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Well, I'm John Mays, and I'm part of Gay Line Wellington, and we've come along to talk to various organisations about their listing on our website and, uh, what we can do to help them to do more. Tell me about the website. Well, it's been around since the year 2000. It's got about 500 listings of gay and gay friendly organisations nationwide. Now, um, we have around about 45. [00:00:30] I think it is articles of interest to gay and lesbian people. A lot of those articles, um now we've arranged for people to be able to make their own comments on the on the articles. We monitor those, of course, and only let the sensible ones through. Um and, uh, there's some quite good discussions going on about religion and and gay sexuality. Good discussions going [00:01:00] on about sexuality generally. And really, some of it's quite deep stuff. Hm, Quite interesting. Prior to this website, it must have been quite hard to actually get a a kind of a hub where all that information was collected in one place. It's not collected anywhere else. It wasn't. Never has been before now, So this is the first time that there's been a national database of gay information and it's a really, um I think a worthwhile resource. So 500 entries? How easy is that To manage [00:01:30] maintaining it and keeping it up to date is massively difficult, but at least it's all in one place. And we've organised things so that other organisations can share that information. They can draw on our database and use that to create listings on their own websites. So that potentially means that, uh, you only need to edit a listing about one organisation in one place. Obviously, that's not achieved yet, but that's potential. [00:02:00] So today we're at the, um ans event show and tell which is, uh, looking at kind of archiving in the the rainbow space. One of the comments made this morning was Well, what do we do with all this digital information? How are we going to archive it? Do you have any thoughts on on how you keep this information now but also keeping it going in the future? I haven't thought about this before. Um, by chance, I suppose nothing that we create on the website is thrown [00:02:30] away. It's all archived. So it could be drawn on. Um, people could get into the database, given access to it and get a bit of history about how organisations have evolved over time. Yeah, that's an interesting thought. Um, one thing. I, I guess we need to really think about, um and I think I I Now you remind me. I think I need to talk to the games about how we keep this information in the future or for [00:03:00] the future. Um, we might die any time. You know, who knows? And, um, it seems such an amazing resource with, you know, contact details with, um, descriptions about so many different community, um, events and organisations. It would be such a shame to kind of lose that and stuff it it it would. Yes. And, um, we'd like it to be even bigger than it is. Actually, one of our big problems is is people resources to do the editing [00:03:30] to gather the information to keep it up to date? Um, if we could only get a few more people involved, we could do one hell of a lot more. I would potentially there would be at least double the amount of listings available if we really worked at it. So, yeah, with the, uh, number of listings that have come in, have there been any organisations or events that have just, like, really kind of surprised you thinking? Oh, I didn't realise there was that particular group out there or Oh, yeah, as well. Especially outside Wellington. I'm reasonably in touch with [00:04:00] what's going on in Wellington, but yeah, there's just an amazing amount of stuff going on around the country as a whole. I was particularly ignorant about the South Island and quite amazed to see so much stuff going on in places like Dunedin, which, where you think there wouldn't be much happening. But yes, there is. Yeah. Uh, Auckland, of course is big, uh, much bigger than than than us. And luckily, um, outline in Auckland are actually maintaining [00:04:30] the Auckland data on that website. So we are sharing the workload a little bit. Yeah, this year 2015, we we're working, uh, towards the 30th anniversary of homosexual law reform. It goes fast. Um, I'm wondering, uh, can you kind of reflect on, um how far do you think we have come in? That 30 years and are there things that we still need to look at? Well, we've certainly come an awful long way. [00:05:00] Um, at the time of law reform, I was working in a senior government position, and I had to be extremely careful about sharing my private life with people. Um, at that time, I used to have to have, um SI S security checks, and they were horrendous. Well, I don't know if that still goes on because I don't work anymore. I'm retired now, but, uh, I'm imagining it doesn't matter anymore. People don't don't do that. So the [00:05:30] stress of the stress of keeping your sexuality, um, the knowledge of your sexuality is where it safe is gone completely. Um, for the majority of people, there will be still people who, um, for instance, are married and gay who may have a need to keep their sexuality to themselves. Uh, that that won't change, but that's for personal reasons. Not for legal reasons. [00:06:00] Yeah, so, yes, it's become a much more relaxed society, on the other hand, because it's easy to be gay now and we don't need social organisations, uh, that are exclusively gay. The gay world is changing in such a way that it's sometimes quite hard to keep some social organisations going. They die because they're not needed so much. And [00:06:30] but in their place, different sorts of organisations are starting up. So and that's one of the things about this function function here today. It's interesting to see the variety of different organisations that are needed and how different they are from what they were a few years ago. Like back in the seventies, it was all about socialising and meeting people. Now it's about activities and, uh, what people do with their lives. And we don't have to be [00:07:00] secret about socialising anymore. Yeah.
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