Get Used to It: Ep. 64, "Voices of Our Lives: David Bohnett"

foreign [Applause] [Music] hi i'm sheila kewell welcome to get used to it uh today is one in a series of uh interviews that we sometimes do with just one person a person that we love and that everyone in the entire united states must be interested in and today is no exception my guest today is david bonet who is an internet visionary and long time gay activist welcome david thank you sheila i'm pleased to be here i'm really glad you're here um i would imagine there are a number of folks in the country who don't know as much about you as they will after this hour and i'm um it's a it's a wonderful and varied life that you've had and i i hope it's all right with you if i kind of start at the beginning where were you born and where did you grow up i grew up in chicago illinois actually a suburb of chicago western suburb hinsdale both my parents had grown up in chicago so i was fortunate to have a a large kind of close-knit family growing up aunts and uncles cousins grandparents and we would see a lot of each other as i was growing up what did your folks do my father was in the oil business as a matter of fact his father had a a company in the tire and and wholesale oil business and my mother's father was in banking and my mother was a homemaker and raised three kids so what was it like for you growing up were you fairly in a well-to-do area did you feel sheltered or um was your family more about i don't know you know wide experience i was fortunate sheila i was the uh youngest of three kids i have a a saying that i use within our family that my that i was third rock from the sun you know my my brother i think bore the brunt of a lot of uh inexperience that the parents have in in raising kids and by the time they got along to me uh being eight years younger than my older brother i think there was more of a kind of let go you know attitude toward toward growing up and i was great i was born in 1956 and the the i remember my childhood with great fondness and affection and exuberance except for that sense that we all have as gay people that at some point you realize that you're different and that yeah when i think back that's that's one of the things i also remember when did you first start to um experience it or think that that you might be gay you know it's a hard thing for all of us i think to to really dredge up those memories or acknowledge when you realize that you know maybe people were looking at you a little differently and maybe the way you threw a ball the way you laughed or the way you were interested in playing with the girls instead of boys or boys instead of girls the way you dressed but you know for me it was pretty early on it was i don't know six seven eight years old when i thought you know it's it's different i feel different i'm attracted to boys and and and men and it's but you really early on i think you pick up that sense from other people that they're treating you that there's something different about you what were your interests as a kid i loved mechanical things and i still do and and as we talk about the internet later on it's just the internet is just an outgrowth of me playing with with at that point taking apart watches play used to build my own radios and i was this i love stuff like that mechanical things mechanical toys anything electrical telephones i just thought were and i still do i just think it's the coolest thing you know televisions taking apart radios i just always had a passion for that so is that what you pursued when you went to college i mean what was uh what were your interests well interestingly sheila i came out here to to go to usc and i had a sense that i never i sensed coming to california was kind of the thing to do i i had never been here before so i i picked the school based on uh kind of reading about it in the catalog knowing that they had a computer science program and a business program and that's some vague sense that maybe there were people like me in california you know not not really knowing anything more than that as a as a high school kid but i came out here to go uh to usc so you were already interested in computers i was not that you're very old david but it just seems like you would have been in very early then well when i was the first computer i ever had experience with was when i was in high school and it was one of these old teletype machines and it had the chunka chunka chunka typing mechanism and you would put dial up the phone and i just you couldn't tear me away from that and that was my first experience and came out here to study computer science but but actually was disappointed because computer science was really just a subset of the math department oh and i just i could do math but i just didn't like it my passion was for the the programming side and for creating computer programs that did things and learning all math theory and practical math just didn't interest me but in the beginning it were really it was really the mathematicians that were the computer scientists and that came from the design side of computers the real the circuitry and the wiring and the hardware and although that was interesting to me and you needed a math background to design the early computers i was more interested in the application side what could computers do that was fun and interesting what what kind of business applications and so i i i really didn't want to pursue a math major and i changed a business and became a business major but it was still kind of interlinked in your mind wasn't very much in terms of so what kind of um business did you pursue i mean did you start at usc to think about which aspect of business you would uh go when i was young i sold my mother likes to to remind all of our friends that i sold amway products you know so i had always been interested in the business of business and sold soap and detergent to all of all of my parents friends growing up i had a i had a paper route and so i was always interested in having you know some money to do the things i wanted to do but just just kind of the business of of business of of working in