DataLounge was launched by Mediapolis, Inc. in May 1995. During the site's early years, content included gay-oriented news, gossip, links to other sites/services, and editorial content, making it a gay web portal. Content contributors included New York drag queen Trudy and journalist Chris Barillas. DataLounge affiliated itself via the DataLounge Network with other gay-and-lesbian-oriented websites, including the dating site Edwina.com, the web guide Homorama, and Gay Health. A weekly email subscription was also offered to users. By 2000–01, the site had evolved to encompass several discussion forums covering topics such as lesbian, religious, and sexual issues, along with a "Flames and Freaks" forum to house threads that site administrators determined to be disruptive to general forum discussion. Special-interest subforums for fans of "The Lord of the Rings" and U.S. daytime drama aficionados were created as well but subsequently closed. The most popular forum was the Gossip Forum, which dwarfed all others in both traffic and number of discussion threads created.