“What do we need to know as gays and lesbians? What should we keep up with?”: Network Q and Building Queer Information Ecosystems Before the Internet

Travis L. Wagner is a 2025-2026 recipient of Rose Library’s LGBTQ Collections Fellowship, which supports research in Rose Library’s LGBTQ related papers and archives that document the history, culture, politics, and public health initiatives. 

My name is Travis Wagner (they/them) and I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My research focuses on the complex relationships between media technologies and the documentation of queer history. In particular, I highlight the significant role that emergent technologies played in enabling these communities to document their history. Many of these technologies are now obsolete and challenging to archive. For example, both VHS tapes and Tumblr, albeit from markedly different time periods, served as a foundation for preserving queer activism and allowed for queer individuals to build community identity and vocabulary. Despite the crucial role each played, both remain incredibly difficult to digitize and preserve due to their volatility as formats and objects, mired in disparate questions of intellectual property. My work, in turn, contends that these tensions between queer communities adopting emergent technologies and their eventual obsolescence within historical preservation are indicative of what it means to produce queer historiography. Focusing on this particular topic, I was thrilled to spend a week this summer exploring the Network Q records held at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. I want to thank the staff of the library and Emory University for selecting me as this year’s recipient of the LGBTQ Collections Fellowship.

Between 1991 and 1996, Network Q was a subscription-based video service primarily produced by David Surber, offering viewers insight into the worlds of gay and lesbian lives within North America, as well as at times, Australia and Europe. Like similar informational video services of the time, Network Q moved between the aforementioned subscription-based model and existing as a show featured on public access networks. Indeed, in the show’s latter years, Surber and his production team released episodes of the show through the Atlanta-based Southeastern Arts, Media & Education (SAME) Project, explaining, in part, its presence in the holdings of the Rose Library. Network Q’s headquarters, however, moved frequently throughout its handful of years on the air with headquarter locations mentioned in either episodes or promotional materials, including Albuquerque, New Mexico, and West Hollywood, California. This movement is indicative of one of the central features across nearly every episode of Network Q, which was something Surber both informally and formally referred to as “queer holiday.” In these segments, either Surber himself or, in early episodes, Frank Butterfield would peruse the streets of a city talking with locals about queer culture and life. In an episode featuring Palm Springs as a queer destination, Butterfield and a group of presumably other gay men take a tour of Liberace’s home while basking in the camp glory of the late queer musical icon.

Meanwhile, later within the same episode, Surber highlights both the food and nightlife of Palm Springs, emphasizing the now antiquated notion of video bars where one could go for cruising and dancing. Alternatively, Surber highlights the then relatively new California Pizza Kitchen, recommending their Buffalo Style Chicken Pizza. However, Surber does warn viewers that they ought to “leave the onions off because you never know who you are going home with.”

These city-based vignettes serve as the organizing feature of nearly every episode of Network Q, but to identify their information value as purely one of culture and cuisine is to grossly undervalue the breadth and depth of what Surber and a rotating cast of contributors and creators produced. One could anticipate everything from suggestions for promotions of upcoming films related to queer life that included now iconic queer cinema classics like Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Philadelphia. Other videos, such as those set in Portland, Oregon, focused on the defeat of 1992’s Measure 9 ballot initiative that aimed to outlaw homosexuality, while an episode visiting Utah included discussions with former members of the Mormon church who were now openly gay. In the earliest episodes of the show, Surber sourced his material from other networks of queer documentary and media production, including educational segments with queer advocate and educator Brian McNaught, segments from openly queer standup comedians and performers, and updates on the still surging HIV/AIDS epidemic. A particular standout from these early videos was “the dreaded experimental comedies” of filmmaker and artist John Topping, which read as more like early 90s sketch comedy than experimental filmmaking.

While the examples of news about queer politics and the curation of queer media for viewers might seem insignificant by contemporary standards what Surber and Network Q offered was a way to not only share with a growing number of open LGBTQIA+ individuals the going-ons of queer America, but do so in a way that allowed viewers to consume such information from the safety and privacy of their homes in a historical moment where being out remained a dangerous undertaking. Similarly, as will be discussed, while the Internet was an emerging idea during the height of Network Q (and featured prominently in the Atlanta episode of the show), the presence of such a technology in everyday interactions remained uncommon. Put another way, not many queer folks had home computers in the late 80s and early 90s, but quite a few likely had VCRs. I believe, as such, that Network Q in its entirety offers us a glimpse, albeit one that favors gay, cisgender white masculinity, into the information worlds of queer communities leading into the new millennium. While part of my larger research undertaking is to consider this across all of the show’s production and distribution, for the sake of brevity and local relevance, I want to discuss in more detail Volume 8, Episode 3 from 1994, which centrally locates itself in Atlanta.

This episode begins with Surber proclaiming, “Hello and thank you for joining us this month from our brand new hometown in Atlanta, Georgia.” Behind Surber is the skyline of Downtown Atlanta, where Surber deems Atlanta “the new world headquarters of Network Q” before introducing the segments for the month’s video. The segments include: the month’s cover story on domestic violence in queer communities, Queer Holiday in Santa Barbra, an interview with the club music group Deee-Lite, queer affirming comedy, an art exhibit titled Living Proof: Courage in the Face of AIDS, a report on an Atlanta-based Gay and Lesbian Bulletin Board System (BBS) known as Graffiti, information about the upcoming Gay Games in Amsterdam. Surber also concludes the introduction by reminding viewers that the episode will conclude with “viewer mail.”