high school i uh worked at the mall and and uh swept floors and i was always a waiter so in business i was most interested in the broad background of just learning more about marketing finance and accounting and i ended up emphasizing or or studying finance and accounting in business school so what was the first work you actually did then after college i uh i was a waiter i all through with that fabulous degree exactly sounds like all the actors in this town all through school i had gone back every summer to a summer resort way up in northern wisconsin which is very pretty area trees and lakes and and i had gone up there as a kid to a cabin had gone to camp but this was a summer resort where all the kids lived on the resort and i waited tables and i taught water skiing and i did that all through school and then when i graduated from college that was the first thing i wanted to do was go back to the summer resort then i went on to graduate school i went to the university of michigan in ann arbor for my mba and then what and then after that i was a waiter again do we see something right i couldn't resist i uh when i was in business school and this was you know very serious and all these uh people getting their mba and they were going off in these summer you know interest internships between the the two years and they would go to gm or city corp or first chicago then you'd come back your second year and you'd kind of compare well who went where and where'd they go and i was always proud that my summer internship was was later so after that and kind of know if i ever have that out of my system but then i worked for arthur anderson which is a large accounting and consulting firm and i because i had a a background business education and my passion for computers i went to the consulting into the consulting division and they did a lot of hands-on computer programming assignments so i would create accounting systems and financial systems and i loved it you you really had a sense of combining the computer skills and the programming skills and applying those skills in real world environments for corporations like wix and real estate companies so i would go in as a consultant and help develop computer systems for them and these were in the in the still in the in the days when punch cards were not that unusual this was 1980 and i learned a lot on punch card type machines and then that migrated more toward the the terminals themselves and then the mini computers did it feel to you like this technology was really developing quickly because i mean one of the things that occurs to me from the 90s that it just felt like it accelerated so much and as we as you said as we get to talk about the internet i mean that was really a quantum leap into a whole new arena that was different from what people thought computers were for and could do and maybe the the use of the pc first you know from the business applications to the personal computer to the internet but did you i mean what you are referred to as an internet visionary were you a also a kind of a computer visionary did you have a sense then about where these things could go well interesting bill gates and i are about the same age and and he was exposed to to a lot of the same things that i was along the way in terms of education and the evolution of computers and he chose to to to write software as his business and it really wasn't until 1982-83 that the personal computer changed the began to change the entire the entire landscape and i didn't i didn't have the sense that things were moving nearly as fast as they are now when i got out of school computers were still the things that very few people had access to or used and it was a it was a very specialized education and the jobs were very specialized but i just i just loved it so much that it's it's it's what i wanted to do and then in the in the early to mid 80s you started to see the the very first widely available commercially available pcs and the ibm pc came out in 1983 and that started an acceleration that continues to this day and so starting slow when you know the car is going 5-10 miles an hour to now we're in the you know about up at the speed limit 60s or 70s and beyond but that's when the things really things really started to happen so here you are in michigan and you're work or you've graduated from came back out here came back out here we're working here with arthur and right i came out to usc after graduating from high school four years out here and that's when i really came out it was it was in the middle of my college days in 70 i came out i'm 74 so i'm 76 75 76 is when i really started to drive up here to circus maximus which was here in studio one and uh you know the train tracks were going down the train tracks were running down the street and the trains were in the middle of santa monica boulevard it was a much more warehousey kind of outpost feeling there was there was no city here there was no pacific design center and i would i was a member of a fraternity who i wasn't the only gay member of the fraternity no but i i remember thinking in in real mid-college career i just i just said to myself you can't fool yourself anymore this is you know face it this is this is who you are this is the way it is and i came out and and started to what do you do what did i do when i first came out was started to come up here and meet people at some of the studio one some of the gay bars my one of my first memories of studio one on lapeer first of all like like most gay people i drove by it 50 times before i'd park the car and go in and uh and this was when the drinking age was still 18 and so finally i parked and i went in and studio one in the late 70s had there's an elevator that you would take up a big freight elevator you take upstairs and they had a plate of cookies in the elevator and i'll never forget that and uh that was and then just like for for all of us a whole new world opened up for me in terms of meeting people so i kind of finished the thought i went to michigan for two years for my mba then came back out here in 1980 to work for arthur anderson and as you were