Earlier today we received an email calling our attention to a website called GayStraightAlliance.org, specifically to the verbiage at the bottom of the main page:
WITHOUT GSA ACCESS, STUDENTS ARE FORCED TO SIMPLY KILL CLASSMATES WHO TAUNT & BULLY – SHOOTING, STABBING AND POISONING ARE THE COMMON FORMS OF RETRIBUTION. FAR TOO MANY GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS LIKE BULLYING CHILDREN TO THE POINT WHERE RETRIBUTION AGAINST CLASSMATES AND FACULTY IS ONLY OPTION TO REDRESS RELENTLESS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN MANY REGIONS. SPECIOUSLY-NAMED “PRO-FAMILY” LEADERS ARE CHILD MOLESTERS WHO MAKE MONEY STIGMATIZING HOMOSEXUALITY TO SILENCE GAY VICTIMS.
These comments seem to imply that murder is a justifiable reaction to bullying and that so called “pro-family” organizations are led by child molesters. Obviously, we hope everyone will agree that these statements are absurdly hateful rhetoric and we condemn them. However, what follows is also hateful rhetoric, from people who really should know better.
First we should note that this has nothing to do with the official GLSEN Gay-Straight Alliance website, or in fact any GSAs at all. It belongs to a company called Event Horizon Publications and we’ve been unable to find anyone who has ever heard of them or this website. Their major claim to fame seems to be a role playing book from the 1990s. An email sent to them earlier today has not been returned. From the badly written copy, it’s a good guess this is an amateur operation but the only thing of which we can be reasonably sure is that it is not connected to GLSEN, or any other reputable organization known by the authors we have contacted. Web searches have also revealed little.
That didn’t stop Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, from posting as though these words were official comments from GLSEN themselves:
The Gay Straight Alliance* has put out an astounding new tid bit of info.
So essentially the GSA powers that be are saying two things: 1) Put in a GSA at your school and we guarantee that you’ll be safe from school massacres. 2) If you don’t have a GSA then taunted gay kids only option is murdering those who tease/bully them.
We did notify them that this wasn’t an official site, and to Chambers’ credit he added the asterisk and the notation at the bottom of his post now reflects this. However the body of the post remains the same, implying that these awful words came from “The” Gay Straight Alliance, and “the GSA powers that be.”
Dr. Warren Throckmorton was also taken in as he posted on his blog today:
If you would like to write the Gay Straight Alliance and suggest a less volatile message, here is the address info@gaystraightalliance.org.
There was no notation distinguishing the offending site from the real one. Subsequent comments under the post did bring this fact to light. Perhaps he will consider updating his post.
The comments on this website are offensive and inexcusable, but it’s obvious that just about anyone can place a site on the web. We expect more of PhDs and the president of the largest ex-gay referral and lobbying organization. It took us less than 5 minutes to verify this site was not connected to GLSEN. Perhaps if they had not been so anxious to give GSAs a black eye, they would have found out as well.
The guy behind Horizon Event Publishing and those websites appears to be Brian Wyant of Council Bluffs, Iowa. On the webpage:
https://www.pflag-omaha.org/pnews/archive/Community_News-archive-4-2006.html
You find this: “April 2006: Individual and Team registrations for the Pride Walk are available at http://www.PrideWalk.org or visit the Rainbow Outreach Metro Omaha GLBT Center, 1719 Leavenworth, (402) 341-0330, during drop-in hours. You can also earn gift cards and other prizes by collecting pledges to support the Pride Walk charity beneficiaries: PFLAG Omaha, PFLAG Lincoln, GLSEN Omaha, Proud Horizons Youth Group, ICON Foundation, Rainbow Outreach GLBT Center, and River City Mixed Chorus. “Until Americans can all walk down the road of life celebrating diversity in a just and equitable society,” said Brian Wyant, GLBT Center coordinator, “we will walk to help create that world. We look forward to seeing everyone at the Pride Walk.””
So, while the site isn’t GLSEN, it is a person who is one of us. My question is, however, was his GayLibrary site hacked? The add-on on the bottom doesn’t look right.
“One of us”
My, that sounds ominous! If you mean he is gay or deals with gay issues, I would imagine so considering the site. The point is that the site has nothing to do with GLSEN’s GSA initiative and in fact I can’t find it connected with any GSAs anywhere. Alan and Warren wrote posts assuming the site was the Gay-Straight Alliance site, which you have to admit would be another story entirely.
As to if it was hacked, well we emailed Brian Wyant yesterday and have yet to hear back. I suppose it is possible, but there are several similar comments on different sites in that group.
Well, the wingnuts will have their fun… I understand your point. Dr Throckmorton said he knew it was not the GLSEN website (though after the fact of his first post).
