I remember a time when August used to be a slow month for us.  That’s certainly not the case anymore.

The weekend of the 10th we made our way up to Red Deer in the evening to photograph the Pride celebrations at the Vat.  Calgary’s Fake Mustache drag king troupe, along with several representatives from the ISCCA all performed alongside the hilarious girls of the Dirrty Show.  The venue was packed solid, albeit a little hot and humid; organizers were ecstatic about the turnout, and were happy to meet us for the first time.

The weekend of August 24th we made our way up to Edmonton for ISCWR Coronation 38.  We arrived the Friday night to cover the Out of Town Show, before the main event Saturday evening.

I usually describe Coronations to people as a 6+ hour drag show, but somehow this year the ISCWR managed to pull off a miracle and cut it down to be 5 ½ hours!  The new monarchs were crowned nearly a half an hour before midnight.  At hospitality afterwards, I was told by an out-of-towner who had been around the Imperial Court circuit in Canada and the States, that such an efficient Coronation was nearly unheard of, with events in some cities pressing as late as 3am!

Of course, an undertone to this Coronation was the news of the recent passing of Mama José, the founder of the Imperial Court system, and first Empress of San Francisco.  If you see members of the Imperial Court wearing a black ribbon over the course of the next year, this is an expression of mourning for her loss.

We were very proud of the outgoing Empress, Vanity Fair, and outgoing Emperor, JJ Velour.  During the ball they presented the Pride Centre of Edmonton with a cheque for $22,000, with further amounts going to their other charities.  We also have high hopes for the newly elected monarchs, Empress 38 Dayzi Chayne and Emperor 38 JeffyLube XXXPress.

Only a week later was the September long weekend and Calgary Pride.  I usually put myself into a grumpy mood leading up to it because I think of how much effort I’m going to be expending to do my part of our duties covering the many events.

The weekend started off a little early with the Louder dance put on by the YYC Badboys at Vinyl, and the Louder Pop Lounge downstairs at Hyde.  Despite the work week not being over, there was quite an impressive turn out that night.  For the past several events at Vinyl, a major highlight for Steve and I has been when the straight male bar tenders get into the spirit and lose some of their clothes.  This time around we enjoyed convincing (all we did was ask) one particular bearded bartender with a gorgeous furry body to show a little skin for the camera. *sigh*  His tips for that night must have been phenomenal!

I was in energy-conservation mode when we went out on Saturday afternoon to photograph and film the Dyke March down 4th street, and the festival that followed at Rideau Park.  A straight friend of mine who lives along 4th street and doesn’t know much about the reason for the Dyke March, over a text, joked about it turning into a giant wet T-shirt contests if it rained.  I dryly texted him back a photo of a marcher’s placard stating, "We are not your fetish".  "Oh, sorry," he replied, stifled.  I later gave him a proper explanation of the event, so girls, he gets it now, please don’t hurt him!

Later in the afternoon we attended the Bi-BQ at James Short Park, for which we (and they) were happy to see a much stronger turnout this year.  We don’t often get the opportunity to hang out with our Bi brethren – or oftentimes when we see them out at LGBT events we don’t realize that they identify as Bi – so it was a great opportunity to chat.

The turning point for my pre-Pride lethargy was the much anticipated PURE Pride dance at Flames Central that night.  As we arrived, shortly after 9pm, organizers told us they had sold out of tickets.  But this was to be expected – it was only a matter of whether it would happen in advance, or at the door.  By 10:30 the place had filled up to the point where it was difficult to move through the crowd.

Even though my videotaping duties meant I couldn’t drink or dance, the energy in the room, the superb stage performances, and the great music really energized me.  Aside from my ass being sore from my seated perch near the stage, I barely felt tired at all by the end of the night – and disappointed that I had missed last call!

Oh well, the lack of drinking made it easier to get up bright and early the next morning to prepare for the Pride Parade and Street Festival.  Originally forecast to rain, this day turned out to be a real scorcher.  We found a spot along the parade route to photograph and video, and then joined the throngs of people tailing the parade to its destination at Shaw Millennium Park.

Pride organizers had estimated their turnout would grow this year to around 30,000 attendees.  While this may have been the case for the first hour or two, the crowds died off early.  Perhaps it was the beating sun sending people packing – Steve and I got a bit burned ourselves before we had a free moment to put on sun screen – or perhaps it was the large number of events happening opposite the festival that drew people away.

