Beck initially declined, but was persuaded to take it over by its two lead sales agents, Matt Mathrani and Alden Thayer. He folded FunMaps into his marketing company, turned it profitable within six months, and from 1994 onward made it his life’s work — right as the web was catching fire.
At its height, FunMaps reached dozens of cities across the United States and Canada — New York to San Francisco, Toronto to Fort Lauderdale — and the brand carried that same trusted name onto the internet as FunMaps.com. The genius was continuity. A traveler who had picked up a paper FunMap at a hotel lobby for years already knew and trusted the name. When that same name appeared in a browser, the trust came with it. The community didn’t have to learn a new source; the source they already relied on simply showed up online, ready to point the way.
And Beck never stopped evolving it. Over more than three decades, FunMaps grew from printed fold-outs into mobile-friendly web maps and, more recently, into Fun Travel Guides — digital guides for more than 33 destinations, now delivered through an app that fits in your pocket. Print never fully disappeared; you’ll still find FunMaps at bars, hotels, and welcome centers. But the brand proved something important: a community institution can honor its roots and still ride every wave of new technology. In May 2024, Beck received a Trail Blazer Award recognizing exactly that arc.
What We Gained — and What We Started to Lose
The internet era was, on balance, a gift. It made the closet less lonely, put the whole map of gay life a search away, and let far-flung LGBTQ+ people — especially those in small towns and unwelcoming regions — find a community they might never have reached otherwise. For travelers, it meant walking into a new city already knowing where you’d be safe and welcome. That’s an enormous, life-changing convenience.
But it also planted a seed worth naming honestly. When finding the bar got easier from your couch, the bar itself became a little less essential as the only door into community. Over the following decades, that shift — accelerated later by mobile — became part of why so many physical LGBTQ+ spaces struggled. The screen that helped us find the bar would, in time, also compete with it. That’s not a reason to romanticize the past; it’s a reason to be intentional about the future, and to keep investing in the physical gathering places that a directory can point to but never replace.
The Same Mission, a New Medium
Step back and the throughline from our last piece holds perfectly. The coded address book, the bar rag, the fold-out FunMap, the online directory, FunMaps.com — every one of them is the same act of community care, just re-tooled for its era. The job never changed: help our people find each other, and make sure they know where they’re welcome. Paper did it with ink. The dial-up web did it with hyperlinks. The mission underneath was identical.
This is exactly the work that shaped how I think about what we do at Pink Media every day. Meeting the LGBTQ+ community where it actually gathers — and helping the brands, destinations, and businesses that genuinely show up for it get found — is the direct descendant of a fold-out map and an early homepage. The tools keep changing. Ours just happen to be the current ones. The instinct behind them is as old as that first coded guidebook.
So here’s to the pioneers who didn’t flinch when the modem started screeching — to Alan Beck and FunMaps for carrying a trusted name from paper into the browser, and to everyone who helped build the queer internet when almost no one else saw it coming. If your brand or destination wants to be part of how this community connects today, that’s a conversation we’d genuinely love to have — you can always reach us through PinkMedia.LGBT.
Authentic LGBTQ+ engagement, 24/7, 365 days a year — that’s what Pink Media: A Company With Influence is built for.
Sources & further reading: FunMaps — About Alan Beck · OutSFL — “Alan Beck, LGBTQ Travel Pioneer” · PlanetOut, Inc. · Gay.com · Slate — “We’ve Forgotten That LGBTQ Nerds Helped Create Online Life as We Know It” · Mapping the Gay Guides — “Who was Bob Damron?”
