This month marks a very big milestone for us here at GayCalgary Magazine – our 10th anniversary of publishing.

In November of 2003, Steve took a chance and started up this magazine to fill a need for many LGBT businesses in Calgary.  Our first edition was a measly 24 pages on newspaper stock, but we had strong support from many in the community that kept us going and growing throughout the years.

10 years later, times have changed.  We’ve seen many LGBT businesses and organizations rise and fall over the past decade.  In recent times we’ve seen mainstream establishments stepping up, taking a gay-friendly stance and welcoming the LGBT community with open arms.  Many events for the LGBT community would not exist, or would not have grown to their current size if not for these new allies.

It is the same case with us.  We started off quite focused on the gay bar scene, but as things progressed, we branched out into other areas like music, art, theatre, entertainment, and more.  Our content became less about what was exclusive to the gay community, and more about what the gay community has in common with the rest of the world.  Accordingly, our advertisers gradually shifted away from being exclusively LGBT toward a good balance of everyone.  In fact, if it weren’t for this, we surely would not be around today.

The people we have to thank for helping GayCalgary Magazine get this far are too numerous to name.

We’ve had quite a remarkable list of contributors to our magazine, all of whom deserve our thanks for their dedication and hard work - in particular, Jason Clevett and Stephen Lock who hold the impressive distinction of having been with us since day one!  It is also both humbling and bittersweet to think back to contributors like Don Turgeon, Nico Hofferd and Jack Fertig who made a big impact on this magazine, but sadly have been outlived by it. We hope that our efforts to preserve history through our magazine will also help their memory live on.

Additionally, we would like to thank our long-standing advertisers who have stuck with us through most if not all of the past decade: Goliaths/Texas Lounge, the Backlot, Cruiseline, and Priape.  Being able to rely on their advertising dollars has been like finding solid ground in what sometimes feels like a sea of quicksand.

Of course, our readers also deserve our gratitude for your continued interest in what we do, and for helping us to earn the distinction of most popular Canadian LGBT publication online!  If you can remember picking up a copy of Issue #1 back in 2003, and you’re reading this now, you are officially a die-hard GayCalgary Magazine fan!!

So what does it feel like for Steve and I putting together this, our 10th anniversary edition?  Well...I’d love to say it feels like walking on air.  Actually, it feels exactly like every other edition before it - just as much work as always, which on our crazy schedule doesn’t leave much margin to do anything special.  So don’t expect us to plan a party or anything!

We thought about doing a feature to recap some of our favorite articles over the past 10 years, but there have just been so many (we estimate over 4000) that it is nearly impossible to single out small a handful.  Besides, we have too much fresh content for this edition to go with a "clipisode"!

Sticking with anything for 10 years is an achievement in itself but, as fun and rewarding as it has been, life is too short to do only one thing!  Neither of us want to be doing this for the rest of our lives, so there will have to be a stopping point for GayCalgary Magazine sometime in the future.  But that day has not yet come!

Maybe it’s just Murphy’s Law, but it seems like whenever we try to take time for ourselves is the exact moment that a slew of people want our attention.  It’s like that phone call that happens without fail just as we’re about to sit down to dinner, or we’re feeling ragged and about to take a nap, or we’re in the shower, or in the middle of having...err...doing other things.  And when we try to warn people that we will be unavailable, it’s even worse.  This is the drawback of running a business out of your home – you can never truly leave work at work.

That’s why we decided to keep things on the down low as we disappeared for a week in the middle of October.  We didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone that didn’t absolutely need to know (such as my parents, who we needed to take care of our cats).  I even forbade myself from posting anything to Facebook or Twitter that might tip anyone off.  For all intensive purposes we were at home, just not answering the door or the phone.

Surprisingly this succeeded in giving us a clean getaway.  We were away for a week without any major crises or community drama to make us anxious to get back home.  It was wonderful.

This trip had two purposes.  It was a chance for us to see for ourselves what British Columbia has to offer, and to gather content for some forthcoming travel articles.  (Yes, I know, even our holidays aren’t really holidays.)

So we embarked on a week long road trip that took us round-trip through some of BC’s major centres.  Doing this right on the cusp of season’s end, we were a bit concerned we might not catch the attractions in their full glory.  But all of the leaves changing to brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red, made many outdoor sights even more striking.

I don’t want to reveal too much before the articles but to sum it all up, we stayed at some amazing places, ate some of the best tasting food of our lives, saw (and photographed) some breathtaking sights, and met some lovely people.

I’m very much looking forward to writing in more detail about it all in future editions.

I got into writing at a very young age.  At home I have notebooks full of unfinished hand-written free style stories that I toyed with throughout Junior High and High School.  While some of these were merely throw-away exercises, they helped me develop a strong grasp of expressing myself through written word, and these skills continued to develop in University as I applied myself to technical writing.

When Steve started publishing GayCalgary Magazine, I came on board initially just to help with ad design.  However, in August 2004 I began co-writing the publisher’s column with Steve, and eventually took over that role completely.  To date, I have written 111 publisher’s columns.  It has been mostly a privilege, but also a burden in some respects.

Writing a column like this every month has not been easy, especially when I kept raising the bar higher and higher.  I glanced through some of our publisher’s columns from the first 12 months of publication which were short and simple – around 4 paragraphs at most.   This was before I started delving into 2000 to 3000 word articles that I would agonize over as our press deadlines were looming.

I can’t say that I agree with all of my philosophical rants from publisher’s columns past.  While I can see where I was coming from, I realize some of them were just stepping stones along the way to better understanding.  My philosophies about life and our place in it have certainly evolved in response to my life experiences – even since the last time I wrote about it.

In 2010, I left academia for a full-time job as a Software Developer at the Calgary head office of an international technology company.  I made the decision that I would be "out" at this job right from the beginning – I wouldn’t rub it in anyone’s face, but if someone asked questions that touched on these aspects of my life, I would give honest answers.  This was probably one of the best decisions I have made in my life.  The awkwardness of telling someone that you are gay when they are first getting to know you is nothing compared to the awkwardness of telling them you lied to them about who you are later when they think they know you.

It was a bit unnerving at first, but once I felt secure enough, I made an attempt to reach out to other LGBT employees.  I received almost no response.  I realized that, while there were indeed others, they felt no need to get together because they were perfectly happy with the people they were situated with.  And soon, I realized, so was I.

While I had been a strong advocate of LGBT people sticking together, my experience working with and being accepted amongst straight people began to erode this philosophy, and in fact lead to several new revelations about the natural place of LGBT people in the grand scheme of things.  But I’ve kept these more recent insights to myself.  I feel they are too complex to be squeezed into a few pages at the beginning of a magazine, so I will need to seek another medium for them if and when I’m ready to express them.

So as much as it has been a privilege to have your attention as a reader of our magazine, and as much as the burden of doing so has tested me and shaped me into a better writer and over all person, I have made the decision that I will be officially retiring from writing the monthly publisher’s column.

This doesn’t mean there will never be another publisher’s column.  It just means that there may not be one every month, it may not be written by me, and even if so, it won’t be the same as you’ve come to expect.

My reasoning for this is that I’m not a fan of repetitive tasks, and mostly I am a very slow and thoughtful writer, so laying this responsibility to rest will free up a great deal of time I can spend elsewhere.  I’m not entirely sure where yet – there is plenty that I could do faster or better with the magazine, and I’m excited that I can now afford to take on some of these new challenges.

I have been writing for most of my life, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.  So if you enjoy my writing style, this is not the last you’ll see of me.  For one, I will still be writing other articles in this magazine when necessity dictates.  And otherwise, this new freedom may lead to other creative outlets