"Our mission is to be there for people like I was five years ago, who are scared to death, but have some pretty basic questions," says Van Nostrand, who credits the support and information he received from other AOL members with helping him come out as a gay man.

You might expect to find this systems manager for a Boston hospital trumpeting the joys of America Online to anyone who will listen -- after all, the community there helped him change his life.

Instead, he's calling for a boycott of the service.

Van Nostrand's National Gay Cancel AOL Day campaign calls on gay and lesbian AOL members to dump their accounts en masse as of Jan. 1. The boycott is a response to news about AOL chairman Steve Case's philanthropy that has some gay and lesbian AOLers wondering if part of their monthly service fees are trickling down to fund the work of a notorious anti-gay ministry. How sick would the irony be if all that free-to-be-whoever-you-are chatting, e-mail and instant messaging were financially benefiting a bigoted, homophobic arm of the religious right? But it's not quite that simple.

The controversy began with the Oct. 16 announcement that over a year ago Steve Case and his wife, Jean Case, formerly a public relations officer for AOL, donated $8.35 million to her alma mater, the Westminster Academy, a religious school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It was seemingly the most innocuous of gifts, earmarked for a new high school building, student scholarships and the creation of a technology center. But Westminster Academy is affiliated with the fundamentalist Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, as the "statement of faith" on the school's Web site attests: "Westminster Academy is a parochial school, an agency of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Primarily, it is committed to the education of the children of this Church and strives to implement a curriculum that reflects the variety of needs of these children, one that is based upon and is faithful to the Holy Scriptures as interpreted in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms."

Coral Ridge Ministries is best known among gays and lesbians as the proponent of an "ex-gay" agenda. The premise of the ex-gay mission is that homosexuals can be converted to heterosexuality or -- if that doesn't work out -- celibacy. Such "ex-gay" conversion therapy is not just one more queer political issue; it's a heated and emotional subject that cuts to the heart of gay and lesbian identity; it's a threat to people's very sense of who they are. And Coral Ridge Ministries is one of the most visible promoters of such queer "conversion": The Rev. D. James Kennedy spreads the word regularly on the bully pulpit of the church's nationally syndicated radio and TV program "Coral Ridge Hour." Among the church's tactics: launching a $500,000 national newspaper campaign promoting ex-gay ministries, and renting airplanes to fly anti-gay banners over Disneyland on "Gay Days."

Steve Case, you've got hate mail. The backlash against the Cases' gift to the school has been swift on such Web sites as Gay.com, which first broke the story. The gay and lesbian rights group Human Rights Campaign has also denounced the gift. Executive director Elizabeth Birch chastised the Cases in a letter: "We find it unfathomable how your family could reward a school inexorably linked to teachings that say gay and lesbian Americans are not worthy of dignity, respect and full citizenship."

But the Cases aren't backing down.

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