Hello everyone!
The last few weeks have been crazy here at Gays.com, and we mean CRAZY. We were working like mad behind the scenes collecting clips from everywhere for the IDAHO Challenge and then it happened. Out of nowhere, we were struck by a massive distributed denial of service attack that brought our site down. This happened two days before our big day on the International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia, and as it turned out, we weren’t the only gay sites affected. Over in Germany, our good friends Gays.de also reported getting DDOS’ed at around the same time, while WashingtonBlade reported of their server “being attacked by hackers overseas”. In a quick chat with Joe of JoeMyGod, a few other unnamed sites were also attacked, and apparently some of those attacks originated from Eastern Europe (in contrast, ours was mostly from South America).
Anyhow, we are SO glad to be back up now. And we’re now stronger than ever. In the midst of all that hullabaloo, did anyone realise that Gays.com is now ONE year old? Here’s the birthday present we promised you guys (no, actually we mostly did it for ourselves) — it took months to produce it, but we’re ecstatic at how it turned out. This global video mashup had a cast of 359 people from 48 countries around the world, and it totally took Youtube by storm! In just about 10 days, it was seen by a quarter of a million people everywhere.
Here is a looooooooooong list of people we really can’t thank enough. Without them, the above video would not be as fabulous or amazing as it is:
- Ali Hili: Gay Iraqi activist now living in exile in London and founder of the Iraqi-LGBT group
- ANT: Host of VH1 reality series Celebrity Fit Club and U.S. of ANT on MTV’s LOGO channel
- Lizzy the Lezzy: Animated lesbian standup comedy character with a cult following on Youtube
- Michael Buckley: Celebrity host of the entertainment show What the Buck, the 5th most subscribed comedy channel of all time on Youtube
- Michael Kauch: German member of parliament and coordinator of the gay and lesbian policy for the Free Democratic Party
- Stephen Williams: British Liberal Democrat member of parliament for Bristol West
- Simon McDermott of Homovision.tv
- Deco Ribeiro and friends from E-JOVEM for their infectious enthusiasm
- New Zealand AIDS Foundation: Boy you guys rocked!
- Loo Zihan and Rabil Lian from Singapore
- Gregory Chapman of The Karpel Group for going coast to coast ;-)
- Douglas Chew for flying all the way to the Petronas Towers!
- Great Ancheta and friends from the Philippines Gay Task Force
- Bruce Amoroto of Philippine Forum on Sports, Culture, Sexuality and Human Rights
- Wemar Strydom and friends from South Africa
- Will Parry from Sydney
- Lee Jong Geol of Chingusai Korea
- Mami, Yoshi & Kei from Japan
- Mystic Ed & Fluffy from the UK
- Luis Tapia from Daedalum Films
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