Rainbow flags. Gay cruises. Logo TV. Domain names? The LGBT community has carved out plenty of homes for itself, but it has yet to officially claim stake in the virtual one. While the Internet has played a central role in the community for many years by providing a space to share information, meet other community members, and grow LGBT-owned businesses, creating a “.LGBT” domain had never been conceived of until recently.

That’s right—in just a few days, favorite LGBT websites could be Mazzoni.LGBT, AtticYouth.LGBT or PGN.LGBT, and you have Afilias, one of the most influential Internet companies that you’ve never heard of, to thank for that. The Ireland-based company with U.S. operations headquartered right here in Horsham, Pa., is the world’s second largest domain registry, with more than 20 million names under management. Afilias powers a wide variety of top-level domains, and will soon support hundreds of new TLDs, including TLDs for cities, brands, communities and generic terms. The .LGBT domain is the first and only Web address dedicated to the entire LGBT community and Afilias’ mission is to provide a positive and protected space where community members as well as businesses, organizations and other entities that wish to reach our community can now interact with one another. While it isn’t completely inclusive, “LGBT” is the most accepted and widely used term for our large and diverse community and according to Community Marketing Inc.’s eighth annual LGBT Community Survey, “LGBT” is also the term most preferred by our community members.

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