Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. We have users of all ages (18+), with people in their 20s, middle-aged men & women and even seniors. You can use Dirtyroulette to find straight, lesbian, gay or any other type of live sex cams. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. Dirtyroulette is an anonymous nude cam site for random sex chat with thousands of naked girls and guys. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater. I don't think I would have had the courage."Įmily lives in the same Lousiana town where Stephanie Sandifer grew up 25 years ago, but her experience there has been completely different.You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography). "I don't think that I could have done it without being able to reach out to other kids and get advice from them," she says, "because it's really hard. This year, the soft-spoken teen came out to her parents and her school. Sixteen-year-old Emily Kitfield of Sulphur, La., is the kind of kid who uses "sir" by default. Soon gay kids weren't just connecting on gay-centered sites: Friendster took over, then Facebook.Īnd today, many parents worry more about online bullying than the Internet corrupting their kids. So we knew we were on to something."Įmily Kitfield, 16, says she's not sure if she would have been able to come out to her parents and community without being able to reach out to others online.Įventually, courts squashed censorship efforts, and slowly gay culture entered the mainstream online - and the world at large. "We couldn't keep up with the demand," he says, "and we would hit traffic records day after day. Mark Elderkin founded Gay.com in the mid-1990s. "I was like, this is really different! And then suddenly we were able to get on the Web and find websites dedicated to the culture." "I still remember the first time I saw those Internet chat rooms on AOL," she says. She didn't come out until college and didn't talk to her parents about it until her mid-20s. And she felt there was no one in Sulphur she could talk to about it. She had feelings for girls, but there were almost no real images of gay people in popular culture.
These stereotypes didn't fit her reality.
In her mind at the time, gay men were supposed to be hair dressers, and lesbians were supposed to be gym coaches. "The only exposure that we had to anyone that might be gay were more of what we perceived as the stereotypes of that," she says. Stephanie Sandifer grew up in the small town of Sulphur, La., in the 1980s. She says her exposure to people who were gay then was limited to stereotypes. Stephanie Sandifer grew up in Sulphur, La., in the 1980s. But the Internet, Gross says, allowed gay kids to find each other for the first time.
"I literally did not have contact with people my own age who were gay."įor decades, being a gay kid often meant holding tight to a secret you couldn't share, or having no one to talk to about feelings you might not fully understand. So, you know, I kept quiet about it," he says. "Gay people - or people who were thought to be gay - in high school were ridiculed, or worse. Growing up in Springfield, Ill., in the 1970s, Todd Bentsen never spoke to his high school classmates about being gay. "The experience that is so common for people growing up gay in the past is: 'I thought I was the only one,' " he says. Larry Gross of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication has been studying gay teens for decades. That change can be seen in the experiences of two women who grew up in the same town, two decades apart. But with the advent of online chat rooms and Websites dedicated to gay culture, communities formed, and that demographic began finding new support. In the past 20 years, the Internet has significantly changed what it means to grow up as a gay kid in this country.īefore the Web, many gay young people grew up in what seemed to be isolation, particularly those in small towns.