Anti-gay activists and organizations are using the Internet in sophisticated ways to reach a broader audience with anti-gay rhetoric, according to an article published in an online sexuality research journal.

“Anti-Gay Politics Online: A Study of Sexuality and Stigma on National Websites” by Janice M. Irvine, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, is included in the current edition of Sexuality & Research: Journal of National Sexuality Resource Center, an online academic journal. The publication also includes a handful of other gay-related research.

The article chronicles Irvine’s research into the Web sites of six anti-gay organizations: Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, The Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, The American Family Association and Americans for Truth.

“I have been doing research on the right wing for about 12 years, in particular how they look at issues such as sex education, pornography, gay issues — and how they used those issues to build their movements,” she said.

In the 1960s, when socially conservative anti-gay groups were starting to take an active role in public policy, the groups mailed information to members and then these papers would be copied and passed around, Irvine explained. Now, the Internet allows anti-gay rhetoric is spread more rapidly and to broader audiences, she said.

The most ambitious anti-gay campaign of any of the Web sites she sampled was the “Urban Legend Series” of the Traditional Values Coalition, Irvine said.

The coalition’s site titillated viewers with promises of seedy sexual revelations, including reports titled, “Exposed: Homosexual Child Molesters” and “Exposed: the ‘Born Gay’ Legend.”

“I think we’re at the early moment of these organizations using Web sites, and the scary thing is that it means they will widen the access to just hate literature,” she said. “They have the potential to really widen their audience.”

A $6,000 grant from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation funded Irvine’s research.

“[I]n the current political and cultural climate, that work seems more important than ever,” Glennda Testone, GLAAD’s associate director of communications, said in a statement.

The journal also published “Left to Their Own Devices: Disciplining Youth Discourse on Sexuality Education Electronic Bulletin Boards,” a study by Laina Y. Bay-Cheng, an assistant professor of social work at the University at Buffalo. Her work examined how teens talk about sex without adult supervision on electronic bulletin boards sponsored by Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Coalition for Positive Sexuality.

“Given the gag orders that school districts and school sex educators have to operate under, I think the Internet is especially important for sexuality education,” Bay-Cheng, a lesbian, said in an e-mail interview.

“It offers youth opportunities not just to learn about how to use a condom but also how to think differently about all of the norms and stereotypes that hem them — and us — in: stereotypes about gender, ‘teenagers,’ sexual orientation or identity, etc.,” she said.

In the two sites Bay-Cheng studied, there was little mention of gay sexualities, issues, relationships or behaviors, she said.

“Although I find this very disappointing, it doesn’t surprise me,” Bay-Cheng said. “A few years ago, I did a study of sexuality education Web sites and found that even though anyone can say pretty much anything online, and there are no school boards or state legislators censoring content, no one was saying very much about sexual orientation.

“Even those sites that did raise LGBT issues did so in separate, specially-designated spaces,” she added. “I think that this inherently codes queer as ‘other’ and ultimately perpetuates heterosexism and homophobia.”

The journal also includes “Gay Men Don’t Get ‘Messy’: Injecting Drug Use and Gay Community,” a report on gay men who inject drugs in Melbourne, Australia. The complexities of gay social circles “provide both resources and dangers for gay men that seem both to increase the tendency for drug using and to provide a supportive, safe space for such use,” according to the report.

But the reticence of gay men to openly discuss drug use, particularly drug injection, is a detriment to their health, according to the report.