TNT: Chris Bartlett of the Gay History Wiki project

The site, at the moment, is awfully ugly.

“A Web site for dead people shouldn’t be too fancy,” says Chris Bartlett.

That proclamation was met with laughs from an engaged audience of 200 or more during his presentation at Ignite Philly 4 earlier this month, video of which can be seen below. But that five-minute presentation was a bridge from 20 years in a community, three years of research and the nearly half-century old Philadelphia gay community.

Bartlett, 43, is the founder of the Gay History Wiki, which aims to collect the life stories of at least 4,600 gay Philadelphia men who since 1981 have died following complications to their battles with AIDS/HIV and the friends and places who helped develop one of the country’s richest LGBT traditions since the 1960s.

The profiles are notably and purposefully varied, showing the lack of order the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s followed, Bartlett says, from a 31-year-old deli clerk at the Bellvue Stratford hotel to a fashion designer with growing clout to who just might be Kensington’s most famous drag queen and a driving force in driving Bartlett’s passion for the project.

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North Philly YouTube stars unhappy with PW exposure

Makael Mclendon (left) and Kevin Simmons are The Skorpion Show

There’s a funny thing about this whole “new media” thing that journalists can’t stop talking about. Now, story subjects can answer back.

Such is the case with Joel Mathis’s profile of North Philly-based The Skorpion Show for the publication’s “Queer Issue.” The day after the article ran, Skorpian’s Keven Simmons shared his distaste with 9,000 of the show’s subscribers.

“Now I know how those reality stars feel … this will never happen again,” he said.

The Skorpion Show is a DIY talk show where Kevin Simmons and Makael Mclendon, better known as Skorpion and Makael, chat about everything from celebrities to relationship issues to music reviews. Each video typically features the hosts sitting side-by-side chatting into their Logitech webcam.

Each episode averages around 4,000 views, which when stretched over 185 videos, adds up. Two of the duo’s videos have broken the one-million viewer mark.

After the story was published, The Skorpion Show uploaded two videos pertaining to the PW story. Follow after the jump to hear their beef.
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GPTMC, other urban destinations attract LGBT community online

Courting gay travelers is old hat for tourist agencies. What’s new is that now the courting is moving increasingly online.

In partnership with the the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corp., Southwest Airlines announced earlier this week that it launched Southwest.com/gayphilly, considered the first airline landing page for a gay destination, as first reported by the Inquirer. The GPTMC is giving away six free trips to Philly in a contest that, while featured in print advertisements, is almost otherwise entirely being promoted online, housed at gophila.com/gayphilly.

It may the first so Web-heavy advertising blitz directed at the gay community by the GPTMC, but it is certainly not the firsT — insert mildly euphemistic pun on the City of Brotherly Love.

In November 2003, GPTMC decided the city’s culture, history, nightlife and dining, packaged with the famed gayborhood could make Philly a top-tier destination for the LGBTQ community. So born was the popular “Get your History Straight and your Nightlife Gay” promotional campaign.

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