On a campus where rainbow flags decorate fraternities and where both a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Center and a Rainbow House exist to make LGBT students feel at home, it can be all too easy to slip into oblivion about the often-harsh climate just outside the Tufts bubble. But a new website has made braving and navigating that outside world a much easier task for the LGBT community.
In an attempt to create a system that will allow gays and their allies to rank businesses and leaders on a scale from extremely homophobic to extremely gay-friendly, Travis Lowry (LA '10) has teamed up with his friend Conor Clary to create RainbowChronicle.com. The website, which launched on Jan. 11, is intended to provide user-generated content that calls attention to the actions and practices of people and organizations, from elementary schools to dive bars to celebrities and everything in between.
"It's very difficult to find a single resource that describes the voting record of a politician," Lowry, the site's president and chief executive officer, said. "In the manner that Yelp is an extremely good site for finding good restaurants because there are so many reviews, we hope that people, when voting, will think that gay rights are important and look at the site to decide how the politician stands."
While the site contains information and ratings on issues and people at a macro-level — such as on presidential candidates — it also allows users to scope out and grade local businesses and organizations with which people may interact on a regular basis.
"It you have a gay child who wants to sign up for a soccer league, you can look and see if any of them have particularly bad records for how they deal with gay kids," Lowry said. "What we hope is that this becomes a very reliable source in which businesses and people respond to gay rights."
Lowry conceived the site in the wake of a recent high-profile rash of suicides among LGBT youth nationwide. Rainbow Chronicle, Lowry said, was inspired largely by the web-based It Gets Better Project, through which gay adults aim to prevent suicide among their adolescent counterparts. As a group, gay adolescents are statistically considered far more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual adolescents.
"I thought we could take the power of the Internet and user-generated reviews, and instead of telling people that it will eventually get better in the future, we could use the Internet to make it better now [by shedding] light on businesses and leaders who are accepting, and also [by drawing] attention to people who are ignorant, to really draw a roadmap for people," Lowry said.
One of the site's features is a heat-mapping system — previously used only in military applications — which allows users to quickly zoom in on their local communities based on the aforementioned user-generated ratings.
Leaders, places and events are listed on the "Rainbow Map" with scores from -5, or very hostile toward gays, to +5, defined as extremely gay friendly. The color scheme depicts a +5 as bright green, and a -5 as bright red, and uses relative shades for everything in between.
For example, Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney is listed under a location in Boston, and has a rating of -1.0 (based on 3 reviews at press time), so he appears as a yellowish-orange triangle.
Ratings under the "Leaders" category are based on an aggregate of individual user opinion of four criteria: voting record, publicly stated views on LGBT issues, inclusion of LGBT constituents and/or employees and the user's personal experience with the leader.
Of more immediate value for users, specific businesses — including Davis Square staples such as Dave's Fresh Pasta and Boston Burger Company, which have been rated on the site — can be scored in categories like popularity among the LGBT community.
Despite the hot-button topics addressed by user comments and ratings, the founders of Rainbow Chronicle stressed the importance of maintaining the site as professional and safe for work rather than an as ideological battleground.
"What we want to emphasize is not fighting extremism with extremism," Clary, the site's chief operating officer, said. "We want to keep [the site] as rational and logical as possible and maintain a distance from being militant on any side."
In order to qualify as safe for work, the site is constantly being checked for graphic images or lewd comments.
"We've got a method for users to flag things that are not safe for work, and we make sure that if someone submits a link to obscene images we'll tag that," junior Jack Carter, who has worked with Lowry and Clary on the site's development, said.
"If we miss anything, then other users can flag it and bring it to our attention. We don't allow any kind of obscene images on the website," Carter said.
Carter emphasized the site's goal of serving and informing the population at large rather than solely focusing on a niche of LGBT individuals.
"It definitely caters towards gay students, although it does have info that would be interesting to straight allies of the gay community. It's not just about gay locations, like gay bars. It's also got a news section, so that anyone who's interested with keeping up with progress in the gay movement can find it there," he said.
While still a fledgling project, Rainbow Chronicle was featured on MTV's Voices website, and its creators have high hopes for the future, although they are well aware of the challenges that are likely to encumber them. For one, businesses may not take kindly to being featured on the website.
"We know that when people are going to be called homophobic, they're going to have a problem with us," Lowry said. "We're OK with that as long as it's accurate. We just want to represent it in the most respectful and academic way that we can."
