November 2005 Issue 25 FREE of charge OOurur 2 YYearear Anniversary!Anniversary! NNeedeed HHelp?elp? MMap,ap, PPlaceslaces aandnd EEventsvents ooff CCalgary’salgary’s GGayay CCommunityommunity iinn eeveryvery iissuessue CCalgary’salgary’s resourceresource forfor Business,Business, Tourism,Tourism, EEvents,vents, BBarsars aandnd EEntertainmentntertainment fforor tthehe GGay,ay, HHoo HHoo HHoo LLesbian,esbian, BBii aandnd GGayay FFriendlyriendly CCommunity.ommunity. TThehe MMagicagic ooff CChristmashristmas aallll YYearear RRoundound http://www.gaycalgary.com 2 gaycalgary.com magazine 51 Established originally in January 1992 as Men For Men BBS by MFM Communications. Named changed to GayCalgary.com in 1998. Stand alone company as of January 2004. First Issue of GayCalgary.com Magazine, November 12 2003. Publisher Steve Polyak & Rob Diaz-Marino, [email protected] Table of Contents Editor Rob Diaz Marino, [email protected] 5 2 years, 2 queers Original Graphic Design Deviant Designs Letter from the Publisher Advertising Steve Polyak [email protected] 8 “Give a Fuck” Contributors Steve Polyak, Rob Diaz-Marino, Nina Tron, Combating Condom Fatigue Stephen Lock, M. Zelda, Jason Clevett, Jerome Voltero, Darryl A. Aarbo, Alykhan Velji, 16 Jacob Wallace, Kevin Alderson, and the Gay 12 Ho Ho Ho and Lesbian Community of Calgary The Magic of Christmas all Year Round Photographer Steve Polyak and Rob Diaz-Marino 15 Just Ask Nina! Videographer The Dish who dishes advice Steve Polyak and Rob Diaz-Marino 16 Map & Event Listings Please forward all inquiries to: GayCalgary.com Magazine Mapping Calgary’s core Suite 100, 215 14th Avenue S.W. Calgary, Alberta T2R 0M2 23 Gay Legalese Phone (403) 543-6960 or toll free (888) Windshield SPAM 543-6960 25 Adult Film Reviews Fax (403) 703-0685 33 E-mail [email protected] 27 Q Scopes Print Run Monthly, 12 times a year “Practice grace, Aries!” Masthead continued on page 4 28 Farewell To A Brother Warrior 31 A Couple of Guys 31 Bitter Girl 33 Fundraising Photos 39 Letters to the Publisher continued on page 4 gaycalgary.com magazine 3 continued from page 3 41 Q Puzzle “E-volution” Continued from page 3 42 The Backlot Copies Printed Monthly, up to 10,000 61 copies. 43 The Calgary Eagle Distribution points 150 points in Calgary, largest distribution points for any Gay publication in Calgary. Also distributed coast 44 Metro the Club and the Rekroom to coast across Canada in select locations in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, 45 Money-Pennies Eatery and Bar Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and other places across Canada. Please call us if you 46 Pulse, Arena and the Loading Dock would like to be a distribution point. Distributed by DLRJ Distributions, Canada 47 Texas Lounge Post and by GayCalgary.com Deadline for Ad Bookings 25th of the month 48 A Letter of Thanks (unless otherwise stated) Deadline for Ad copy 28th of the month 58 49 The Twisted Element (unless otherwise stated) 50 Press Releases Legal Council Courtney Sebree Aarbo, Barristers and Solicitors 51 Moving Along Printers North Hill News This Issue Cover Model Laura Vanity Would 53 Open Versus Closed (Monogamous) and Tara Would Reshawn, photographed at Twisted Element by Steve Polyak. Special Relationships thanks to Nina Tron and RJ Fafard for helping Are Both Viable? out with the shoot. The opinions expressed in this magazine are 58 Kendall not necessarily those of GayCalgary.com or the 61 Queer Eye - for the Calgary guy (or gal) contributors of the magazine. Events that happened around Calgary People photographed or interviewed, writers, advertisers, contributors and anyone else involved with this publication are not 68 Classifieds Ads necessarily gay, lesbian, bi, bi-curious or trans gendered. They can be straight people that are gay friendly. No part of the publication may be reprinted December 2005 without the expressed permission of the Press Deadlines editor-in-chief. Copyright 2005 AAdd SSpacepace BBookingooking - WWednesdayednesday NNovemberovember 223rd3rd 22005005 AAdd SSubmissionubmission - FFridayriday NovemberNovember 225th5th 22005005 4 gaycalgary.com magazine 2 years, 2 queers Letter from the Publisher back, but our business needs money to keep running, and By Rob Diaz-Marino more importantly we need to eat and have a roof over our heads. The magazine certainly isn’t going to make us mil- Brace yourself – I’ve been told we’re supposed lionaires, but to us money is only a fringe benefi t. We don’t to take the opportunity this year to do a little harp on the word ‘community’ for nothing – it is something bragging. I apologize in advance, I usually 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 dislike people that brag too much, but con- like wildfi re. sidering it’s the magazine’s anniversary this Though Steve and I do an awful lot of leg-work ourselves, month I hope you can forgive me. I promise we cannot forget the outstanding effort our writers and con- you, we haven’t let any of this go to our heads. tributors have put in. They are our backbone, and without them a lot of stories would never have made it to paper. Shameless Bragging…well sort of… Despite all that we’ve done, we have still gone through As you probably saw from our cover, GayCalgary.com our share of adversity, and been placed in the middle of Magazine has reached it’s our second year of operation, heated politics and ugly situations. It’s very diffi cult to or 25th issue anniversary if you prefer. This is certainly a know what to do when these things arise, but we have stub- big milestone for us, especially when a few other publica- bornly held to our morals, emphasized fairness, and tried to tions expressed doubt that we could make it this far. Sadly do the right thing even if it makes us unpopular with those enough, it turns out instead that they have been the ones to that claim to hold ‘power’ in the Gay Community. Though fold or fall to the wayside, while we have continued to grow. this can make the magazine feel like a thankless task at Steve and I believe that what makes us successful is that times, in the end we just need to look to the community we work so closely with the people in the community. We support we have built in such a short time, and we know keep our ear to the ground on what’s going on each month, that we must have done some right. and gear our article topics to be helpful and relevant. Most On the Internet importantly, rather than trying to change the community to fi t us, we have changed ourselves to fi t you. We have used In recent months we have seen our online readership your input to shape us into what we are today, and this has grow too – in fact last month our fi gures surpassed and defi nitely branded us as your magazine as much as it is our nearly doubled the amount of copies we print! Predictably, own. You are the stars of the show; we’re just behind the the amount of website traffi c we get has grown too. We cameras. could rattle off our fi gures for hits and all that, but we like to rely on Alexa (www.alexa.com) – a 3rd-party website that At the same time we have also done a lot to give back to monitors all traffi c on the website and assigns rankings non-profi t groups and charities, as well as supporting our based on website popularity. Popularity is not just about advertisers in any way we can. Ultimately our advertisers hits - in fact, hits are a very dubious measure to use since make it possible for us to exist, and in turn, a lot of our every page viewed and every image loaded counts as one profi ts go back into the community. We’d love to give it all hit. So for example, someone could accidentally visit your gaycalgary.com magazine 5 site and leave without even looking at it, but they could You can read what the owners of your favorite bars had still rack up 50 or more hits depending on the number of to say by fl ipping to the following pages: images on the page. The better measure is number of visi- Pg 43 – The Backlot tors or unique visitors, which gives a more accurate indica- Pg 44 – The Calgary Eagle tion of how many individual people visit your website, and Pg 45 – Metro the Club and The Rekroom visit duration which gives an indication of how long they Pg 46 – Money-Pennies Eatery and Bar stayed. Alexa takes these factors into account and sequen- Pg 47 – Pulse, Arena, and the Loading Dock tially ranks every website on the internet. For instance, Pg 48 – The Texas Lounge www.yahoo.com is the most popular website and is ranked Pg 49 – The Twisted Element #1, www.microsoft.com is ranked #2, etc. There are over 5 million websites on the internet today, and we are currently Help Wanted in the top 90,000. Naturally there are way more popular gay websites out there than us, but try comparing us to We’ve grown so much over the past couple of months that other gay sites, local and national, and you may be sur- we’re looking to expand a little on the staff side of things to prised on who we surpass! accommodate these changes. We’re looking for experienced writers/journalists and sales staff, as well as a reliable Healthy Homo driver to handle supplementary magazine deliveries.