coming out in the 70s and and going here to west hollywood to uh you know to sort of be with other folks gay and lesbian mostly gay folks did you have a sense of freedom a sense of shame what was what did you feel like that oh it was in and still today for it was a it was a big deal to come to that realization that this is this is who i am this is this is i've always been this way i this is not a choice this is the way god created and made me but but to your to your question it felt very clandestine it felt these these it it felt like you you how would you find out about there were there weren't the the newspapers that there are it was you really felt and i'm searching for the word you felt secretive and it was the world was most gay people were very much in the closet and you had you were very careful about kind of who you told about where you were going and the the this it's funny those treats weren't well lit i mean it was all kind of dark and shadowy and and you'd get in and then there'd be people like you but but there were there was an acknowledgment on the street it was well you know it was just a much much different world and so your family was separate from that right and your work very separate totally separate from that and how how did you did you you must have eventually of course come out to your family did that happen much later it happened in it it didn't happen with my family until uh late 1983 and this was this was six or seven years after i had really come out to myself and began to acknowledge and accept that i was an openly gay man but it wasn't until i was in a relationship that i felt was committed and involved loving and strong that i felt maybe the courage to to face that step with my with my parents i had told my sister who was very supportive and my brother but but really did not come out to my folks until later i was i was 27 years old at that point and how then a lot of us i guess and coming out to ourselves and even as we begin to come out to our families or friends there is this notion that we have a sort of a budding career whatever it is and here you are at arthur anderson and um imagining that you know some career path for yourself of some successful path did it did it create a conflict in you about sort of who you really are and how that might impact your dreams about your future it did i i had a sense of how difficult it would be to to be who you were and still stay on track within the corporate environment and i whether or not that played a factor in moving me more toward an entrepreneurial environment or whether i was predisposed to do that or who knows if way back early when all that was kind of came together being gay and and wanting to be you know do your own things in business i don't know but i knew that that it would be tough to stay at arthur anderson and continue to to move on and evolve and achieve and succeed when a lot of your success was based on the networking you would do the kind of social activities you would you would you would go to i remember going to one of the there was an annual dinner dance and and was close with a good friend of mine his name was bob douglas and he died early on of aids and we both had dates and and the dates that were were women and it just didn't it just wasn't going to be easy i mean many many many people were had no other choice but to follow that path and but it it i just knew it wasn't going to be easy so what'd you do well i think that part of that was what fueled my my energy and passion for gay activism knowing that this just wasn't this wasn't fair i mean it just it it i didn't do anything to to to create this situation yet i wasn't faced with the same opportunity that other people were it would have been harder for me to become a partner there it i would have had to push down who i was and that just didn't didn't seem right to me and fortunately i i landed i'd left uh i'd left arthur anderson i was in the beginning of a significant long-term relationship and through the love and support of that relationship i felt like i could kind of branch out and i had a couple of consulting business consulting jobs for a short period of time a year or two and then i landed at a software company founded by a friend of ours a fellow gay man fred paul as a matter of fact and what a wonderful environment that was because it was computers it was software i was able to contribute my business experience i could be openly gay and i just thought wow you know this is great and it really was i was i was very fortunate to have gotten to know and meet fred and then hook up with him in business so what was your first sort of foray into gay activism because you said that you you wanted to participate and be a gay activist and there was as i heard you say it kind of almost a conflict with this corporate world i mean how are you even going to be out much less an activist in 1980 this is when i was in graduate school at the university of michigan i had a work study program work study grant and which meant that you the university would pay your your wage at some university-related job and somehow that helped yeah right and uh there was a gay student union at the university of michigan ann arbor was was a big you know kind of liberal college town and michigan had a gay student union and i remember a activist by the name of jim toy was it michigan and ran the gay student union there and i was answering the helpline and i went through sensitivity training helpline training to do that and i would have the helpline forwarded to my apartment and this is the time when that was what gay activism was was you would work on a crisis line you know you would there would be a phone number that people could call and talk to a gay person and it was a lot of it was suicide prevention kind of work it really it really wasn't that much substance abuse visibility at that point it was all kind of crisis that's what they're called the crisis line you know it's this big crisis i'm gay and what do i do and you needed someone to talk to and i remember how important it was to hand off the the line to somebody else because there just always