OK Campaign | Calgary Gay History

Tag Archives: OK Campaign

Edmonton Queer History Collection

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Kevin Allen | 1 comment

The Calgary Gay History Project recently contributed historic gay media to our colleagues in Edmonton for digitization. Heroically, they have already digitized hundreds of magazines! You can find the collection: here.

Most of this online collection focuses on Edmonton, but several publications have a provincial reach. We contributed issues of Modern Pink, Alberta Gay and Lesbian Press (AGLP), and Outlooks Magazine, which were all published in Calgary but distributed province-wide.

*Outlooks Magazine, September 1998 Issue with GLCSA’s OK Campaign*

The close connection between our two cities is long-standing. Importantly, this collection includes several Club 70 Newsletters. Club 70 was the sister organization to Calgary’s Club Carousel, and the Club 70 Newsletter was similar in format and style to Carousel Capers. In their newsletters, one can read about the camaraderie between the Clubs.

For example, on July 29, 1972, Club 70 hosted their “Klondike-Calgary Night” after a blanket invite was sent to the members of Club Carousel.

*Club 70 Newsletter with Calgary Invite!*

This digital archive has been spearheaded by the Edmonton Queer History Project, an innovative university-community project designed to help celebrate the people, places, and moments that have helped to build Edmonton’s 2SLGBTQ+ community.

{KA}

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged AGLP, bisexual, Calgary, Club 70, Club Carousel, Edmonton, edmonton queer history project, gay, Gay history, GLCSA, lesbian, lgbt, lgbtq, Modern Pink, OK Campaign, Outlooks, queer, transgender

The OK Campaign

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Kevin Allen | 5 comments

Calgary Outlink, our community hub, has been in Calgary in one form or another since 1975.

{The Calgary Outlink AGM is tonight and open to the public!}

In the late 1990s, the organization was called GLCSA (the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Association). In 1998 they embarked on an awareness initiative called the OK Campaign, spearheaded by a resourceful volunteer and former board member, Brian Crawford. The campaign literature explained that it “was designed to promote personal reflection specific to gay and lesbian issues in the mainstream media.” In reality it was a not-so-subtle political statement and outreach tool.

Screen Shot 2016-06-22 at 4.01.45 PM

The campaign ended up targeting 98% of Calgarians through bus, billboard and poster ads throughout the city. The campaign ran in September of 1998 and 1999, and was the first of its kind and magnitude in a Canadian city. In 1998, the World Wide Web was still emerging as a communications force. The GLCSA crisis and information phone line was heavily used. In that year the organization logged 3700 calls, and utilized over 10,000 volunteer hours. Just over a third of the people who used the phone service were under 25.

GLCSA aggressively fundraised in advance of the OK Campaign: the campaign budget being $56,000. The community delivered: many pledging a regular monthly contribution in support of the initiative. One fundraising dinner netted $27,000. The local office of Pattison Outdoor Group were hired to coordinate ad placement, and like many other gay advertising initiatives before the OK Campaign ran into troubles.

Screen Shot 2016-06-22 at 4.01.10 PM Some local shopping malls protested having the text only ads in their facilities. Worried that the ads could offend shoppers, they demanded the ads pulled. Mortified Pattison Account Executives gave bonus advertising of $15,000 to the Campaign to compensate for mall owners who had insisted the ads be taken down. Eventually the GLCSA wrote critical letters to those mall owners but were restrained in lodging a formal human rights complaint by the “public education only” nature of the campaign.