The Backlot was certainly lively for their Pride BBQ!  Arriving here at around 4pm I was finally able to get something to eat for lunch.  Meanwhile Steve was covering the drag show at Broken City, where I later joined him before we headed over to Commonwealth for the Fused 2 dance.  There Steve finally got his lunch from Tubby Dog.

We have never visited Commonwealth before, but it’s a really nice space.  I had trouble visualizing it as its previous incarnation, the Warehouse, as it has been so long since we were last there.  The audience was treated to a sexy fashion show, followed by a drag show.

What was special about this drag show is that this would be April Storm’s last performance before she takes a long break from drag.  She came out on stage wearing nothing but a wig and a long-haired merkin.  She decided to symbolize the end of her drag life by enacting a fake suicide, with fake blood and everything.

Of course, fake or not, I don’t react well to the sight of blood.  I was managing fine until Steve told a friend nearby, "Watch him, he might pass out."  Then I was in trouble.  I managed to stay standing to the end of the number, but as soon as I could lock the camera I crouched down so that I wouldn’t fall over.  The drag show ended and I went searching for somewhere – in a very crowded bar – that I could sit down.  It ended up being on the patio out back, where April and several others were trying to clean all the blood off of her, and mop up the trail that she had left behind her on the way there.  It was quite a sight.  I found a seat, put my head between my legs and tried not to think about it.

We made one final stop at Local 522 for the Hot Mess dance, which like everything that day, was packed.  I admired the energy of the people that were still dancing by this time.

Steve and I had agreed to give a blanket "no" to anything happening on the holiday Monday.  We needed a day to recover, never mind do some grocery shopping and start processing all the video we had collected.  But in the end we made a teensy exception for the Big Gay Pride Brunch put on by Gay Friends in Calgary at the National on 10th.  This was another venue that Steve and I have never had the pleasure of visiting before.  It was so full that the huge main area with rows and rows of tables had run out of room and people were spilling over to other parts of the bar.  We didn’t stay for brunch, but we took photos and had some good chats with the organizers and the staff of the establishment.

If you’ve still got some party left in you, there is plenty more pride to go around this month.  Medicine Hat and Banff Pride are still to come, though unfortunately on the same day (Saturday, Sept 21st).  To make matters worse, most of the AIDS Walks across Alberta are happening the Sunday immediately after.  We’ve had to make some decisions, let me tell you.

But there is no question where we will be the weekend of the 28th - the Edmonton Expo, and the fundraising gala for the Pride Centre of Edmonton.

Edmonton, you lucky dog, you’re getting a new gay club this month!  We’re told the soft launch for Evolution Wonder Lounge went extremely well, and Edmontonians can look forward to the official grand opening this coming weekend of the 14th.

Last month we launched a News Release area in the magazine that lists the news headlines for the previous month, with links to the full articles online.  I wrote a script on our website to generate this list of headlines and links based on the existing script I use to generate the list of online articles.  To make a long story short, the shortcut links used an "a" before the ID of the article when they should have been an "n".  The difference is that "a" brings you to articles and "n" brings you to news releases, so the links were pointing to articles with the IDs of the news releases.  What a mess.

Anyway, while this mistake was in last month’s print edition, we were able to correct it for the online edition, and it has been corrected for everything moving forward.

This September marks the one year anniversary of GayCalgary Magazine being the #1 most popular Canadian LGBT publication, according to third-party statistics collected by Alexa.com and Issuu.com.  In that time we’ve made further gains on competitors for this title, with us now being ranked within the top 2000 websites (in the whole world) visited by Canadians!  Our website "stickyness" continues to soar, with the average visitor sticking around for over 25 minutes, while most other Canadian gay media websites only keep visitors for 2 minutes or less.

This month we added a new section to our website.  Well, it was an existing area that was previously buried under the Magazine section, but has been taking off so much that we decided to promote it for ease of access.  If you’ve never seen our News section before, make sure you check it out!  We post news releases just about every day, with all sorts of interesting information about what’s happening in the gay world - everything from entertainment to fashion, politics to sports, food to fitness.

Another upgrade that we made was an overhaul of our Newsletter system to allow us to send out a shiny new Membership newsletter to those who subscribe.  This weekly email update contains a list of what’s new on the website, including articles, news releases, prize draws and more!  You can subscribe to it directly by joining GayCalgary.com (with email notifications enabled), and we also post a web version of it onto our Facebook and Twitter groups.