But gee Dave… what if it had been your site? Wyant seems to be rather involved and active in the Council Bluffs gay community, I wouldn’t simply brush him off because he isn’t GLSEN proper or because he’s a landlocked gay. He may be personally affiliated and active in many organizations including GLSEN. His website might be just the thing in Council Bluffs. I guess I kinda feel more for the individual than the organizations. Either he was hacked or something happened in Wyant’s life to cause him to lose his cool.
Apparently Wikipedia has been duped as well.
The entry there for Gay-straight alliance has a link to gaystraightalliance.org, titled “Gay straight alliance official site.”
Nowhere in my post did I mention GLSEN. I knew at the time that there are multiple websites supporting the concept of GSAs, and I did not say it was GLSEN’s site or responsibility.
I do wish I would have researched the site and site’s owner more thoroughly, however; and I am going to correct the wrong impression that GLSEN is behind the inflamatory language. Nonetheless, as Lynn David points out something is up in Council Bluffs.
Throckmorton, do you have any idea how easy it is to dupe Wikipedia?
It’s edited by anybody in the world with internet access. So..pretty easy.
Warren, Wikipedia is the worst resource out there. As an English college instructor, I do not allow any student to use Wikipedia for any info gathering. Anyone can post or change info. It is highly unreliable. Weekly World News is only slightly less reliable.
That verbiage at the bottom of the page seems strikingly out of place with the rest of the site. The rest of the site is much more polished and professional in tone and content. The text in the bottom frame, besides being provocative, is just plain awkward. I took a look at the source and the comment tags on the bottom frame source are even stranger.
So I did a little poking around…
I followed a few of the links at the bottom of the GSA site. They all had a similar layout. The text in the bottom frame on the gay library, gay community centers and gay film festival sites are different, and even more bizarre.
All the sites seem to be (according to nslookup) residing on the same servers. At a guess the code for all these sites was originally created by the same person or persons…maybe they operate some kind of web site design/hosting company or something. The text in the bottom frames are often the same from one site to another.
But check out the Gay Destination site. The bottom frame just has the intro and faq links…which seems right from a design standpoint. In my opinion, that’s all that the bottom frame was originally intended for. Note that the text in question links back to the home pages on each site, just like the link marked “home” does. At a guess, someone just copied the home link code and added their own label to it, which is the text we’re seeing. If you look at the Gay Destinations page, you see how that bottom frame is supposed to look.
The text you see in the bottom frame reads like it was done by a little hacker child (or someone with the brains of a hacker child…). It is strikingly out of place with the rest of the content on all these sites. So my hunch is that there has been some hackery going on here.
Has anyone even bothered asking the owners of these sites about the content on them now? I strongly suspect they’ve been hacked in some way.
Oh sweet Jesus go look at the comment tags in the source of the bottom frames at the Gay Community Centers site and the others with that same verbiage in them. It’s…dazzlingly nuts. Way…Way more so then what’s in the comment tags on the GSA site.
Well…I’m convinced. This was a hack job.
Agree Emily: all such GLBT pages are targets of abuse on Wikipedia (from either the vile or the religious, and sometimes one and the same).
It doesn’t take much searching through the history to know that. GLSEN is particularly targetted. I’m just glad Chambers/Throckmorton didn’t treat as authorative this attack … (from 8 June 2005)
If anyone’s interested, the gaystraightalliance.org link was added 08:48, 27 March 2006 by 71.131.10.7 (can be a username, rather than a IP addy). gaystraightalliance.org itself blocks internet archive robots, so no history to show from Wayback etc. Guess we’ll have to await an explanation from Council Bluffs, Iowa…
(David, you may get a quicker response if you contact him — or others if no response — via https://rainbowoutreach.org/center/GLBTabout.htm)
Maybe I am naive, but there are extensive links with suggestions to start forest fires (https://www.gayhumanrights.org/gayhumanrights/usaflag/trueamerica.htm) and other such things. Would a hacker go to this much trouble?
Ughhh,
This nutcase is basically the gay equivalent of James Hartline… only less well known.
Would a hacker go to this much trouble?
I didn’t look at that one, and it’s interesting. Its overall content is more like the verbiage in the bottom frame of the GSA page for sure. But what’s interesting is that some of the text in the left sidebar is identical to the text in the comment tags in the source of the bottom frames of some of the other sites.
So maybe I need to rethink my theory of what’s going on here. Maybe there is some issue with the content of one site getting munged somehow with the content of others on this…I’m assuming it’s some sort of hosting service. But I strongly doubt that the text we’re seeing at the bottom of the GSA pages and the Gay Film Festival page and the Gay Destination page is supposed to be there.
This nutcase is basically the gay equivalent of James Hartline…
So these sites in this whole Gay Library thing are all him…?