needed to be somebody there to answer the phone and so that was now almost 20 years ago in 19 1979 1980 and that felt great i mean that felt like well you're you're doing something you know that that somebody's there and you talk to someone on the phone and it was just such a sense of relief for them they wouldn't you know these were people who couldn't even go to gay bars at least there was someplace there was an entry in the phone book and that was also the important thing was to make sure that this crisis gay crisis line could be you know listed in the phone book and somebody could call so when you got back to la did you also get involved in stuff i was i was tied up with with no not not for a few years later until until 1983. i i was working i was you know making some money and then just kind of coming out and starting to come into my own and going to the places that were around here and in my next my next real uh uh phase of gay activism was in 1983 when i met ranch schrader and this the the gay community services center dinner i don't think lesbian was part of the name yet not until we went and painted it [Laughter] in 1983 and i met randy and he says you know the center puts on this dinner every year and and uh i said well um we met in june of 83 and the dinner was in the fall and i said well let me see if i can help sell some tickets and i wrote up this letter i was really careful about talking about why this why this center was so important and sent it to people and i sent it to somebody who i thought was going to have a heart i mean it was in a plain brown envelope and he said why did you send this to me i said well you know and he just was was red in the face and angry and just don't ever send anything like that to my house again and i just the the the vehemence of his response was amazing to me that that i mean i just thought well this is why not i mean uh nobody's gonna one nobody's gonna find out from the envelope so it really was another reminder of how far we had well it's another aspect of crisis yeah in a way i mean one of the greatest crises we have is is really coming out to ourselves right and there's all kinds of stages i mean i may have told somebody but i don't want anybody to see me anywhere or i won't go to a dinner or right you know i don't even get something in my homes that says it says gay on it you know really well somebody might go through my trash i mean you know whatever you get very paranoid about it now was randy a judge already he was he was he had been appointed just just i think 18 months and he was the first openly gay judge and he and steve lex were the first openly gay judges appointed in california and he was just a wonderful guy we met i was 27 when we met and this friend of mine interestingly from arthur anderson bud douglas his boyfriend was uh just past the bar i finished law school past the bar instead of you know being sworn in on mass he wanted to be sworn in kind of in a special ceremony so uh was randy agreed to do it and was invited to a in this little swearing-in ceremony in randy's chambers on a friday afternoon and i went and randy swarm in and they all went out to dinner that night and i had other another date or some other plans and the next day my friend called bud called me and said you know there was a couple people there asking about you but one of them was was was ran schrader the judge i said really he said yeah who are you you know what do you do i kind of liked him too you know i said yeah i think you should call him so i picked up the phone and and and i called him and i said you know we met and randy said well as a matter of fact you know the center is having its lawn party this was the summer lawn party uh and i'll be there maybe we can meet there so he's always selling tickets to something you know so yeah i just said great you know i'll see you at the lawn party and i went to the lawn party was up in los feliz uh and looked for randy and i sought him out and i thought well you know great he's waiting for me and we talk and i see when i go off for dinner sometime he was 11 years old he was 38 didn't feel like 11 years to me but 11 years older than i was and then and then we we started to go out and just a couple dates into it i said you know i'm so glad you had called bud you know and talked about wanting to get together i don't think i ever would have called he said i never said a word good from god you know and i had been operating under this he was interested in me you know and i'm walking around and boy and it just it's a lesson for life sheila which is you you you act and assume and enact with the degree of self-confidence and self-assurance and look at what's opened up to you i never would have called you know and i thought but you know how those things go when you think someone's interested in in you so that's how we met and is this a relationship that allowed you to come out to your parents that was it so late that year um i had gone home not home i got in my brother's house for christmas and randy wasn't with me and i thought this this this just isn't right you know this is this is not right and so like like a lot of us that kind of crisis christmas coming out you know and i'm a gay man and you know all this and it was hard it was hard for my folks but you know over time they came to accept it and and always loved me and came to love him very much and how long were you and randy together before he passed away ten years so june of 1993 right is when he died it was just terrific so you built a life together and at the same time you've now started i mean it's interesting to me and these they're not exactly middle years because you were still quite young and but when things start to come together i mean i i love the story of people's lives you have sort of the education part the coming out to yourself part the i'm trying this this didn't work for me part you know etc and it seems like at this point things started to you started to make them kind of integrate a new relationship a good one a business where you could be yourself right the software but also developing the interest that you had about