Amy Goodloe is the creator of the websites Women Online and Lesbian.org, a

non-profit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

focused on documenting activities and work by lesbians on the web.Calvert, Melodie; Terry, Jennifer (2005). ''Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life''. Routledge. p. 41. . She also initiated and maintained mailing lists that served as online discussion spaces for

LGBTQ LGBTQ people are individuals who are lesbian, Gay men, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (sexuality and gender), questioning. Many variants of the initialism are used; LGBTQIA+ people incorporates intersex, Asexuality, asexual, ...

communities. She was a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

of writing in the Women and Gender Studies department at the

University of Colorado-Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University o ...

Career

In the 1990s, Goodloe was responsible for starting and maintaining

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

mailing lists for

lesbian A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexu ...

s. She is considered to be a leading figure in creating online spaces that allowed lesbians to easily interact with each other. Goodloe has contended that participation in these spaces represents a form of

activism Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make Social change, changes in society toward a perceived common good. Forms of activism range from ...

. By 1997, there were 46 e-mail lists available for lesbian audiences. Goodloe notes that many of these lists retained policies that restricted participation to women only, but discussion participants would frequently disagree over whether

transgender A transgender (often shortened to trans) person has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were sex assignment, assigned at birth. The opposite of ''transgender'' is ''cisgender'', which describes perso ...

bisexual Bisexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior toward both males and females. It may also be defined as the attraction to more than one gender, to people of both the same and different gender, or the attraction t ...

individuals should be included in these spaces. Goodloe created the website repository Lesbian.org between 1994-1995 to both provide a platform for lesbians and to demonstrate their increasing presence online. The website included resources such as literary journals, noticeboards, business listings, and information about art exhibitions featuring work by or about lesbians.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goodloe, Amy 1960s births Living people American LGBTQ rights activists University of Colorado Boulder faculty Year of birth missing (living people)