The great .gay experiment has reached a turning point. I believe this is the beginning of the end of the great .gay experiment. What started as curiosity got shut down real quick. I set out to test the limits of free speech online, and I have kind of found the limit.
To recap: the great .gay experiment consisted of many domains that I had purchased for less than three dollars a piece per year. I purchased:
- CommiesAre.gay
- GunControlis.gay
- ClimateChangeIs.gay
- CanadaIs.gay
- LosAngelesIs.gay
- SanFrancsiscoIs.gay
- CaliforniaIsVery.gay
- UkraineIs.gay
- FreeSpeechIsNot.gay
- AlecBaldwinIs.gay
- iBetRobReinerIs.gay
- KingGavin.gay
- PrinceHarry.Is.gay
I no longer possess the domains in red. The linked domains I continue to possess and have sites linked to still. The domains in black I own but have not put up a site.
How did it happen, you ask? I’ve been having a lot of fun with the .gays. I put up a bunch of sites on most of them and was using them for my own comedy. I was dropping links on tweets like they were going out of style. I was getting a few laughs, but an abundance of my own. This was fun and took little effort but the effort I put in was worth it.
So the day after the State of the Union (which I did not watch), I catch wind of Mitch McConnell’s Ukraine flag tie. This is early in the morning so I do what I had become accustomed to doing. I head on over to UkraineIs.gay to grab a link for Mitch. I get there and no site. Site is nowhere to be found. Doesn’t exist. So I check GunControlIs.gay then ClimateChangeIs.gay. (My next two favorites behind the one I fortunately still possess, CommiesAre.gay.) Site after site, gone gone gone.
Initially, I’m thinking I got hacked. It’s happened before. I check my sites and restore from backups. Still nothing. No emails coming in either. I run who is. Interesting no-transfer order, server-hold. Hmmm. Interesting.
The day goes by. I have no idea what happened. Then I think let me login to the resgistrar where I bought them and see if there is anything there. Sure enough, they took them away from me and referred me to a abuse and legal. No email explanation, nothing other than they are gone and you need to contact this team if you want to discuss.
Apparently, I did not use the .gay in the way they wished it to be used. No hate speech or anything of the sort was tied to the content on the sites. It was merely a play on the .gay domain names and nothing more. Apparently some people didn’t find it to be very funny. Oh well. I had fun.
-Guy