URNotAlone.com came online during 07/96 according to the earliest available homepage, first captured by WayBack on 12/23/96. While URNotAlone's subject matter is trans, it differs from many of the other sites in that the intended userbase was primarily men looking to meet trans women, and not the trans women themselves. The site's scope from the original capture was small:
"Here you'll find 4 main topics: Vicky, Drag Bars, 'Girls' & Green Iguanas. Now's the time to turn back if none of them interest you or if any of the topics offend you in any way."
Unfortunately, the only page saved from 1996 was the home page, and no other captures exist until 1999. Vicky's page, first recorded 10/12/99, hosted a wealth of photos of her, with only a small amount of information communicated in captions. However, a page live on the current site written by original site admin and Vicky's husband, Jon, titled "URNotAlone.com - a Brief History," posted 06/07/12, tells us a bit more about the site co-founder:
"Vicky was born and raised in Puerto Rico and has lived in the Boston area since early in 1980. [...] Vicky has been a Performer, hosting Latino Nights in some of the clubs in the Boston area, although she gave performing up a couple of years ago. She was a model for our other site, ModelTS (now defunct) [...] Vicky is very extroverted, a social butterfly and a real people person. [...] As for Vicky's sexual preference... she likes men and also likes to occasionally Transform a good looking guy into a pretty girl for both of us to enjoy:-)"
On the same page, Jon shares more about the site's history, including his motivations for building it:
"URNotAlone was born back in 1996. I wanted to learn how to build a website and was trying to think of a topic that would hold my interest [...]. I was traveling quite a bit around this time and one of my friends suggested I start a listing of Drag Bars since I seemed to know where to find them in every city I traveled to:-) It clicked and URNotAlone was born as a site to come to if you wanted to find out where the Drag Bars were in the cities you were traveling to. [...] Within a month, I decided URNotAlone needed to be more than just a site that listed Drag Bars. [...]
"I grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston and didn't really know where to find TGirls until well after I was already married. When I was younger I did encounter Trans Porno in porno shops and knew... right away... that it was something that I was strongly attracted to... very strongly attracted to... and started buying all the Trans Porno that I could find. [...] Since I liked Girls also, I got married and thought I'd be happy and that porno would be enough to satisfy me. It wasn't... eventually I heard about [Boston drag bar] Jacques Cabaret (a long story) and got up the nerve to go there to meet real TGirls... in the flesh. That was the beginning of the end of my marriage. Once I was with my 1st TGirl I knew that it was what I truly wanted and that I would never be happy unless I could have a relationship, a real relationship, with a TGirl. [...]
"[...] the Profiles section got started because I thought it would be a great way to help other Admirer's like myself avoid making some of the mistakes I did and to try and provide a place for TGirls and their Admirer's to meet one another. [...] I found myself surfing the web more and more often, looking for pages of TGirls that were starting to pop up all over the web. [...] Once the Profiles started, it took about a year for the site to really get going."
Around the beginning of 2000, the URNotAlone was becoming a lot to keep up with for Jon, and he posted on the homepage that the site would cease receiving updates and eventually go away.
"Around this time, Dan, praise Dan:-), sent me an eMail offering his assistance. Some of the TGirls he knew from the clubs in Ohio knew he did web development for a living and asked if he could help me out and keep me from shutting down URNotAlone. [...] Thanks to Dan, we added an Articles section, a Places section, Galleries, a Chat Room, broke down the Profiles into categories and much more!
"[...] The main reason we went ahead with the merge [of ModelTS and URNotAlone] is in the hopes that the money generated from the ModelTS Adult Content Section of URNotAlone will allow us to add even more Free Features to the Public Area of URNotAlone... things like Calendars for Profile Owners to let people know where they'll be, Performer's to let people know where to see them, Escorts to let people know what City's they'll be visiting, etc. We've also added a method to list profiles by proximity to a certain area so people can get a list of people in their area by means other than State or Country. We'd like to add a better Message Board (Forums) and lots of other features. Dan left his job to devote full time to URNotAlone... something I'd like to be able to do at some point and we even hope to organize."
During 02/15, Jon sold URNotAlone to a woman named Pamela, who became the site admin until 11/17/21 at which point it was sold to Lori after "a database corruption which rendered the site unusable by the members." Data was restored and URNA was brought back online, although over the years, the site had atrophied a great deal. Like TGG, UNRA no longer hosted their own chat and instead outsourced and merged their chat into a third-party called adulttranschat.com.
| Page | Description | Archive Date | Capture Date | Archive.org Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conflicted | An essay by a self-described "trannychaser" in which he gives his thoughts on the nature of his attraction, the treatment of "tgirls" by gay society, and his experiences navigating the world of chaserdom | 03/29/23 | 10/22/02 | x |
| What is it with Straight TS Admirers? | A short stream of conscious from a gay crossdresser | 03/29/23 | 02/21/03 | x |
| I Read the Small Article by Christiboy | A short reply to "What is it with Straight TS Admirers?" | 03/29/23 | 02/08/03 | x |
| Some Responses to My Response | A follow-up article from the author of "I Read the Small Article by Christiboy" | 03/29/23 | 01/08/03 | x |
| In Support of Karen<redacted>uk | A brief response to "I Read the Small Article by Christiboy" and its responses | 03/29/23 | 01/08/03 | x |
| Sharing the Closet: Coming Out to Your Wife or Girlfriend | An article discussing disclosing one's gender activities with a female significant other | 03/29/23 | 01/08/03 | x |
Notes:
If I had all the knowledge I have now when I started this project, this page would probably not be built into well into the future, if at all. It was my only lead early on besides TGG. I've spent some time on the succesor to TGG's chatroom, where a lot of middle aged and older trans women hang out, and once I got to know some of them, I asked if they remembered any sites that they used during the 90's and early 00's. TGG and URNotAlone were really the only answers I received, so I started with what I was given. To be frank, URNotAlone is a site for chasers, and is more a catalogue of trans women than any sort of trans resource or community. I'm putting a good deal of effort into keeping the site writeups as neutral and fact-based as possible, with as little assertions of my own as possible, which led this page to be much heavier in quotes than I would generally prefer. I feel that Jon's writing on the "A Brief History" page convey the idea that this is a chaser site very clearly, so I believe that the best route is to let his words speak for themselves. 04/04/23