not quite sure where this business is heading because software after all we we couldn't even have envisioned i don't think then what what would happen um and you're you know in your life with randy so talk about those say the next five years how did your work develop and we were the the the strength and the comfort of a of a loving relationship was was provided that kind of uh nurturing you were talking about i always i was doing well in business enjoying my job and and working with fred and building a software company and being a part of a team that that we had were building together randy and i a life he was very visible very active uh politically and and within the community had grown up in los angeles and and had had known you know many many people through his school and and uh educational years so and he and he was well known well known through the center and it was great it was that kind of the years when you thought that the whole the whole movement was was gaining momentum the the world was ahead of us people were were beginning to accept uh lesbian and gay people and that we just had to keep working and working harder and being visible and coming out and that path would then continue to lead to more visibility and more acceptance and more opportunity and so and along the way it was fun along the way there were the you know the the the disco years and the the the parades and it was just like this is our time you know in the in the in the early to to to mid 1980s and then things changed and things changed dramatically uh uh for for especially for those of us that were there remembering that it's not that you thought the party would never end because it wasn't a party it was a it was a zeal and it was a drive for continued visibility and acceptance and it was a lot of hard work building the organizations that were assisting with that at the time and gaining political visibility but that was you know that you felt like it was really happening and an enormous sense of hope and it was exciting so exciting and and just the the the the promise of all that was was was was terrific then people started to get sick then people started to get sick and my friend from our this friend bob douglas from arthur anderson was one of the first and gets sick very very fast and and and unknown kind of kind of sicknesses and and i remember steve schulte from the center we were randy and i were at a screening of of a movie and steve said you know everybody needs to to start practicing people didn't call it safe sex see steve said everybody needs to start using protection or wearing condoms i just everybody and he was he was early on saying there's something happening there's something but but we think it's sexually transmitted you know words like grid were going around and um which is gay related immune deficiency and but steve was one of the first people who said we think it's sexually related has something to do with the blood and and wearing condoms may help protect and we were in a you know monogamous committed relationship and so i wasn't neither of us i think we're two were too worried but there was a lot of stuff going on around us and then i my 30th birthday came along and we had a we had a party for my 30th birthday and i say that because there were i've tried to get a sense of this there were 40 people or so there and a good six uh by you know the late 80s 1990s were gone and and this was just this these were these were then going into the very very very tough years in the mid to late 80s when people like you know roger horowitz who was another early fallen hero to this disease and uh many many people that that we knew and that randy knew and so my friend bud was was became progressively sick a good friend stephen walter who was a friend of another friend who died so it was it was beginning those those tough years but it had not affected us personally other than how close we were to to to people who are getting sick and bud died he'd been with arthur anderson he had chosen a path to stay and he became he was on his partnership track and when he was sick and then when he died it was it was a difficult thing for for the firm to to deal with they wouldn't acknowledge that he had aids and it was all those hard things going on when it was so shameful and shameful for people not just to be gay but but you know to have this disease and extremely extremely difficult there was an old it was there are no jokes that are actually funny about about the aids epidemic but early on people used to say uh you know i'm i'm worried that i'm having to tell my mother i'm haitian because you know there was this instead of saying you're gay that that was haiti was an early incubator for that disease right and and as as life went on then uh on the on the career side things took a bit of a turn fred uh had an opportunity to sell the company to a software company in ohio which was the right thing to do and a good thing to do but then that kind of meant going back into the kind of on the corporate track because this was a larger software company based in ohio and i was ambivalent about staying along and staying on board but i decided it was a good thing for me to do it was continue to learn and i had the opportunity to move into a marketing related job which was a an area that i didn't have experience in before and then randy and i decided it was probably time to get tested there was a lot of ambivalence about being tested and to some degree there still is but early on there was huge debates about tested not being tested the privacy the efficacy of the test and it was a long time before a test was really developed that was determined deemed to be reliable enough to be worth taking and then once there was a test where would you get tested and the anatomy of the anonymity of the testing but all that seemed to sort itself out over a period of a couple of years while people were dying we decided let's let's get tested and we did in the unfortunate uh situation where one of us was positive and one was negative and in my mind that was the blessing that at least one of us was was negan i didn't care i don't think