About Our Community

Introduction

You've stumbled into a cyber village full of young people from around the world. Most of us fall into the category of LGBT Youth, and the rest of us are either unsure, curious or just straight but supportive. Thanks for your interest in learning more about our online community.

Are you a parent, teacher, or guardian? Have a look at our Guide to QueerAttitude.com for Schools & Parents ^[PDF]

This... is QA

There's lots of LGBT websites on the internet, and lots of LGBT communities at that. But, we're different. (That's what they all say!). QA is entirely free. QA has no advertising. QA is monitored and managed around the clock by a team of volunteers. QA supports free speech and freedom of expression, but there is always a line and we ensure everyone respects each other. QA is, above all else, a friendly community.

Safe and sex-free

As you will have noticed already, QA is not a dating site, and you will not find a member search. We've got lots of people all wrapped up in our community, from 13 years old to early 30's; protection for all is vital. That's why we have a Safe Space Policy. Dating is of course fantastic, but we do everything we can to ensure QA is not driven by sex. We do everything we can to ensure our members are safe.

Continuing principles

It's an unusual corner of cyberspace in a lot of ways. QA's humble beginnings were rooted in an overgrown personal homepage run by a gay teenager from Edinburgh, Scotland. A personal homepage that was first published well over 9 years ago, and has never stopped evolving. That gay teenager is now in his early twenties, but is still at the helm of this organic webspace; evolved rather than engineered. This is undoubtedly the reason why we're still sticking by our principles: friendship, equality, maturity, support, expression. It's the QA Ethos.

Quality content and further reading

We try our best to maintain both a clever and chilled out environment, and to this end we have written various guides and articles. Please do have a look:

How much do you know about the web? This is a must read for anyone before they post anything online:
- QA Guide to the Web and the World

Want to be a good contributor to QA?
- Quality Content Guide

Some legacy sections of the site include:
- Words containing poems and texts, and
- Society containing our popular Famous Gay Celebrities page.

QA Promotional Videos and publicity material:
- Downloads

More about QA:
- QA Community Fund
- QA Staff

Thanks for browsing, and stick around...

Join us, and be part of our digital adventure.

Our name...

We love when people like you, web surfer extraordinaire, talk about QA in other corners of the web. And we especially love being in print! And we'll be forever doting if you format our name right. We're QueerAttitude.com, not Queerattitude.com or Queerattitude or Queer Attitude. QueerAttitude.com is definitely where it's at. Thanks!

Donate!

For their help and encouragement over the years: Ross McCann, Michael Nisbet, Jill Moir, Rebecca Dale, Lindsay Dineen, Katie Abram, and Yvie Hughes.

For their contributions to QA Staff over the years: Alex, Andrea, Caron, Jeremy, Joshua, Lindsay, Marcel, Mark, Megan, Mike, Rachel, Robin, Robyn, Ross, Shaun, Sterling and Trevor.

For his contribution to the development of QA as a leading LGBT youth community: the one and only Mr Lewis Henshall of Manchester, England.

And last but not least, AJ's Queer Teen Page: the original inspiration for GSO, QA's predecessor.

Developers

• QueerAttitude.com and the megaphone logo © Copyright Graham Design.
• Produced and maintained by Graham G. Hughes (grum).

• Produced and maintained by Lewis Henshall (Enigma) between 2004 and 2009 inclusive. Portions of code (CSS and XHTML on the front-end, MySQL and PHP on the back-end), text and intellectual property throughout the site and content distributed by it written by Lewis Henshall, with a non-exclusive license for non-commercial, non-profit use by QA at QueerAttitude.com.

  Some specific features entirely implemented by Lewis (excluding images): search engine (2008), networking links (2009), birthday lists (2008), chat room counter (2009), QA's home page in 2009, monthly newsletters in 2007 and 2008, dynamic site headers of QA4.3 (2007) and QA4.4 (2008).

• Graphics and video by Robin J Browne.
• Additional image credits

• Finding futures of freedom and acceptance^™

• We aim to be the most influential online queer youth community. Our goal is to reach and support LGBT young people, wherever they may be. Our community will facilitate the personal development of its members in a safe and friendly space. Through innovation and dedication, we aim to nurture a close-knit and sustainable community built upon positivity, honesty and respect.

• QueerAttitude.com is a free community project run by volunteers.
  
• QueerAttitude.com currently does not generate revenue and runs at a loss.

• We're running a custom built application for complete flexibility and originality; no Joomla batched components here!
  
• We use PHP scripts, MySQL databases, and a dedicated Linux server running Apache.

• Launched (Graham: Speaking Out [GSO]) sometime on 7 April 1999.
  
• Relocated from grahamhughes.tripod.com to queerattitude.com (QA1) on 20 August 2001.
  
• Launched QueerAttitude.community Forums on 9 November 2002.
  
• Relaunched (QA3) on 21st January 2003.
  
• Relaunched (QA4) and renamed, simply QueerAttitude.com, and launched QA4 Forums taking over from the ezboard forums, on 5 September 2004, at 5pm British Summer Time.
  
• Relaunched (QA4.2) on 7 April 2006, at 11pm British Summer Time.
  
• Relaunched (QA4.3) on 7 April 2007, at 7pm British Summer Time.
  
• Relocated from a shared server to our dedicated HughesHenshall server on 12 December 2007, at 2am Greenwich Mean Time.
  
• Relaunched (QA4.4) on 8 April 2008, at 4am British Summer Time.