Cut the crap Google!

As you can see I am new to blogging. I have spent quite a while writting my articles and naturally I would like someone to visit my blog at some point, maybe even leave a comment or two.

So with this in mind I went in search of tips on how to increase the traffic to your blog. What stood out amoungst the tips was this:

Top get people to your blog you need to become part of the "blogoshere" for your subject and leave comments pointing you your articles where appropriate.

Clearly these seems like a good tip, so I jumped on to Google and tapped in some terms like:

Gay, personal stories, Gay Blog, Gay advice, My gay blog, personal gay blogs, top gay blogs

Needless to say I didn't get back what I was hoping for, I got a load of rubbish back. This mainly consisted of the following:

• Random news articles from so called blogs which are actually magazines and news sites which just so happen to have the word Gay in them.
• Links to blogs which are pornographic or link to other paid for pornographic sites.
• Blogs which have nothing to do with homosexuality or being gay but at some point have posted something on the subject and attracted a ton of comments, most of which are defamatory, negative and bigoted.

Needless to say after some prolonged searching and essentially hopping from blog to blog I did manage to find some really good blogs written by insightful people discussing their experience of being gay. I have posted some links to these on my blog.

I am however a little frustrated at how difficult it was to find these. It angers me that a young person or a parent wanting to find other people and sites sensibly discussing being gay and the topic of homosexuality will have to wade through this offensive crap before before they find the decent people out there.

The gay support group

At the age of approximately 23 I had been living away from home for a couple of years for work. Work itself was going extremely well. I was well liked, had been promoted and my pay was shooting up too. I lived in a great house with my housemates and I was out every friday and saturday night with either housemates or friends from work. From the outside looking in everything was perfect.

The last few years had been a bit of whirlwind, finishing uni, moving away from home, finding new friends and establishing myself in a new job has left hardly any time to thing about the problems with my sexuality which had caused me such distress at the end of university. That isn't to say I didn't think about at all. I probably thought about it every day. That also doesn't mean I wasn't still noticing all the sexy guys around me. I just found myself busy enough to not let those desires and affect what I was doing.

After about 2 years at work no matter how busy it kept me it started to become the norm. As you get promoted through a company the role changes, but the amount of work you do in a day, the place you go and the difficulty you find it doesn't really change. Once my new life started to become routine there was once again time in my mind to start pondering and exploring my sexuality.

Typically I knew no one in my life who was openly gay, but even if I did I am not sure that would have helped much at that time in my life. I needed to go and explore my feelings in anonymity, so that if (by some bizarre turn of events) I was wrong about all of this no harm was done. I needed to meet other gay people who I didn't know and who didn't know me so that I could learn what they were like and see how I felt in an openly gay setting.

After some looking around on the internet I found a group called Outzone. They are a charity established for the support of gay people between the ages of 16 - 25. Their website was fresh and vibrant, and made it clear that they were a fun group set up to help people make friends in a safe environment.

On the day that I decided to go I was full of nerves and excitement and unfortunately guilt. Nerves because I didn't know what to expect, introducing yourself to an established group of strangers is difficult in any setting. Excitement because whether it went well or not I had finally found a way to explore this aspect of my life a little and move things forward. Guilt, probably because I felt I was doing something I shouldn't. I could feel the questioning eyes of my parents, I felt as if everyone I knew would disapprove of what I was doing. I was actually about to do something "gay" for the first time, and that meant I was looking at myself from a different perspective.

When I arrived.......

[Ahh - my train is just about to pull into Guildford, so I will have to leave it there for today. You'll have to wait until my next post, bye for now x]