he did who it was but it was you know i'll get emotional i was negative and randy was positive and then everything everything changes overnight and from the from the day we went from the getting the test results to uh peter wolf's office in century city where he said your t cells are under a hundred at the time and so randy had been positive from the early 80s since before we met and through you know 83 through now this was 88 89 his immune system continued to be attacked and compromised so that he went right on i guess it was azt early on and but the life changed you know 180 degrees overnight and from a career standpoint then the idea was to keep a job was was not not to pursue entrepreneurial dreams and opportunities i would have i would have preferred to leave the the the the corporate environment that i was now in and i couldn't the software company that was in ohio then was merged with a larger software company called legend and that was a real compromise i just didn't didn't want to stay but randy uh was required you know we we he was getting sick and he first went in the hospital i think in 1991 and our friends were getting sick he was continuing to show the effects of the disease and it was a horrible dark dark time as you as you remember well i knew you then yeah yeah we had met right in the early or maybe the mid 80s yeah and uh i was was still in the software business but now in more of a corporate administrative marketing product management role traveling a tremendous amount and he was continuing to do his his work and remained on the municipal court because we were in those all those horrible years of the republican administrations uh with no opportunity to be to be elevated but be that as may it still gave him a platform for for being a very visible and effective gay activist and of course he was central to so much that happened at the center and i mean so much so that they've named the street in front of the center for him thanks to mike wu yeah it's not a small thing though you know i mean it's not somewhat somebody else who was involved with the center i mean we all respected and loved him so much i mean he was a major life force and both of you together it was always a wonderful thing to go to your house and there was always such such wonderful stuff to look at and great food and you know great fun but a a a terrible loss for all of us most of all of course for you david um and um you know i mean people people were around you and you had some support but it's never never easy we were you'd say it's funny to say fortunate this context but we were fortunate to have such a wide group of friends and and access is somebody didn't to to the medical care that was the best that was available at the time really through peter wolf in the century city hospital and it was a period of time when we all were visiting friends and hospital all the time and and randy was was one of those people and became progressively more ill and we went to both the marches in washington uh to to to to feel what was going on at the time and it was a it was a wonderful opportunity for for our community to come together uh and and march for lesbian and gay rights and the second march was very poignant he was in a wheelchair and so so many people were at the time but he was there and and uh participated in in all that was going on in his his his mother was was uh very supportive my friends and my family were uh very supportive of of what was going on but there was no there there was nothing anybody could do there was a sense that just kind of around the corner were drugs that would be a little bit better but it was it was seeming to be an intractable situation with you would address ks and then you'd have you know cmv or retinitis and there's something else and something else would come along and it was a very difficult difficult time and he um he died in 1993 june of 1993 he we worked up until almost he worked through march and uh he was receiving more and more acknowledgement and and honors and he was very public about coming out with his disease and he was open about trying to be visible because he felt like i've always felt and now with with my work on the internet that that that that raising the visibility of of of who you are and what you're going through helps other people and gives them a chance to to to connect and relate and see what's going on so he was very public about the the process of letting go the the struggle he had in dealing with his disease and uh worked through march and then was nominated for the and received the alumni of the year award at ucla very proud of that he was a ucla alumni and uh that that event was uh in june of 1993 and i'll i'll never forget because he early in in in that year he he was nominated and and and was was scheduled to be part of the program to receive the award so i drove him to ucla and he taped some of the voice over that they would have when he was accepting his speech and the awards show was was on june 12th by that time he was very very very sick and i accepted the ward on on his word on his behalf and i'll never forget walking on stage and hearing his voice in the background and went and accepted the award then i took the award back to the hospital uh and he was he was on on uh morphine at that point so he was not communicative and i i said you know this is for you you know very proud moment and then he died that night so i will remember i was at that uh at that ceremony yeah um it was a hard time it was a hard time but i mean you say there's a lot of cliches i mean the life well lived and his uh really sort of his example to all of us um i i have to say especially in the legal profession because i was a great great fan of his uh and a great admirer well i still am a fan of his i guess i would say um so you must have then gone into quite a transition uh in the last six years because and of course so has the industry i mean the internet was a glimmer in someone's eye i suppose but how did you transition from the work that you were doing really to you know to maintain what you were doing take care of randy make sure that you were both