Many of the segments are what one has come to expect from Network Q: a focus on HIV/AIDS as a cultural touchpoint, queer affirming comedy, and a focus on music and art made by or affirming of queer individuals. These snippets reveal both the advances and tensions of increasing queer visibility as the discussion of the Gay Games talks frankly about the costs of sustaining such a significant international event. At the same time, the interview with Deee-Lite includes the members talking about their own stances on their music’s impact on the queer community with lead singer Lady Kier extolling the band’s queer listeners. At the same time, DJ Dmitri sidesteps his stance on queer individuals by insisting that Deee-lite’s music is “for all humans.” Other segments like the Queer Holiday in Santa Barbara prove as informative as they are obsolete, with Surber touring one of the city’s two “Stamp-a-Barbara” locations—the store specialized in rubber stamps. The segment includes an interview with Stamp-a-Barabara’s wonder, Gary Dorothy, who has since closed this store, but continues to sell stamps online under the store’s moniker.

The two stories that most prominently feature Atlanta are the story on domestic violence within the queer community and the segment exploring queer bbs culture. In the first story, viewers are introduced to Al Cotton, a survivor of domestic abuse and an organizer and advocate for consciousness raising related to intimate partner violence within queer relationships. Cotton, donning an Atlanta Braves hat, is shown working the desk and phone lines for a survivor’s hotline. The segment continues with a mixture of psychologists explaining how abuse might manifest in a relationship while survivors who identify across the queer spectrum reflect on their own experiences with abuse. While a difficult watch as the segment includes voice mails and letters from abusers, by shining a light on these realities in the queer community, Surber and Network Q make available useful information for other queer individuals who might be experiencing similar challenges.

Alternatively, the segment on the Atlanta-based BBS proves far more joyful and includes interviews with Graffiti’s sysops (system operators) Jim Maddox and Ric Helton. Maddox offers technical explanations of how the BBS works by noting that the original server ran on an Atari 800 and ran via “ two floppy drives and [a] 300 hundred baud modem” before shifting to a Pentium 66, which would have been a cutting-edge computer at the time of this Network Q tapes circulation. Alternatively, Hilton serves as the social face of Graffiti, likening the BBS to an “online gay community center” and further suggesting that since many members of the queer community “don’t read Out or the Advocate,” that Graffiti may well be their first and only source of information. Amidst this discussion, the segment also talks with members of Graffiti while showing off the modems and computer screens, helping keep Graffiti up and running.

Beyond showcasing the vibrant and expanding queer life of late 80s and early 90s Atlanta, these two stories also help contextualize why Network Q serves as a particularly fascinating example of queer media history and its archival potential. Although the organization Al Cotton worked for has long since shuttered its doors, his presence as a queer advocate has persisted. Information about Cotton’s life and queer advocacy is readily available through oral history projects and the circulation of Southern queer newsletters. In this vein, Network Q’s story builds on a rich archival history. However, when it comes to Graffiti and the presence of Atlanta’s queer community in the early Internet, Surber’s interviews with members of the group provide one of the few documented artifacts of the BBS’s existence and a visible representation of those figures present in the movement. Indeed, while anecdotal, upon learning about this particular bit of footage, I immediately thought of the work of Avery Dame-Griff, whose Queer Digital History Project and recent book The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet offer insight into how we can go about preserving queer digital history. In discussing this, Dame-Griff noted that he was only aware of one mention of Graffiti in a copy of Southern Voice, suggesting that Network Q’s footage offers a rarefied representation of this particular subcommunity within queer history. In this way, Network Q serves as both an additive document to the queer historical record and exists as a site of unique evidence to the ways queer folks throughout the United States sought community and worked to share information, in its varied forms, across all too real geographic barriers. The fact that a person could learn that in cities like Atlanta, there existed resources for community gathering and for the support of one’s health and well-being, potentially invited viewers to seek out similar information, community, and culture in their town. Network Q, while an artifact of a particular historical moment, serves as a crucial reminder of what can come of passion and focus in the name of queer community building.

It is also worth noting that what makes Network Q so wonderful is also what makes it so difficult to access and preserve today. Since Surber and his team relocated and changed production companies, understanding who owns these materials and how to make them available for general access remains fraught. For example, while it is easy to trace the segments of the Jonathan Demme film Philadelphia to TriStar Pictures and then to Sony, the representation of a band like disappear fear, which offered the show’s theme song in later episodes, surfaces defunct record companies and a change in band makeup. Making those materials accessible without potentially violating copyright remains a challenge. Similarly, while Network Q was a publicly distributed show and one that involved many open and out queer figures, interviews with queer bar goers during the Viewer Mail segment introduced questions of one’s willingness to have their image circulated in an era of digital remediation. Even more critical, while the show represents a particular sliver of the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, our understandings of queerness and, in particular, transgender identities have evolved drastically. The individuals featured in these segments may have changed their names, pronouns, or identities, and it is essential to provide this context when encountering footage that is now over thirty years old. For now, Network Q exists as an invaluable research tool, but one that rightly exists in restricted access at the Rose Library. I offer here the briefest snapshot of the collection, which includes outtakes and fascinating deep dives into queer American one city at a time. Do yourself a favor and visit the collections and see how your city was seen through the lens of queer folks as we moved into the new millennium.

If you were involved in the creation and distribution of Network Q or if you received copies of Network Q as a viewer, I would love to chat with you! Please feel free to reach out to me at wagnert [at] illinois [dot] edu

I want to reiterate my gratitude to the staff at the Rose Library for their gracious hospitality and for being a valuable resource for my research needs. Additionally, I appreciate Emory for selecting me for this prestigious fellowship.