The word Gay is Dead!

We have some exciting news - Gay West Web Site will completely change on Oct 1




Toronto Ontario, Monday September 1, 2008 ---- You may have noticed The Inside Story dropped several entertainment pages last Friday; Festivals, Theatre, Film, Diversions and Books. We will be incorporating the best of these and less bar listing into "Happening's Today' pages. The new site will be entirely in XHTML and hand-coded, Your editor is learning new tricks of the trade and abandoning Dreamweaver MX.
Hand coded because it is FAR MORE ACCURATE than any WYSIWYG and makes it much easier to maintain beautiful, optimized code.
Our California Web Designer Ivar Johnson has been slowly converting over 80 of the old PHP pages, one day at a time for the past month and half.
Our domain name will change forever, formerly gaywest.905host.net Because it will better reflect who we are, who we serve and our Mission Statement.
Our new name is bound to be controversial as funding corporations and foundations are just getting use to to the word Gay.

Our new name will be Queer West. 
 
Queer is an umbrella term designed to be inclusive of a broad range of self-identifications. Within the gay and lesbian community, there are those who identify as bisexual, transsexual or transgender as well as those who do not want a label at all. Rather than use the more cumbersome acronym 'LGBTQ' (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-and queer), we find the word 'queer' to be a more inclusive term for sexual minorities and simpler. The term 'queer' is also used by a number of organizations for this reason and is well-recognized.
Another reason is our location in the west end of the City of Toronto. We are not like Toronto's traditional 'gay' village with all the sort of conservative and essentialist ideas that go with that. Our Queer West Village is about queer practises, and being, not about identity and some fixed notion. We are open, younger, non-traditional, about possibilities and opportunities for connection and collusion, not something to to be confused with Church Street.

If you would like a sneak peek, as work progresses "everyday" visit QueerWest.org