Petrelis Files

SF Gay Center Computers Ban Access to Gay Sites w/"SiteCoach"

Veteran progressive activist Tortuga Bi Liberty posted this letter a few weeks back on the IndyBay.org site, all about a censorship issue involving gays, but this time it's not rabid homophobes in the GOP or over in Tehran blocking web access to gay sites. Nope, it's the San Francisco gay community center and it's Democratic Party-donating executive director, Thom Lynch, forcing censoring ways on us.

From Tortuga Bi Liberty's letter:

Our San Francisco LGBTI center has installed a censorship program on its public-access computers.

This robot-censor, euphemistically named "Site Coach", blocks access to a recent B.A.R. news report on medical use of cannabis -- because "marijuana" is on its list
of forbidden words and ideas.

I ask B.A.R. to investigate the facts, and publish an objective news story on this matter. I ask the Center to abandon censorship. And I ask all freedom-loving queers and allies to communicate their views to the Center's staff and board. Censorship betrays our LGBTI liberation movements.

Queer fascism isn't okay just because it's queer.

I stopped by the computer lab at the SF gay community center this weekend, just to verify that the center's public access computers are indeed now equipped with SiteCoach and that the program blocks access to "offensive" sites, including gay ones.

It saddens me to report that our local gay center has installed the censoring filter and that it wouldn't allow me to go to some gay sites, including ones with explicit HIV prevention images and messages.

The volunteer staffing the computer lab told me that the center's leader, Thom Lynch, is the person responsible for this development. That would be the same Thom Lynch who donated $1,000 to John Kerry's doomed presidential campaign in 2004.

If someone had tried to convince me I'd see the day when a gay Democratic donor, in his capacity as executive director, would bring a policy of censorship to San Francisco and that there wouldn't be loud objections, I would have laughed.

But that appears to be the case. Neither the gay nor the mainstream press in San Francisco has reported on any of this.

This lack of press and community attention is shocking, especially when considering the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2001 ban web filters for the computers in the city's public libraries! Read the AP story about that Board of Supes ban here.

And if you're against such web filters being used at the SF gay center, call Thom Lynch and complain to him. The number at the center is: (415) 865-5555 .