Yuku free message boards

Well, it's a long story, but if you care to know…

On May 18, 2004 I was at the Showtime website gathering the four photo stills they had to offer from the most recently played episode of their series Q u eer As Folk, when I noticed the 'community' link on the page and thought, let me try this, what the heck. I'd never been to a message board before.

With fondness of the English language and never at a loss at expressing my opinion, I gathered innumerable friends since and too few enemies to even recall. After a month, one of those new friends, Shannon, suggested we start a dedicated thread of our own, one we would eventually renew every time Showtime created new forums in their QAF message board, and stick together. That was the beginning of "Keeping A Light In The Window for Dr. David" (a departed character of the show, even then). In a month, we were the second busiest thread after the "HORS House," which had been established for years, and we never fell from that position.

Real world concerns forced partner Shannon into eclipse by October, but on her heels was Mike, an aggressively participatory poster, who'd eventually become my next partner and it was Mike's suggestion that we start our own board at ezboard. By December 6 of the year we had. The Showtime board was rather bare-bones, a monotonous red, white & black tone, a mere dozen emoticons from hunger, had identity-less moderators who'd summarily remove strings of posts with no appeal, a lousy 9 point Arial font, and disallowed any embedding of pictures. Still, it took some coaxing on Mike's part to convince me it's better to captain your own ship, with considerably more control, including a 'door' strangers had to 'knock' on. (Mike's far-sighted outlook proved prescient when Showtime rather abruptly dissolved their own still-busy QAF message board in January 2006.)

It worked out well. I kept the gang together at the Showtime board while Mike leisurely designed and opened our new ezboard, "Emmett's Café," named after another show character. Since QAF wouldn't finish up its final season until August 7, 2005, Mike could take his time and not feel rushed, and we could both cherry-pick the best potential members for the new place back on our Window thread at (the public) Showtime board. Notwithstanding the TV series content, our posters were and are gay & straight, black & white, male and female, with single, married and divorced women 25 to 60 predominating.

The show is long gone; we hardly discuss it anymore, unless the doings of some former cast member makes the news. Series star Gale Harold went on to a Broadway run of "Suddenly Last Summer," a short-lived Fox series Vanished, guest starred on Gray's Anatomy last fall, and will be on Desperate Housewives this May 18th. Sharon Gless got another TV series on USA and Chris Potter, the Dr. David character (and my avatar), had two successful TV-movies earlier this year on Lifetime and Hallmark. We have long since evolved to a group of friends -some there since the first week- who simply want to check in with one another every day, and we enjoy doing it.

Of our 78 registered members, we're down to a core of now diehard (and, blessedly gabby) friends of about 15, but we all post nearly every day, the board averaging about 130 new posts per day.