A Philanthropic Dot Gay
During the ICANN summit in Seoul I met Joe DOLCE, member of the Dot GAY Alliance who projects to create domain names with the .GAY extension for his community. Here is our interview.
– Mailclub.info : Could you introduce yourself and the dotgay alliance?
– Mailclub.info : Will .gay be open to everyone ?
– Joe DOLCE : A community, as defined by ICANN, must be a safe place so I envision it being closed to people who are bigots, haters, wish to do community members harm. The great news about the LGBT community is that they are very fluent online, so I expect that many members will dedicate themselves to reporting malicious behavior, hate speech, super right wing lunatics etc…
– Mailclub.info : Some people might consider the .gay as another way of isolating gay people. What is your view on that?
– Joe DOLCE : I understand the desire to join the mainstream, but I believe that today many of us are made up of several cultural components, all of which co-exist simultaneously. In simpler terms, I am a White, Italian-American Gay Man who lives in New York City and works in Media. I identify equally with all five of those descriptions at any given time and I think the same is true for many people in Western societies.
But there’s something else that many people overlook because they see images of successful LGBT people on television all the time. We are also unified by a host of factors : job discrimination, marriage inequality in the US, violence, bullying, to name a few. In 7 countries homosexuality is still punishable by death. We’ve come a long way in 40 years since the organized movement began, but there is still a lot of work to be done, and if .GAY can assist in funding that work it is a worthwhile venture. By the way, in just a few months we’ve received endorsements from people in Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Nepal, Mexico, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Chile and a dozen more countries, so rather than isolating a community it appears that .GAY could do a great job of organizing and bringing it together globally.
– Mailclub.info : There is another .gay project. What are the main differences between your project and the others?
– Joe DOLCE : There are three significant differences :
1. Ours is gay run, which I think is important to a community gTLD.
2. By charter, ours has a philanthropic giveback program in which a majority of profits will be donated to organizations that fight for LGBT causes in the US and around the world.
3. Ours has the endorsement of Christine C. Quinn, Speaker of the New York City Council, and New York State Assemblyman Danny O’Donnell, two important politicians who represent millions of people in the city with the largest openly gay population in the world.
– Mailclub.info : When do you expect the project to be launched ?