taken care of and i i know you had you know quite a period of really of grief and and recovery but you seem to make quite a transition well i he died in june of 93 and i did follow advice i was given which is don't make big changes right away i stayed in the house i stayed at my job and that was good that was to degree anything can be comforting that routine was comforting and i i i ended up selling the house uh the home we lived in that that you had been to many times in los feliz in early 1994 and then i left my job in may of 1994 with a software company and so about a year after he died i had sold the house and moved to a one-bedroom apartment and left my job and did what what people kind of do in that situation i took some time off i traveled i you know i took a train trip i went to europe i went to key west and just kind of just kind of traveled around and and and met people and now by this time i'm 38 which is how old he was when we met and with no specific plans in mind just thinking i need to take some time off and really just kind of do that and that's what i did how do you get from there to real cities this big internet thing well yeah this geocities i mean what was what was interesting is i was into it was the end of my kind of sabbatical six months later in november of 94 and i was in new york to speak at a memorial service for horace collins who was a just a terrific guy and this was again someone else who died of aids i was asked to speak at his memorial worked for hbo and on the airplane i had picked up some of these computer magazines and i started reading about this thing called the world wide web because i had known about the internet i can't believe it on an airplane magazine i had known about the internet because i was in the software business and the internet was kind of this thing that was the government and universities and if you were on compuserve you could kind of get to the internet but you had to be really geeky and to figure it out so i started reading about this thing called the world wide web which i'd never heard of and it was part of the internet and i came back after that and i said this is what i want to do this web thing you know i just because again it's just his passion for computers and modems and technical things and i made a list of you know learn about the world wide web you know buy a pc and i did you know i didn't have a job and i i just then just that was it i mean it's just someone turned on a switch and i don't think it takes a rocket science to figure out i was looking to throw myself into something i was really kind of still dealing with how sad and how difficult it was and i i'm the kind of person that just kind of dives right in and so this i said i'm going to i want to build a business i want to i want to be a part of this new thing called the internet so how did you imagine this business and how did how did geocities come about because it's such an interesting kind of a different notion than a lot of i mean people think that oh i have a web page or i'm going to have a business or e-commerce or all of these things but geocities is quite different because the notion is one of community exactly and seems very related to our notion of community in a funny way that's what that's really where it all came from the the sense is a is a gay man and seeing how empowering it was for people to come out that that had been my experience all the way back you know from my own personal experience and then at michigan working on the on the help line in the sense that you give people an opportunity to express themselves look at what comes from that and then my i always been fascinated about these computer bulletin boards and online services compuserve had been around for a while and prodigy and i just thought that was the neatest thing you could get onto this online service and meet other people and and these were you know very slow connections but there were online services like copy server and prodigy at the time and i thought that was really great and so when the internet and i was starting to read about the web i thought well well my vision of it is just one big connected online service that why not build a site that has a lot of those features that i think are neat from what was called bbs's bulletin board systems and online services and create a series of of communities i i used communities as the context or the organizing principle but it was all in in give people a chance to meet each other because that's what i thought was going to work i i just thought that online services are cool they've always been popular but they've had a very limited audience and if you could take those ideas and translate those to this new thing called the web that that you know that there there's a business there somehow you know and who knew from advertising and e-commerce and books and video but but i thought if you concentrate on building an audience building a site where people wanted to come the business would come after that when the business models were were farther along and i was fascinated by again from a technical thing i was fascinated by these early online cameras there was a few web cameras on the web early on an aquarium and there was a camera on a nobody remembers this but there was a camera pointed at a coffee pot in cambridge university and all it would do was point at this coffee pot and i used to drag people over and my apartment say look at this cool thing called the internet and this camera pointed at a coffee pot and people say you're nuts but it created a state of mind and that's what i was trying to explain to people was that the web gave you the ability to create a context and a state of mind that puts you in a different place and that's what i was trying to convey so i had a friend who had an office at the corner of hollywood and vine and i said would you mind if i put this camera in your window pointed down at the corner of hollywood and vine he said yeah but why i said well it's cool you know it's a fun thing to do and people on the internet will come and tune in and see what's going on in the corner now we all know nothing