Morlan_Kaylee_Ant's Adopt a Gay Pet

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Morlan_Kaylee_Ant's Adopt a Gay Pet
Description
Ant’s Adopt A Gay Pet--or Ant’s Gay Pet Adoption Service--was a participatory web page on GeoCities, a free web hosting site active from 1994-2009 that allowed users to publish and visit web sites. In 2025, thousands of GeoCities pages are available due to a digital preservation project called restoritivland, focused on restoring abandoned web pages to a searchable and stable state. Hidden within restoritivland’s Geocities Gallery is Ant’s Adopt A Gay Pet, an artifact of queer leisure on the early internet.

Created by a 25-year-old gay man named Anthony (Ant, to his friends) in 1998, the site featured Ant’s doodles of a variety of pets with corresponding biographies describing their likes, dislikes, and sexual identities. To adopt a pet, site visitors completed an electronic form indicating the adoptee of the pet—themselves or a friend, the pet’s name, species, and an optional message. Ant automated these form responses to upload to a virtual guest book that logs every gay virtual pet adoption that occurred on the site.

The digital collection, Ant’s Adopt a Gay Pet, is curated to highlight the queer experience within digital footprints. Ant’s website provided a digital venue for queer people and their loved ones to be creative, funny, and thoughtful in unique ways with a new medium. The images and texts contained within the digital collection illustrate how Ant’s creative endeavors were received by a sample of GeoCities passersby.

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