Welcome to Ireland's newest addition to the family of Irish, Gay Community
websites!
Outlifestyles.com is gay owned and operated and we have already spilt blood,
sweat and tears to bring you the Outlifestyles.com experience, but hey, better
late than never huh...? We figured that many Irish and others who love Ireland
and who identify as gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or Tran gendered would appreciate
a website which offered information on aspects of our lives that help us mould
our individual and collective sense of Queer Irish Identities. Few, we believe,
would deny that identity is shaped by the people we associate with, the places
we choose to live, the places we choose to visit, the consumer items we purchase,
language, ethnicity, culture and a host of other factors. Using identity as
a focus we aim to offer you ways to develop your sense of identity, such as
highlighting gay lifestyles, discussing lifestyle issues and keeping you informed
of things happening on and off the Scene which we feel might be of interest
to Irish gays and lesbians.
Culture is also an important contributor to our sense of Irish Queer Identity
but with recent immigrants to Ireland such as the Poles and Chinese we're fast
becoming multi-cultural. So we have not limited ourselves just to traditional
Irish Culture. Who are these new immigrants and what do they think of Ireland
and Irish Culture and indeed what do they make of the way we express our sexual
identity? Our hope would be to help bridge the gap in understanding between
different peoples in Ireland today and to share our stories about 'Coming Out'
and fighting prejudice.
You'll see that we have a particular emphasis on travel, this is because
we believe travel is particularly important to gays and lesbians, that is to
say as a group of people who are often victims of other peoples' prejudices.
In a recent survey conducted for Outlifestyles.com, travel proved to be an important
part of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender persons' lifestyles. Yes, other
queer websites have destination guides but our intention is to take things a
little further and taking our focus on identity we will explore different types
of vacation and travel as well as providing destination guides, information
on events and the opportunity to put together your own travel itinerary via
our website partners. Whether you're visiting Ireland from abroad or live here
and wish to plan an Irish trip away from home or if you live here and want information
on foreign gay friendly destinations or to plan a trip away, we will aim to
do our best to help you.
Closely associated with our travel section is our Scene Guides. Again we aim
to take things a little further than other websites that list Scene information.
As frequent travellers to other city destinations we know that many a visitor
would like to know exactly what a particular destination, bar, community center
or visitor attraction looks like, how to get there, to describe what it
is like inside and what type of people frequent a particular place.
Our Irish event search guide, featured on many of the Travel and Scene pages
should also be of help both to visitors or locals alike in planning your leisure
time.
Our entertainment section is split into what you might do outdoors and what
you might do indoors.... ah and we don't just mean between the sheets. As
with some other national publications aimed at Irish queers, we review books,
music and films. We feel that literature, music, film and other classes of
entertainment of specific interest to gays and lesbians isn't always easy to
find from other mainstream on-line guides and we aim to sift through what's
out there to find information, events, products and services that we feel may
be of interest to you. We'll also provide you with the facilities to purchase
many of the products and services via Outlifestyles.com, should you wish to
do so, together with our partners and we will soon offer our own little shop
items in association with CafePress.
Should you have just a few moments in your day we have included 'Fun on
Outlifestyles.com', with interesting if sometimes completely useless factual
articles, jokes and other fun sections.
Since many of you love to chat and meet via forums, we have included just such
a facility on Outlifestyles.com from 'Day One'! We look forward to getting to
know you and about your various viewpoints on various topics. However in order
to participate we need you to join 'Outlifestyle.com' via the 'My Lifestyle'
section where you can build a detailed profile of yourself for others to see.
It also provides us with another way of keeping you informed, should you opt
for this, about what's new on 'Outlifestyles.com'. We're also exploring ways
of enabling 'Outlifestyles.com's' gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and Tran gendered
members to establish groups from within the Community, with like minded interests,
to meet both on and off line.
'Outlifestyles.com' is free to you but none of what we provide comes
to us free so all purchases on the site will help us to keep the site facilities
free and to grow 'Outlifestyles.com' into one of the best gay travel and lifestyle
websites on-line today and we have some really great ideas planned for the
future!
Finally, we welcome your feedback and if any of you wish to become a
contributor to any of our review sections be sure and e-mail us a sample of
your work to: webmaster@outlifestyles.com and although we wont be in a position
to throw money at you for some time yet, we will nevertheless do our best to
make you famous!
We look forward to providing you with a great Internet experience
and we hope you will support us and maybe even meet us, along the way!