As bandie pointed out, you‘re explicitly making a http request. Duh.

nc is for generic connections and handles it well.

i know, but the OP's goal was to host/access http(s) services with names and avoid port numbers, and gopher service name was chosen by me as an example. my point was that /etc/services cannot be used for the OP's need.

if you host an http(s) service on port 11111 you can reach it with url http://127.1:11111, but url http://127.1:vce/ would not work in most software.

  $ grep 11111 /etc/services
  vce  11111/udp   # Viral Computing Environment (VCE)
  vce  11111/tcp   # Viral Computing Environment (VCE)