Brace yourself – I’ve been told we’re supposed to take the opportunity this year to do a little bragging. I apologize in advance, I usually dislike people that brag too much, but considering it’s the magazine’s anniversary this month I hope you can forgive me. I promise you, we haven’t let any of this go to our heads.

Shameless Bragging…well sort of…

As you probably saw from our cover, GayCalgary.com Magazine has reached it’s our second year of operation, or 25th issue anniversary if you prefer. This is certainly a big milestone for us, especially when a few other publications expressed doubt that we could make it this far. Sadly enough, it turns out instead that they have been the ones to fold or fall to the wayside, while we have continued to grow.

Steve and I believe that what makes us successful is that we work so closely with the people in the community. We keep our ear to the ground on what’s going on each month, and gear our article topics to be helpful and relevant. Most importantly, rather than trying to change the community to fit us, we have changed ourselves to fit you. We have used your input to shape us into what we are today, and this has definitely branded us as your magazine as much as it is our own. You are the stars of the show; we’re just behind the cameras.

At the same time we have also done a lot to give back to non-profit groups and charities, as well as supporting our advertisers in any way we can. Ultimately our advertisers make it possible for us to exist, and in turn, a lot of our profits go back into the community. We’d love to give it all back, but our business needs money to keep running, and more importantly we need to eat and have a roof over our heads. The magazine certainly isn’t going to make us millionaires, but to us money is only a fringe benefit. We don’t harp on the word ‘community’ for nothing – it is something we truly believe in, and something that we try to promote in each and every issue. It’s a term that we see catching on like wildfire.

Though Steve and I do an awful lot of leg-work ourselves, we cannot forget the outstanding effort our writers and contributors have put in. They are our backbone, and without them a lot of stories would never have made it to paper.

Despite all that we’ve done, we have still gone through our share of adversity, and been placed in the middle of heated politics and ugly situations. It’s very difficult to know what to do when these things arise, but we have stubbornly held to our morals, emphasized fairness, and tried to do the right thing even if it makes us unpopular with those that claim to hold ‘power’ in the Gay Community. Though this can make the magazine feel like a thankless task at times, in the end we just need to look to the community support we have built in such a short time, and we know that we must have done some right.

On the Internet

In recent months we have seen our online readership grow too – in fact last month our figures surpassed and nearly doubled the amount of copies we print! Predictably, the amount of website traffic we get has grown too. We could rattle off our figures for hits and all that, but we like to rely on Alexa (www.alexa.com) – a 3rd-party website that monitors all traffic on the website and assigns rankings based on website popularity. Popularity is not just about hits - in fact, hits are a very dubious measure to use since every page viewed and every image loaded counts as one hit. So for example, someone could accidentally visit your site and leave without even looking at it, but they could still rack up 50 or more hits depending on the number of images on the page. The better measure is number of visitors or unique visitors, which gives a more accurate indication of how many individual people visit your website, and visit duration which gives an indication of how long they stayed. Alexa takes these factors into account and sequentially ranks every website on the internet. For instance, www.yahoo.com is the most popular website and is ranked #1, www.microsoft.com is ranked #2, etc. There are over 5 million websites on the internet today, and we are currently in the top 90,000. Naturally there are way more popular gay websites out there than us, but try comparing us to other gay sites, local and national, and you may be surprised on who we surpass!

Healthy Homo

This edition we are sponsoring an anti-drug campaign, “Life or Meth.” Studies have shown that there is an elevated percentage of the gay population that use Crystal Meth compared to the straight population. The ads are very provocative, and we hope effective in discouraging people from using this very destructive drug.

Bar Banter

The International Gay Bowling Organization (IGBO) is holding their Casino Night on Friday November 11th, and their Black & White Anniversary Dance on the 12th. Check out their ad on page 67 for more details.

It’s really strange that so many gay businesses celebrate their anniversaries at this time of year. Backlot had theirs in October, and aside from us this month, so does Twisted Element (Nov. 12th) and Money-Pennies (Nov 26th). Detour’s anniversary used to be around this time too (Nov 21st), but now that they’re Pulse, that date is still up in the air. So here’s our bulk-congratulations to everyone that’s celebrating entering a new year in their gay business – it’s something to be proud of!

This month we decided to do something a little bit special, even for those bars that don’t celebrate their anniversary this time of year. We took the opportunity to sit down with the owners of each and every “gay bar” in the city and conduct a small survey and interview. We found that this was an excellent opportunity to touch base with all of them, to discuss what has changed for them, and in the community in general over the past 2 years. Now, we know there are some readers thinking “Why just the bars? They are not the only businesses in the community!” In our defense, we decided to focus on just the bars for two reasons:

1) There are far too many gay businesses in the community to cover all of them, and to exclude some would be unfair. The bars are a reasonably sized subgroup where we can include everyone.

2) The bars are the most prominently visible gay businesses in Calgary – they are the “front door” to the community, and are typically the first to welcome newcomers, and see new trends.

You can read what the owners of your favorite bars had to say by flipping to the following pages:

Pg 43 – The Backlot
Pg 44 – The Calgary Eagle
Pg 45 – Metro the Club and The Rekroom
Pg 46 – Money-Pennies Eatery and Bar
Pg 47 – Pulse, Arena, and the Loading Dock
Pg 48 – The Texas Lounge
Pg 49 – The Twisted Element

Help Wanted

We’ve grown so much over the past couple of months that we’re looking to expand a little on the staff side of things to accommodate these changes. We’re looking for experienced writers/journalists and sales staff, as well as a reliable driver to handle supplementary magazine deliveries. Naturally these are all local part-time positions that can be done over the course of the month.

For more information, call (403) 543-6970, E-mail magazine@gaycalgary.com, or Fax résumés to (403) 703-0685.

Questions or comments about the magazine or other things happening in the community, please E-mail us at publisher@gaycalgary.com