Yeah…I guess… If you do a whois on gaydestination.com you don’t see anyone listed as the admin or technical contacts, but if you do a whois on gaydestination.org you see his name there. If you go to gaydestination.org you get the same page as gaydestination.com.
Same thing with the gayfilmfestivals sites. org and com both map to the same place, but you only see Wyant’s name on the org registration.
So…yeah…I reckon it’s all this one guy after all. I was going under the assumption that this was some kind of a gay web hosting service or umbrella organization with a web design service that also offered to do your site for you and get it all running, and that at least some of these sites actually belonged to different people or groups. But it seems that’s not the case here after all. It’s all just this one guy. At least that’s what it looks like to me now.
So I retract my hackery suspicions. It looks more now like a severe case of clumsy web site editing. I still don’t think he intended that text to be in those bottom frames.
We just won’t know for sure until and unless we get some response from Wyant.
It’s a hack job, obviously. Ok. Fine. Well done, oh great h4cker! You pwned us all! Now, please take your skillz somewhere else. Maybe hack into a website that’s actually dedicated to hate and destruction, and post some “loving” remarks at the bottom for irony’s sake.
Kudos, Bruce, for doing such fine research and digging.
Throckmorton and Chambers, you have officially lost any credibility you may have once had with America’s potentially ex-gay youth. Nothing does that better than proving what a dupe you are to the online world my generation was practically lives in. But of course, I see that as a good thing. They’ll spend less time torturing themselves and blowing their money and you and more time enjoying themselves and blowing their money on things that are actually fun or fulfilling.
And as for “why would a hacker take the time?” It’s because they HAVE the time.
This guy has a dedicated web server (all sites are on the same IP address, 207.228.227.179; all 68 domains on it are registered to the same Brian Wyant). Whether the content is his or whether it was hacked, is difficult to know without asking Mr. Wyant — but, given that his primary business web sites (Event Horizon Publications, etc) seem to be fully intact and functional, I imagine that all the sites are still under his full control. It’s very unlikely that only some of his server would have been compromised.
If anybody’s listed in the full list of domains, I can post it, but it’s pretty dull. Most of the interesting ones were already noted, and I did not look at every one because there’s only so much “omg wtf” I want to do every day 🙂
I see no mere hackery here. A hack would have been fixed by now, e-mails would have been responded to.
I would like to see Omaha-area organizations take appropriate action to discredit whoever is promoting violence, arson, and so forth.
It sucks being in a minority sometimes, because the worst of us automatically become representatives of the majority of us. A closeted, troubled gay man gets caught having group sex at 2 am in the park – it comes back to us gays. Scheister ambulance chasing lawyers that have last names like Rothenberg or Silverman – it comes back to us Jews. In the meantime, heterosexuals are some of the most sexually “diverse” people I know, but their identities aren’t universally judged to be one singular lifestyle because of it – and the cultural and religious identities of greats like Einstein and Gershwin are quickly forgotten and brushed aside. The same can be said of any other minority in America, like Blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, etc… everyone feels a struggle at some point in their lives.
I think I’ll start The Official Ex-Gay Website at theofficialexgays.org and therealexodus.org, and put Exodus officially on record admitting and condoning lying about their opposition… and killing dolphins, just for good measure. </snark>
I would like to see Omaha-area organizations take appropriate action to discredit whoever is promoting violence, arson, and so forth.
Did you catch this from the Gay Rights Human Rights Report…?
That’s from footnote 11 on Australia. It’s also in a comment tag within the bottom frame of many of the other site pages, but not the GSA one, along with the rest of that sidebar.
And I thought I was an angry militant homosexual. Whoever it was who wrote that footnote definitely has…issues.
No need to bother Mike A…
Just tell everyone about GodHatesFags, and tell everyone that each and every Christian is personally responsible for the Phelps. I mean, he is an official Christian, and all, isn’t he?
Oh, that’s right… we have “rules” about doing that sort of thing here… especially without having done some basic checking of the sources.
(“killing dolphins”. Wow, horrible. Better add that to our Exodus Fact Files.)
More seriously: Alan you shouldn’t believe everything Warren says, and Warren you shouldn’t believe everything LaBarbera says. From July 27… 2 weeks before Warren.
(and come on XGW guys — weren’t any of you reading LaBarbera while we were on hols???)
To be honest Grantdale, I never read LaBarbera unless he gets mixed up in an ex-gay issue to some extent. He’s just not significant enough in my opinion to give free ink to.
Interestingly, the message at the bottom of the site has changed since yesterday. The following has been added:
I’m not certain what is going on with this. While the part at the bottom has the appearance of a hack, i.e. the entire paragraph is formatted as if it were a menu link, there is some disturbing verbiage on other sections of the site. We have not yet received a response from the owner/author.
We will post an update when we have anything new.