Gay Gossip Site DataLounge Shutters After 31 Years

The New York Times reports:

At around 5 p.m. on July 30, one day ahead of schedule, the DataLounge, a long-running online forum that became a gathering spot for (mostly) gay men, went dark. Just like that, tens of millions of posts spanning more than three decades simply disappeared.

Gone were the threads in which the participants contemplated the relative merits of the 1940s teenage star Deanna Durbin versus those of her rival, Judy Garland. Countless posts about the rumored sexual habits and physical gifts of various celebrities also vanished into the electronic ether.

In place of those lengthy examinations of various cultural obsessions, there was now a block of text from the site’s administrators: “In the end, the receding tide of the World Wide Web left the DataLounge disconnected from the wider ecosystem that once fed us,” it read. “Like Cher and Liza, we somehow lingered. Survival, however, is not the same thing as thriving

Thirty-one years after emerging from the digital ooze, the DataLounge was no more. Many people will not mourn its passing. With its laissez-faire moderation policy, the site earned a reputation as a backwater of unsubstantiated rumors, dodgy politics and — sometimes, to its owners’ chagrin — bigotry.

Read the full article. There’s much more. Gift link here.

After 31 Years, a Quirky Gay Gossip Website Shuts Down www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/s…

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— Chris Sullivan (@chrissullivan.bsky.social) August 17, 2026 at 8:57 AM

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