Update Number 2: Survival and Struggle: From Germany Back to America
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BoyChat History Update #2:
Survival and Struggle: From Germany Back to America (8/20/97-9/30/97)
That last update was written much too fast. This is the problem with writing history as it is being made: the events occur faster than than anyone can make sense of them.
As should now be obvious, the anti-BL forces, presumably CPAC and another proselytising individual whose name I will not honor by mentioning here, regrouped and struck hard at our German host. The precise circumstances remain vague, but it seems that the owner of the Reinecke server, Bernd Reinecke, received notice from his super-ISP, EUNet, that he would have to take down the Free Spirits sites or lose his backbone connection to the Internet.
On 8/18/97, after a hasty consultation with a German lawyer, he pulled the plug. A recent West German law criminalizes even fictional depictions of adult-child intimacy; perhaps it was on these grounds that his lawyer advised him to cancel. Reinecke said he would take 24 hours to consider, but he actually never contacted us again. Nor did he ever allow us to download updated versions of our files; we had to reconstruct many of them from scratch. There were also unsubstantiated allegations that a major computer software firm sided with EUNet in pressuring Reinecke, but we have not been able to confirm these.
On 8/20/97, I fired off 20 emails to providers who advertised themselves as willing to host controversial or sensitive material. Nearly all answered, and an American ISP, called Phix, stated firmly that the only reason that they would ever pull a site would be due to a court order. Since we are fairly confident that no court could ever find BoyChat an illegal site in the United States, we chose to go with Phix. Phix also had the advantage that we could be up and running in 24 hours. Very shortly, BoyChat was back up under the new URL http://www.phix.com/~haldane/bc/boychat.shtml. Within a week, Phix was also able to transfer the ivan.net domain name (still lodged at XtatiX), and since then BoyChat has been back at its old URL of http://www.ivan.net/bc/boychat.shtml.
In the meantime, the enterprising kabouter had done some research and discovered that the Dutch provider Demon had hosted various BL sites for several years without incident. In the interest of decentralizing and making our sites less vulnerable to attack, we decided to approach Demon about hosting BoyLinks and FPC. European red tape and my own unreliable email being what it is, it took a couple weeks before we could get these sites up and running, but by late September, they are back on line.
In August and September 1996, dozens of new posters arrived on BoyChat, and the same deluge has occurred in August and September 1997. Some recent, and vocal, additions to the clan include Ford Prefect, Double Q, Venbow, NewDay, BlueSeal, Bill B, Nicky, Mr_Lee, b_danny, Fair Witness, Prometheus, SWEETRAY, lelldorin, Julius, Moscal, StarRaider, Tyler, The Poor Farang, Marcus (Boyatollah), Lost Boy, Duke and many others.
In September, we also briefly saw the reappearance of our guard dog Llewellyn, who posted an update on exactly what had happened with 13 year old Criss back in March. With Llewellyn's permission, I am reproducing his update here. It is one of the most touching stories that BoyChat has had to offer. Criss, if you're out there reading somewhere, we all still love you.
Alexis, 9/30/97
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