Camp’s social side

If you’ve spend much time on social media lately, you’ve probably seen countless photos of people’s Thanksgiving dinner tables, their Christmas trees, their indoor or outdoor holiday decorations and their festivities.

Scrolling through these can be just like sitting through someone’s big batch of vacation photos. These posts may or may not be welcome (though most of us don’t want to be curmudgeonly or to fail to see the entertainment value of grown-ups wearing ugly Christmas sweaters, right?).

But this promulgation of photos sharing details of our lives is part of the new normal with social media. For all of us, the challenge is to go beyond a stream of thought and make our posts worth reading.

A few months ago, our creative director, Terry Newell, assembled a team to help Camp build up its social media presence. Now Camp has expanded to Instagram and Twitter. Writer Susan K. Thomas has interviewed the four men on this team for her Camp10 column on page 20 in the December print issue.

They have been doing a fantastic job. They’ve sent me statistics that I’m slow to grasp, but I do know that the numbers they have created for this magazine are impressive. On Nov. 6, team member Luke Walker was posting updated election results all night to keep us informed. The group promoted a special screening of the film Boy Erased, and Billy Bob Griffin did a review of the movie. And the team posts links to news and entertainment stories from Camp writers and other sources as well.

If you haven’t yet liked Camp on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, please do. We welcome your response as comments online or letters to the editor in our print edition.

A few words of thanks

After we close out 2018 with this issue of Camp, we will take a small holiday break and publish a combined January/February issue in mid-January. We plan to share some exciting news with you in that issue, and I’m happy to say that 2019 will mark our 15th year of publishing Camp since our launch in June 2004.

We couldn’t have built this history as the longest-running LGBTQ magazine in Kansas City (possibly even in Missouri), without the support of our advertisers, readers and, most important, our wonderful staff of writers, graphic designer and editor and our loyal distribution delivery man, Steve. We found Steve delivering the Pitch when we first launched the magazine and asked him whether he could deliver Camp. He’s been doing it rain or shine, heat or cold, all these years.

I’d also like to thank and acknowledge our printer, the Jefferson City News Tribune. We’ve printed Camp at a few different printers over the years, but we have been customers of the News Tribune for the longest. They’ve accommodated last-minute changes in printing schedules and never blinked an eye at our LGBTQ content. At one former printer, we were asked to censor some of our content (we quickly took our business elsewhere), and another printer felt our content “might offend their Christian employees” and declined to make a bid. We’ve never experienced any of that kind of judgment from the News Tribune (and we shouldn’t from anyone).

We also thank our gay bars and other distribution locations for allowing us to make Camp issues available in their businesses for everyone to pick up and read. The public libraries have been impressive locations: I’ve heard that LGBTQ youth get their copies there and share them with their Gay Straight Alliances in high school.

All of us at Camp wish you the happiest of holidays and a joyful, healthy and prosperous New Year.