goes out in that corner but but again everybody's heard of it and it created the state of mind for entertainment in the movie so my idea was which we did do we put cameras in a few places and that would generate the traffic into these things called communities at geocities and so we you know we wired up the cameras and had to write all the computer programs and put the camera online the company started in late 94 put the camera online in 1995. we had six communities and the idea was to put cameras on wall street cameras on rodeo drive to draw in traffic to these to these neighborhoods because i was fascinated by the technology so we had this camera and that brought in traffic and that started to you know the whole ball rolling at that point but what we were missing sheila was was what's called now content what's called the editorial side the camera wasn't enough to really attract people repeatedly that it was gimmicky it was interesting but it wasn't enough that people would keep coming back and i was really just racking my brain people say this is a good idea these communities are a great idea that's it's it's what the internet needs but where's where are you going to get the content you know are you going to hire people to write articles are you going to build a whole editorial staff and i couldn't afford to do that and i also knew that the media companies the major media companies sony and viacom and and nbc and cbs they'd be coming into this medium time big time and they had all this editorial and i thought well again it was just really uh born out of necessity in a flash of light i said we're going to give away free homepages and we're going to rely on the users to create the content themselves and it was a wacky idea and and nobody believed it but that's what's great about your own business because you can just do whatever the hell you want a wacky idea right and so i came back and i had we had one employee at that point uh somebody that came in right early on with me and i said we're going to write these programs to create homepages we're going to give them away to everybody who wants a home page and they're going to be so excited about they're going to create all this cool stuff and everybody else would come in and look at it and he said yeah sure and but we did and that was then i knew right from the beginning when you gave people a chance to express themselves people would say i want to talk about stock tips or movie stars or sports scores and the the the the the empowering feeling that that gave to people i knew then that we really had something well you definitely really had something because yahoo really wanted to buy it um well after a fashion yeah well um i mean it's it's an enormous success story here you are kind of uh recovering in your grief and wandering around and you read a magazine on a plane and the next thing you know you're you know you're like a major internet mogul well there was a couple period of years when it didn't it didn't seem like it was going to be that big i had i had put my whole life savings i had had some money from selling our house and and some of randy's life insurance money and i put everything i had into this business and i was i just i i was i was i was flat out broke and it was through you know kind of the perseverance of raising venture capital money when i was when i was out of money that we started to really start move along hire people and the business took off from there well i i never like to rush through these interviews but of course all of a sudden you're left with only five minutes and i really want to get a sense now that sort of beyond your wildest dreams at least in the probably in the material world you have an opportunity um some resources because of your involvement with geocities and other uh other enterprises um and suddenly i'm certain that you're the man of the moment your phone never stops ringing every 501c3 now wants to talk to you what do you do as a gay activist with a conscience who understands community and now suddenly has some significant resources what do you do now again you turn to the community to help you give it all away and you turn to the people you and tori and dean hansel and gwen baba who have been committed activists for so long and you say help me find places to give this money away and through the david bonett foundation it sounds so grand but well it is through the help of of others in the community we're finding places to to really make a difference in organizations that i've supported for a long time like glad and the center to groups like liberty hill to political candidates like you and again my my whole strategy like geocities is is very collaborative in consensus building so to to turn to people who have like like myself a consciousness and a a passion and and have them help and you know how wonderful it is to be able to give away you know all it's a responsibility that that i'm glad to fulfill and and do with what i've been given it's an interesting circle isn't it it is i mean obviously a circle's not complete until all of it is is over but it's just such an interesting path i think that we walk uh from not knowing kind of who we are to getting a sense of who we are to to coming into a community the you know the good the bad and the ugly and the the wonderful and the difficult um and then sort of lightning strikes in a way as a result of really hard work um and yet it's all a threat of community i mean it's really that's been the theme of your life rightly right well i'm just so happy to be you know a part of it and being able to tell a story and and help other people through what i've done well david i'm very very happy you were on the show um the hour goes by really fast i hope it did for you too uh and for you as well um getting an hour with david bonett uh internet genius uh community activist um wonderful guy really happy you were here and for those of you who are out there riding on airplanes and reading those airplane magazines you never know what might happen fate could just come and get you so get used to it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you