When it's 5:30 a.m. and she can hear the owner of a gay bar down the street dumping empty beer cans into the trash, even the highly nocturnal Betty Sullivan knows she's been up too long. After all, she's 53 now, several incarnations removed from the Ole Miss sorority girl, divorced single mother, Tennessee schoolteacher and high-powered East Coast consultant that she used to be.

It's time to turn off the computer and go to bed.

When Sullivan wakes up at the "crack of noon," as she likes to do, she can return to Betty's List again. And to her Web site. And to her blog. And to the events she stages. And to the cable TV show she appears on every week.

In the world of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning San Francisco, Sullivan is ubiquitous.

Betty's List -- an online conduit for getting the word out about happenings in the Bay Area's gay universe -- is still her main focus. Anyone can subscribe to the e-mail and information service for free by going to her Web site. There are currently about 8,000 subscribers, but Sullivan figures the list is seen by 10,000 to 15,000 people because many households have more than one member.

"I'm dealing with the question of, 'Who is Betty?' " she said in her Castro district apartment on a recent afternoon. "Betty is a commodity. Betty is a community person. Tending to Betty is pretty much my job now."

She started the list 10 years ago but refrained from calling it that until 2003 out of deference to Craig Newmark, the Craig's List founder with whom she'll appear tonight at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club to talk about Web-based lists.

"Betty is the e-conscience of our community," said San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty. "She's kind of that reminder -- I really ought to be doing this or supporting that -- and she has a great reach. People really respond to the list. People trust her."

Recently, Betty's List has included announcements about this week's gay pride events leading up to Sunday's big parade, an art sale to help people with AIDS, a campaign for gay senior housing, a forum on the rights of gay immigrants, and an exhibition at the Main Library's Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center. Sullivan calls what she does "infoedutainment."

The list links to Sullivan's Web site, www.bettyslist.com, which received 505,276 hits in May and 18,051 different visitors.

"I love the way she makes our community a lot smaller and more connected," Dufty said. "She makes it not seem like a big impersonal town."

However, that's exactly how San Francisco seemed to Sullivan when she arrived in 1995, six months after relocating from Washington, D.C., to Santa Cruz for a new relationship that didn't last long. Heartbroken, Sullivan moved to the city.

"Here I was in the mecca of the gay world and I didn't know anybody," Sullivan recalled.

That quickly changed. Sullivan had worked in the nation's capital for eight years as director of education at the Newspaper Association of America. She had taught at Columbia University in New York, where she'd received a doctorate in linguistics. She'd traveled extensively -- Brazil, South Africa, Sweden, Japan -- showing how newspapers could be used as a classroom teaching tool. Her resume was hefty. It all added up to an enormous list of contacts and "data coming out the wazoo."

And so, in late 1996, it made perfect sense to send out an e-mail to dozens of women about an upcoming lesbian dance. That's how Betty's List, formerly the "Sullivan Communications Big List," got its start. In the late 1990s, she started charging for most announcements -- she now sends about 400 a year -- but she's available for free to her supervisor, Dufty, and her assemblyman, Mark Leno.

Dufty said Sullivan was instrumental in informing people about a gay youth parade in Los Altos earlier this month, the renaming of a city block for gay pioneer Jose Sarria in May and a memorial for gay San Francisco police Officer Jon Cook in 2002.

"If Betty doesn't know what's going on, it's probably not," said publicist David Perry. "She's got all the charm of her Southern roots and all the efficiency of broadband."

List subscriber Grace Floyd of Martinez said she knew no one in the gay community until three years ago, when she attended an event that Sullivan was hosting. "I now share a much larger circle of friends and interests," said Floyd, an information technology operations manager.

The "private Betty" can usually be found in workout clothes in her bedroom office, with its two computers, three televisions and a pair of cats that come and go -- yellow tabby Louie the Great and calico Miss Frances.

The use of media has always been important to Sullivan, who grew up in Vicksburg, Miss., the daughter of a Southern Baptist deacon. Watching the CBS network news every night helped her realize there was a world beyond the Deep South.

"You were either this or that in Mississippi," Sullivan said. "You were black or white, right or wrong, queer or straight. And queer was really bad so you had to be straight. Media showed me there were other ways to be than this or that."

From the first grade on, Sullivan knew she was different, but she got involved with a boy at age 15, married him seven years later and stayed with him until she was 26, when she had a baby and then her first lesbian affair.

In that same quest to fit in, Sullivan also had joined a sorority at the University of Mississippi, but she eventually dropped out.

"Quitting a sorority at Ole Miss is heresy," she said. "You just don't do that."

Motherhood, much like sorority life, did not come naturally. And her beloved daughter, Liz, always addressed her as Betty.

"It's because that's my name," Sullivan said. "Mom is not my name. And if she has a child, I want to be called Grand-Betty."

She escaped the South but it's still in her, much like the remnants of her twang. There's a porcelain magnolia in the china cabinet, a souvenir plate from the Delta Queen on the living room wall and a basketball trophy from Culkin Junior High in her bedroom -- a womblike place with a mix of French Provincial, Victorian and California Arts and Crafts decor.

"It reflects my butch/femme sides," she said. "I'm willing to go either way."

Several evenings a week, the transformed "public Betty" emerges, spiffed up for "obligatory partying" at events around town.

"I've developed a close relationship with my hairdresser," said Sullivan, who sometimes achieves a "full-tilt diva" look. "I want to keep a certain level of professional image for the Betty character."

Late at night, that image dissolves in beads of sweat when she hits Gold's Gym, half a block from her house, with her iPod playing the Dixie Chicks. And then it's back to her computer.

"People tell me, 'You don't have a life,' " Sullivan said. "But I'm sorry -- I have a great life."